Is This the Next Woman to Run Germany?
Julia Kloeckner is brash, charismatic, and an unabashedly conservative alternative to Angela Merkel. Can she plot a trail from the countryside to Berlin’s top job?
BY MARCH 9, 2016BERLIN — Until recently, Julia Kloeckner was a little-known provincial politician from Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Before she joined the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, in 2002, her main claim to fame was her one-year reign as the country’s 1995-1996 “Wine Queen.” As German viniculture’s promoter-in-chief, she once had the honor of presenting Pope John Paul II with a bottle of Riesling.
This year, however, Kloeckner is back in the spotlight — not, this time, for her grape expertise, but for her stance on asylum-seekers, the issue currently roiling German politics.
Kloeckner, who is running to become premier of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, first made national headlines in January, when she reportedly told dissenters within the CDU to “just shut up for once” in response to their grumbling over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy. At the time, she looked like a Merkel lieutenant helping to maintain discipline in the ranks.
A week later, however, Kloeckner made news again — only this time for siding with Merkel’s critics. Kloeckner released a paper that recommended deciding asylum claims directly at the border and regulating the flow of refugees through daily limits, determined on an ad hoc basis. All of a sudden, Kloeckner looked like a rebel, advocating for a plan much closer to the stop-gap, unilateral measures already taken by neighbors Austria and Denmark than Merkel’s cumbersome trans-European solution.
Kloeckner was careful to dub her proposal “Plan A2” — rather than a full-fledged Plan B — to gain some distance from Berlin during an election season. In the process, the whole country began to pay attention to Kloeckner: a bold, brash, and young Christian Democrat, who promised to restore the party to its conservative roots and walk back the open-door policy that her boss was defending so fervently.
Even as Merkel’s popularity has taken a beating during the refugee crisis, the lack of a viable successor has left her firmly in charge. Yet Kloeckner’s debut on the national stage was a reminder that a new generation is on the rise.
Germany’s regional elections are scheduled to be held on March 13. The vote in Rhineland-Palatinate and two other states is being treated as a national referendum on Merkel’s refugee policies. Should Kloeckner win, her victory would put her in an excellent position in the race for who will lead post-Merkel Germany.
