There has been virtually no winter in southern Germany this year – last year there was snow on the ground from late November to mid-March – but a hurricane thundered in yesterday across western Europe. As the wind blew everything unchained around the garden of the palace of the Bavarian kings, a Shakesperean drama played out its final act in the seat of government at the edge of the Hofgarten in the wings of the old War Museum. Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber, 14 years in power, announced that he would resign all his posts as of Sept. 30, 2007.
For Stoiber, at 65, it was a tragic end to a life-long career that had brought him within a very few votes of becoming German Kanzler in 2002. The way it played out demonstrated the wide gulf that separates the Protestant north of Germany, with its power centre in bankrupt Berlin, and the Catholic south, with its baroque splendour in booming Munich. In 2005, Stoiber actually set up shop in the grand coalition government ruled by Angela Merkel, where he offered to play the role of a kind of super minister. When Merkel offered him quite a bit less than that, he fled back to Munich to resume his position as Bavarian premier, much to the despair of many of his party colleagues. When the Süddeutsche Zeitung speculated that the Bavarians would never forgive “einen feigen Hund” (a cowardly dog) for cohabiting with the despised Prussians before fleeing back to safe home territory without a fight, the storm flags were flying, and the prognosis was correct.
But Stoiber didn’t give up, and his (angry) potential successors all swore they were loyal and would not be candidates if he ran again in 2008, as he said he would. Behind the scenes, however, the knives were out, and the mortal blow came, appropriately enough, from an unknown female backbencher in his own party who accused him of sending spies on her trail.
Yesterday, in the midst of the hurricane, it was all too much, and Stoiber gave up. But in many ways he may have also won. The leftist Süddeutsche, a permanent thorn in the side of Stoiber’s conservative CSU party, concluded in its lead editorial this morning, that all in all Stoiber had been a good premier of Bavaria – somethung that had never crossed its mind previously – and that it was sort of sad that he had been brought down both by his own weakness in going, however briefly, to Berlin, and by his inablility to realize that the red-haired backbencher from Franconia, who “loves to hear her own voice and see her own photographs” had made a charge he had to take seriously. Small failures in a major political figure, one would think, but maybe that’s what Shakespeare is all about.