ACCORDING TO WELL-PLACED German sources, the rumors swirling around foreign minister Joschka Fischer are true. He has, in fact, gained a lot of weight. “Have you seen him lately?” asked one German politician. “He is huge!”
He’s been here before. Ten years ago, the 5’11” Fischer weighed a hefty 246 pounds. In his book My Long Run Toward Myself, the minister confesses to eating “sausage, ham, cheese, eggs, fried potatoes, bread, butter and jam–just for breakfast. Then I would have an opulent lunch . . . followed by curry wurst and french fries as an afternoon snack, before really cutting loose with an enormous dinner.” But after his third wife left him in 1996, Fischer decided to become a new man, shedding 81 pounds in one year.
At a press conference in 2002, I asked Fischer about his regimen. He said he still managed a brisk eight miles per run, and about 24 miles each week–the one exception being shortly after 9/11, when he was hunkered down in his office, sometimes for 48 hours straight. (On a related note, former chancellor Helmut Kohl once said, “When I get up at night, I’m not thinking about history, but about plundering the refrigerator.”) Needless to say, Fischer has been spending a lot of time in his office lately, unable to run those eight miles a day, and possibly gaining all 81 pounds back. “He may be even more now,” speculates one German television producer.
Considering the amount of stress the Green party minister has been under lately, the relapse should not come as a shock. First there was September 11 and the war in Afghanistan. Then came the invasion of Iraq and the rift between his boss, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and President Bush. Currently Fischer is in the midst of a scandal called the “Visa Affair,” in which, on his watch, tens of thousands of Ukrainians were mistakenly issued visas to enter Germany–many of them prostitutes and gangsters involved in sex trafficking. Fischer has admitted to making mistakes, as critics clamor for his resignation. He is scheduled to testify before an investigative committee later this month.
But in the midst of all this, Fischer did something quite interesting. In an interview in Die Zeit last week, he broke with his government’s position and said he was not prepared to lift the arms embargo that the European Union has imposed on China since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In doing this, Fischer sided with the Bush administration, which had been lobbying Europe to retain the arms embargo. “The chancellor knows that on this matter I have a skeptical attitude,” he explained, citing regional security concerns, the position of the United States, and human rights.
But while the chancellor may know this, he certainly can’t be happy about it–Schröder has been one of the staunchest advocates for lifting the arms ban. “Now the question occurs if the embargo is still appropriate in view of a new leadership in Beijing and moderate progress in liberalization,” Schröder told the Wall Street Journal Europe last February. “We have come to the conclusion that it is not appropriate. According to the latest plans the embargo may be lifted in the first half of 2005.”
Schröder has had to revise those plans in the intervening months. Last week, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly for a resolution urging the E.U. not to lift the embargo. Even Schröder’s fellow Social Democrats in the parliament voted for the resolution, which called for human rights reforms and described Taiwan as “a model of democracy for the whole of China.” It appears that the arms embargo will stay for now.
Fischer’s break with his chancellor has occasioned much comment from friend and foe alike.
“That Fischer comes out against the chancellor is very unusual, and it has a lot to do with the other problems he has, especially the Visa Affair,” says Friedbert Pflüger, the foreign policy spokesman of the opposition Christian Democrats. “As you know, he isn’t the most popular politician. He has lost that place, he’s going down in the polls. What he needs now is the support of his own people more than anything else. He wants to rally his party around him. Nobody believes that either Fischer or Schröder has a lot of principles. So it is a question of tactics, and in the moment he needs his own party more than he needs the chancellor’s consent.”
One prominent German Green who asked not to be named disagrees, saying “Fischer wouldn’t do this just because his party was doing it. Fischer would never do anything for the party. That is absurd. But it is true he does have public opinion on his side–it is also the right side. . . . On the one hand, I know he was convinced [lifting the embargo] was not a good idea from the start. He didn’t say anything publicly but he wasn’t for it. But doing this now was a bold move.”
Indeed, throughout the Iraq war, Fischer was a silent partner, deferring to the chancellor, even if he disagreed with his approach. “Fischer debated the issues and asked the right questions,” says the unnamed Green, “but he never went as far as Schröder did because he never believed in what Schröder did, which was to go anti-American. . . . The question is, Why did he do it now? And for that I don’t really have an answer.”
Whether it be for principled or political reasons, Fischer was right to express his “skeptical” opinion on the lifting of the arms ban. His comment had an impact not only in Germany but throughout the European Union. For this he deserves much credit. And a nice hot plate of curry wurst. With a side of fries.
Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
