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Christian Democrats campaigning in southern Germany ahead of Sunday’s critical election were already languishing in the polls. The mask case did nothing to improve their chances.
Voters digested the news that two MPs from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right bloc have won substantial commissions on deals to procure urgently needed masks during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
“It has the potential to inflict lasting damage on the CDU,” Olav Gutting, a Christian Democrat MP, told the Financial Times. It also coincided with a “striking” number of other scandals. “They really pile up,†he said.
The two deputies involved were forced to resign, after coming under massive pressure from party leaders. Nikolas Löbel of the CDU announced on Monday that he was leaving the Bundestag with immediate effect. Hours later, Georg Nüsslein, of the CDU’s Bavarian sister organization, the CSU, announced that he was leaving the party, although he will remain in parliament until the September elections.
For the CDU, the timing couldn’t be worse. On March 14, elections will take place both in Baden-Württemberg, where the Greens have led the polls, and in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate, where left-wing Social Democrats appear to be heading towards victory. The mask affair severely damaged the CDU’s chances of turning the tide.
“We are absolutely furious that this is happening now,” said a CDU official in Baden-Württemberg. “Voters say these MPs are winning so much – why do they also feel the need to make questionable deals?”
For Jürgen Falter, a political scientist at the University of Mainz, the mask scandal simply adds “the insult to injuryâ€.
“People were already blaming the CDU for the slow start of the vaccination campaign and for the broken promises on mass testing, and now this,†he said. “Confidence in the party is waning and this will only speed up this process.”
Sunday’s elections come at a delicate time for Armin Laschet, the new head of the CDU. A poor performance by the Christian Democrats could undermine her authority and weaken her candidacy for the joint CDU / CSU candidacy for chancellor in the September elections.
Senior CDU characters quickly went into damage limitation mode. Ralph Brinkhaus, leader of the parliamentary party, said he would investigate whether other MPs were paid for deals on pandemic protective gear. “Anyone who has tried to profit financially from the purchase of PPE in this emergency has no place in our ranks,†he wrote to MPs.
Meanwhile, opposition parties moved quickly to profit from the mask affair. Annalena Baerbock, co-leader of the Greens, said this showed the CDU / CSU had a “structural and systemic problem” with the “sleaze”.
Marco Buschmann, chief whip of the opposition Free Democrats, said Merkel’s party risked sharing the fate of the Italian Christian Democrats, who were notoriously “riddled with corrupt networks”. “And when they became known, the voters sent them to the desert and the party disappeared.”
Even before the mask case broke, the CDU was in trouble. He holds two ministries – health and the economy – that have come to embody government failures during the coronavirus pandemic. Jens Spahn, the Minister of Health, has been blamed for slow vaccinations and the botched rollout of rapid coronavirus tests; Peter Altmaier, the economy minister, has been criticized for delays in distributing financial aid to businesses affected by the three-month shutdown.
But the CDU also has another big problem: Merkel herself. For months, the veteran chancellor has shaped Germany’s national coronavirus policy, working with the governors of the country’s 16 states. But in recent weeks, she has struggled more and more to find her way. Experts say her influence will continue to wane as the September Bundestag elections approach, after which she pledged to withdraw from politics.
“He’s a lame duck who has clearly lost his authority,†Falter said.
Meanwhile, Löbel and Nüsslein, who is under investigation for alleged corruption in the mask case by Munich prosecutors, are not the only Christian Democrats in the eye of a storm.
Authorities are investigating CDU Bundestag member Axel Fischer for alleged corruption and last week lifted his parliamentary immunity.
Prosecutors claim that he and other former and current members of the Bundestag received money from Azerbaijan in exchange for voting for pro-Azerbaijani motions and resolutions. Fischer dismissed the allegations as “baseless”.
CDU MP Philipp Amthor has also come under scrutiny for his lobbying work for US tech firm Augustus Intelligence. After initially claiming that he received no payment for his services, he later admitted to receiving thousands of stock options from the company.
The resulting fury prompted Amthor to step back from the limelight. However, he returned to the forefront of politics last weekend when he was elected the leading CDU candidate in the northern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in the September Bundestag elections. The opposition parties were dismayed.
For Olav Gutting, the mask affair evokes painful memories of the worst crisis in CDU history, when Helmut Kohl admitted accepting illegal party donations while he was chancellor in the 1990s.
“The donation scandal almost destroyed the CDU,†Gutting said. “And this one could have the same caliber if every week we got a new story about masks.”
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