Armin Laschet could scarcely conceal his delight last year when the carnival club in his hometown of Aachen named him an honorary knight. “Finally I get a job on the first attempt, without having to lose twice first,” he said.
Faced with the kind of painful setbacks Mr Laschet has suffered in his career, most politicians would have given up and tried something else. He slipped off the greasy pole so many times that some thought he’d never get back on it again.
But the 59-year-old always bounced back. And on Saturday he scored his biggest victory yet, winning the election for leader of the Christian Democratic Union and so moving into pole position to succeed Angela Merkel as Germany’s chancellor.
Friends see him as a political survivor whose sheer grit and stamina have finally paid off. Faced with defeat, “he never just threw in the towel and walked away,” said Serap Güler, a CDU politician who has known him for 15 years. “He always stayed on the ball.”
The son of a miner who studied law and later worked as a journalist, Mr Laschet was long considered the “nearly man” of German politics. He won a seat in the Bundestag in his early 30s but lost it again four years later. In 2010 he ran for boss of the CDU’s branch in his home state of North Rhine-Westphalia — and was once again defeated.
“The CDU in NRW was famous for its internal power struggles, and he always seemed to be on the losing side,” said one local opposition MP who has known him for years.
Through it all he maintained his good humour. A typical Rhinelander, affable and approachable, he frequently appears in fancy dress at carnival time. The award he won in Aachen last February was the “Medal Against Deadly Seriousness”, in recognition of his “individuality, popularity and natural wit”.
But for some traditional hardliners in the CDU, he had an image problem: he was seen as too liberal, and too closely identified with Ms Merkel. As a Bundestag MP Mr Laschet was part of the “Pizza Connection”, an informal discussion group that brought together young lawmakers from the CDU and Green Party.
As a minister in the NRW cabinet of the 2000s, he touted the benefits of immigration, saying in 2009 that ethnic and religious diversity should be seen as a “chance” for Germany, “not a threat”. Fellow Christian Democrats nicknamed him “Turk Armin”.
“He was the first politician in this country to really give people from immigrant communities the feeling they were important, that their concerns were being taken seriously,” said Serap Güler, who worked as his adviser in the 2000s and is now his state secretary for integration.
That carried through into the refugee crisis of 2015, when Mr Laschet was such a staunch defender of the chancellor’s “open-door” immigration policy that the Berlin press called him “Merkel’s bodyguard”.
CDU conservatives may have been appalled, but it didn’t harm his chances at the ballot box. In 2017, the CDU defied expectations to win regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, long considered the “beating heart” of the left-of-centre Social Democrats, who have ruled it for nearly 50 of the last 75 years. Mr Laschet became prime minister.
“Beating a popular incumbent is a very hard thing to do in politics, and all the polls said he couldn’t do it,” said one of his close allies. “The thing about Laschet is people always underestimate him.”
Though everyone knew he was a Merkel-ite moderate, the cabinet he put together reflected the full spectrum of views in the CDU. He has a tough law-and-order interior minister who has launched high-profile raids on criminal clans. He has a labour minister who is a well-known expert on social policy from the left of the CDU. And he has Ms Güler, the integration secretary, who is the daughter of Turkish immigrants.
“Laschet is a unifying figure — that’s his main strength,” said Josef Hovenjürgen, general secretary of the NRW CDU. “He understands that the CDU needs economic liberals, value-conservatives and those with more of a social agenda. It must remain a broad church.”
Based on his success in North Rhine-Westphalia, Mr Laschet was considered favourite for the CDU leadership when he threw his hat in the ring last February, especially after he recruited health minister Jens Spahn, popular with young conservatives, as his running mate.
But the coronavirus pandemic threw a spanner in the works. He saw his approval ratings sink during the first phase of the outbreak, when he came across as hesitant and indecisive. In appearances on TV talk-shows he was badly prepared and over-emotional. His poll ratings fell as those of Markus Söder, the tough-talking and forceful prime minister of Bavaria, rose. But they gradually improved as he regained his footing and voters showed greater appreciation of his crisis management.
In his speech to delegates on Saturday, Mr Laschet presented himself as the only one of the three candidates who could keep the CDU’s various competing camps together. Any party leader “has to be able to unify”, to reach compromises and find solutions, he said. He also positioned himself as the continuity candidate who would maintain Ms Merkel’s pragmatic course. “We’ll only win if we remain strong in the centre of society,” he said.
Mr Laschet also injected a personal note into his speech, playing on his humble beginnings. He described how his father had worked “1,000m under the earth” in the “heat and darkness” of the mine, and at one point produced the metal ID-tag his father had worn at work and had given him as a “lucky charm”.
The speech seemed to do the trick: Mr Laschet convincingly beat his main rival, the millionaire corporate lawyer Friedrich Merz, who ran on a platform of tilting the CDU more to the right.
Now he is in pole position to run as the CDU’s candidate for chancellor in September’s election. But he has to deal with Mr Söder first. Any decision on who runs will have to be made in consultation with the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the CSU — and Mr Söder is its leader. Speculation is rife in Berlin that he might himself entertain ambitions for the top job.
Many in the CDU, however, are now convinced that Mr Laschet must be their candidate in September. “Söder is a polarising figure, while Laschet is a unifier,” said one CDU MP. “I want the next chancellor to be from the CDU, not the CSU.”
