HAMBURG (dpa) – Germany’s otherwise lacklustre general election campaign has received a sudden injection of controversy with conservative standard-bearer Edmund Stoiber’s choice of a pro-gay single mother to be his main campaign voice for family values.
The selection of political newcomer Katherina Reiche as a potential cabinet minister has thrown conservatives into disarray and spawned outrage from religious leaders – while at the same time further taking the wind out of incumbent Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s already becalmed campaign.The idea that an unmarried parent who has blatantly said “I’ll get married when I choose” could soon be shaping policy in Berlin on issues affecting families and children is appalling to many Stoiber supporters. But left-of-centre politicians concede his ploy could make inroads into their own voter support.Surveys show the nation’s Christian Democrats (CDU-CSU) led by Stoiber ahead of Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the run-up to the September general election with Stoiber taking advantage of worsening unemployment and industrial figures.But Stoiber, the first hopeful for chancellor from staunchly Catholic Bavaria in two decades, is mindful of the errors made by another Bavarian who wanted to become chancellor. Franz Josef Strauss went down to flaming defeat in 1980 when Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt painted Strauss as a hardliner on social issues.Strauss, one of the most powerful and outspoken conservatives in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, lost national influence along with the election loss. And Schmidt’s landslide victory seemed to verify conventional wisdom in Germany that a Bavarian cannot become chancellor.So this time around another canny Bavarian state premier is taking precautions to portray himself as a middle-of-the-road moderate deserving of voter support in throwing out what he terms an “inept leftist” coalition in Berlin of Social Democrats and Greens.To cement the image he wants to build as a moderate on social issues, Stoiber pushed through Reiche’s appointment over vehement opposition in the CDU-CSU.Reiche is just what his campaign needed: Intelligent, a chemical scientist from eastern Germany where Stoiber’s campaign is weak, and she is just 28 years old and looks good in front of the TV camera.Presenting her to those cameras at a sometimes raucous news conference, a beaming Stoiber sat back as Reiche answered contentious questions with a firm but unrattled voice.Visibly pregnant and expecting her second child in August, Reiche was asked when the prospective “minister of family affairs” was thinking of getting married: “I do intend to get married at some point,” she replied. “But I’ll get married when I choose to do so. That is a personal matter which involves only me and those I love.”Stoiber continued to smile as she was asked whether gays and lesbians should be permitted to marry and she answered: “There are glaring inconsistencies pertaining not just to homosexual couples but also to other unmarried couples involving such issues as inheritances, shared property and visitation rights. And these inconsistencies should be remedied.”Stoiber even went on smiling as she was asked just what her definition of family values is and responded: “The term ‘family’ is outgrowing the traditional definition and there are millions of Germans living in loving, nurturing relationships not covered by the traditional definition.”The response was quick in coming, with a Roman Catholic cardinal accusing Stoiber of taking the “Christian” out of the Christian Democrats.“If he is going to keep Frau Reiche, he should take the ‘C’ off the CDU,” said Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne. “If the CDU leadership want to take on the Church, then they had better be prepared to fight it out.”The cardinal conceded, however, “Frau Reiche’s nomination is understandable from a strictly secular view of the realities of society.”At the grassroots level, radio talk shows in Bavaria have been flooded with calls from irate listeners and newspapers have been inundated with letters to the editor condemning Stoiber’s move.But political analysts have been quick to point out that conservatives have no alternative but to vote for Stoiber in September, and that including Reiche on his team makes the CDU-CSU more palatable to voters who might otherwise vote for continuance of Schroeder’s coalition.That analysis is clearly shared by leading coalition figures, who have been quick to reject Stoiber’s move as too little, too late.“Everything that Frau Reiche is proposing has been rejected by the CDU-CSU for years,” says a key Social Democrat, Otto Schily, minister of the interior in Schroeder’s cabinet.And the number one Greens politician in the land, Foreign inister Joschka Fischer, accused Reiche of “a reactionary form of political recycling – she’s recycling platform planks from the Greens party platform”.As an editorial writer for the Luebecker Nachrichten newspaper put it: “This young woman from Potsdam is saying things that society has long accepted, but against which which her own party still drag its heels. She is light-years ahead of her party and it will be interesting to see what becomes of her after election day.”