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As Schröder’s “super minister”, Wolfgang Clement implements Hartz’s reforms. It’s getting the economy going again and it’s plunging its SPD into a crisis. Now “the doer with whom it was not always easy” has died.
In October 2002 Wolfgang Clement was at the peak of his political career: “Super Minister”, it is hardly possible anymore. He receives the certificate of appointment from Johannes Rau, his sponsor, adoptive father and predecessor as Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia. “Edmund Stoiber once said to me: How could you move from the post of prime minister of the largest of the German states to the second rank of the Berlin political landscape?” Clement said in one of his last interviews with the dpa news agency at the end of June.
2010 Agenda Executor
Clemente, naturally, saw his jump from Düsseldorf to Berlin differently from Stoiber. In retrospect, he said he wanted to change something in the social and economic framework in Germany. And Clement changed a lot. Also because SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder likely followed a clear plan with Clement: Schröder enthroned the Bochum native as a “super minister” with a merged economy and labor ministry to implement labor market reforms Hartz I to Hartz IV. And Clement, who was considered business-oriented, pragmatic, and determined, did just that. The 2010 reform agenda is now considered his outstanding political achievement: it brought boom years to the German economy. On occasion, Clement was even negotiated as Schröder’s successor.
But within the SPD it is losing support. The left-wing party, in particular, is attacking Hartz’s reforms. Due to the sometimes drastic cuts in the social area, the party is losing much of its central electorate. The 2005 federal elections are lost: “Super Minister” Clement goes into business and heads for an energy company. It is the beginning of a long rift that eventually led the increasingly uncomfortable comrade to leave the party in 2008. At his heart, he will always remain a Social Democrat, Clement said. Even without a party book.
The lawyer becomes a journalist
Clement was a Social Democrat with a party member for 38 years; he joined the party in 1970. The son of a builder first studies law, but later becomes a journalist. It started in the “Westfälische Rundschau”.
In 1981, the SPD veteran Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski contacted him. “He asked me on behalf of Willy Brandt if I wanted to become a spokesperson for the SPD.” Clement then visits the SPD state chairman and NRW prime minister Johannes Rau and allows him to describe “what it is like when he sits in the presidium with Brandt, Schmidt and Wehner.” The relationship between the three luminaries: Brandt was president of the party, Helmut Schmidt, federal chancellor, leader of the parliamentary group Herbert Wehner, is so broken that they hardly speak. This is especially true for Brandt and Wehner. Rau told him: “You have to learn to understand what it’s all about from the shortest sentences, side notes, almost from your body language.”
Brandt and Rau: an impossible duo
Clement did the job of SPD board spokesperson until near the end of the Bundestag election campaign in 1986/87, when he told party leader Brandt and SPD chancellor candidate Rau to the face that one of they had to resign because they were following an almost opposite course in the electoral campaign. When they refuse, he throws himself, returns to journalism, and moves with the family to Hamburg to become editor-in-chief of the “Hamburger Morgenpost”. Contact with NRW Prime Minister Rau remains close.
In 1989 Rau took him to Düsseldorf as head of the State Chancellery. Later he becomes Minister of Economic Affairs and will soon be considered the Crown Prince of the father of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Clement is redesigning the industrial site in the Ruhr area, against all opposition from the workers and unions. In 1998 he finally became Prime Minister himself. Clement has big plans and wants to make NRW “State No. 1”. He runs prestigious projects such as stem cell research or Transrapid, which he wants to bring to the Ruhr area. The news of his image as a creator reached Berlin: four years later, Schröder took him to the cabinet. The “alpha-alpha wolf”, as Peer Steinbrück, his successor in North Rhine-Westphalia, once called him, was politically at the top. “I’ve been very lucky in life,” says Clement, looking back.
The “uncomfortable comrade”
Wolfgang Clement has become polarized throughout his life. The term “uncomfortable comrade” is almost an understatement. The alienation between party and person lasted for years and finally led Clements to leave the party in 2008. Although he survived a process of exclusion from the party with a “reprimand”, the relationship is broken. After 38 years, Clement is a former comrade and, henceforth, promotes the FDP.
And for himself: Clement now holds various positions on the economy’s supervisory board, from RWE to the housing company Deutsche Wohnen. He was also chairman of the board of directors of the New Social Market Economy Initiative.
It is characteristic of the break in Wolfgang Clement’s life that it was not the SPD, but the FDP, who were the first to condole over his death. Clement has long embodied the modernization of the SPD workers party like no other, but at some point the break with Clement, who likes to shoot across the board, could no longer be consolidated. SPD leader Norbert Walter-Borjans finally put it this way: “He was a doer with whom it was not always easy. His frankness deserves all respect. We are sorry.”
With information from Torsten Beermann, dpa, AFP
