Armin Laschet, the frontrunner to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor, was heckled by residents in a town devastated by last month’s flood in a further sign that he may be punished at the polls for a perceived weak and gaffe-prone response to the disaster.
As the CDU’s candidate in September’s poll walked through Swisttal near Bonn to inspect flood damage on Monday, he was surrounded by 100 people, some of whom vented their anger. “Where were the warnings half a day before?” one man demanded. “You’ll feel it at the next election.”
Another man said he had brought his parents out of their house at 2am during the flood, “otherwise they’d be dead now. There was nothing, no alert!”
Laschet, 60, is the state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, which with neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate was worst hit by the floods that claimed at least 180 lives. His approval ratings have fallen steeply, which has been attributed in part to him being filmed laughing and joking during a visit to the flood-damaged town of Erftstadt, west of Cologne, on July 17.
That, combined with frustration at the scale of the damage, has led commentators to say Laschet has failed to show his crisis-management skills.
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His response has compared unfavourably with former chancellors who built their reputations on action taken after flood disasters, such as Helmut Schmidt, who deployed army units to tackle a severe flood in Hamburg in 1962 when he was the city’s police senator. Gerhard Schroeder’s visits in rubber boots to deluged eastern towns cemented his reputation as a hands-on leader before his re-election in 2002.
Laschet told victims, “I’m not interested in the election” and that instead he had come to “solve problems”.
One resident replied. “There’s no problem to solve any more. The water’s been. I’ve seen no one from the regional government to come round and help me, no one from the administration.”
Laschet said that a reconstruction fund would be set up to fund repairs amounting to billions of euros but victims have complained that the financial aid provided so far is not enough and they are worried that red tape may make assistance complicated to obtain.
