ALT-Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder wird in einem Bericht der US-Presse nicht gerade in einem besonders positiven Licht skizziert.

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January 3, 2006

Politicus

For Schröder and Putin, Linkup No Coincidence

By JOHN VINOCUR

Gerhard Schröder's extraordinary career seems based on the so-far successful premise that whatever he does, nobody remembers for long, and that his personal alloy of metallic charm, chutzpah and feel for his countrymen's instincts takes care of the rest.

Who recalls Schröder's two visits to Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow in 1980 and 1982, sandwiched between the invasion of Afghanistan and the targeting of Western Europe with Soviet SS-20 missiles? And Schröder saying then that Brezhnev looked more disposed toward talking peace than the Americans?

Or that Schröder opposed German reunification and the creation of the euro? And, with a certain consistency of reflex, once backed the proposed sale of German tanks to Saudi Arabia before its rejection by Helmut Schmidt's Social Democratic government, and last year, as chancellor, pushed the European Union to lift its arms embargo to China?

Here is a man, said Helmut Kohl, remarkable for consistently standing on the wrong side of history.

Now, Schröder is going with his instincts again.

Less than a month after leaving office in November, he's taken a job as the chairman of a Gazprom subsidiary, at time when the Russia of Schröder's close friend Vladimir Putin is intent on turning the enormous energy reserves Gazprom controls into a foreign policy lever that would reinstate Moscow as a center of world influence.

This time, before he officially begins work as supervisory board chairman of the North European Gas Pipeline Company (held by Gazprom with two minority German shareholders, BASF and E.ON Ruhrgas), Schröder may seem to have made an irredeemable choice.

Through Gazprom, Russia is demanding that Ukraine pay dramatically higher prices for gas and has cut off its supply in retaliation for Ukraine's favorable orientation toward the European Union and NATO. Last week, Putin's economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, quit a Kremlin team dominated by Putin's fellow KGB veterans, saying state corporations like Gazprom are "managed above all for their own personal interests." He called the pressure on Ukraine a move toward "a policy of imperialism."

Perhaps, in Schröder's mind, these are the kind of events that, in German politics at least, if you sit tight and don't flinch, tend to go away.

After all, Bela Anda, his former spokesman, has told how Schröder worried before running for chancellor in 1998 that he would cut his political stock in half if he divorced his third wife. He did, married for a fourth time, and, Anda notes, watched his popularity drop by 50 percent in the polls - before it turned up again four weeks later.

During that campaign, Schröder, in spite of a contact ban recommended by the EU, went out of his way to meet with President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, then and now a man described as Europe's last Stalinist dictator.

Who remembers? For sure, the Kremlin.

Lukashenko, still on Russia's 2006 good list, gets gas for Belarus from Gazprom at $47 per 1,000 cubic meters, or 35,000 cubic feet, compared to the $230 Gazprom now demands from Ukraine.

These days, of course, Schröder's audience has changed. His constituency is now an international one with its own sense of revulsion. And his new job obviously goes beyond the tasks of an old heavyweight boxer hired as a shill to glad-hand the high-rollers at a Las Vegas casino.

Putin's clear goal in recruiting Schröder, reverberating in his failed attempt to hire the former U.S. commerce secretary Donald Evans to head another Gazprom offshoot, is to sign up tactical intelligence and political leverage - not just amiable front-men to shellac the conglomerate with an aboveboard sheen for Western investors.

Yet check this for Gazprom's presumptive probity:

The manager in charge of the company Schröder will chair is Matthias Warnig, a former major in the East German secret police, or Stasi, who currently serves as chairman of Dresdner Bank ZAO, a Russia-based unit of the German bank. A Wall Street Journal article, published 10 months ago, quoting former colleagues of Putin and Warnig, said Warnig helped Putin recruit spies in the West when the Russian president served as a KGB man in East Germany in the 1980s. The same article reported a Kremlin spokesman's denial that the two men knew each other as Stasi and KGB agents.

More: The new pipeline company itself is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, a town known as a tax paradise sometimes associated with companies run by the "capitalist locusts" Schröder's Social Democrats love to denounce.

Reporting from Zug, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the leading Swiss newspaper, has investigated a Swiss lawyer who is the lone administrative board member of Schröder's pipeline corporation. It said he was previously an officer of a Swiss firm shown in Stasi documents to have furnished East Germany with strategically sensitive electronics from Western embargo lists during the 1980s.

Talk of an accumulating sense of discomfort! Just days before the German elections in September that propelled him from power, Schröder signed the pipeline deal that will carry Russian gas under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, bypassing American allies like Ukraine and Poland. Announcement of his new Gazprom job followed weeks later.

All this has been described by Siim Kallas, EU commissioner for audits and fraud prevention, as Schröder damaging Germany's integrity. Had EU Commission standards been applied, he said, Schröder could not have accepted the job.

In Washington, where Schröder has few admirers, an administration official, who asked not to be identified, trashed his choice for a career retread. "Despicable but predictable," was the phrase.

If the Americans obviously must continue to deal with Putin at the head of a very important country (hosting the Group of 8 summit meeting in St. Petersburg in June) whose potential greatness now excludes much success at democracy, Schröder has to explain working in an environment stamped with the KGB's imprint and Russia's bullying of its more democratic neighbors.

All alone in the great, big-bucks world, Schröder is likely to find his marketability as an international go-between discredited. Eastern Europe frankly does not trust him. Western Europe, in its calculating way, could be described as more than a little disturbed by his new associates.

Even his lecture-circuit appeal to Bush-baiters (Schröder signed a deal with the Harry Walker speakers bureau in New York after Christmas), cannot be enhanced.

Should Schröder, just this once, think a decision of his won't wash, and in a blaze of contrition dump his new day job, he's got a fallback: He's also become an adviser to Ringier, a Swiss publishing house.

Beyond irony, but for the record, Cicero, Ringier's political magazine, in a poll it commissioned in August found Schröder scoring just 1 percent support as Germany's most significant postwar chancellor. Nobody did worse."