Sometimes Günther Beckstein comes home to Nuremberg with a bitten tongue when he was a guest on the CSU board in Munich. That’s how he tells it at a meeting in a coffee house in Munich and he laughs a bit. The ex-Prime Minister will be 80 in the fall, but he is still very active and travels a lot. Armenia, Georgia, Iran, Mexico, Israel, Vietnam, Uzbekistan have already been there, with Saudi Arabia, Albania and Cuba next on the agenda.
And always Munich. The longtime former interior minister is still a member of his party’s executive board. However, he prefers to bite his tongue if something doesn’t suit him instead of speaking up. Otherwise it would only mean, “Beckstein annoys Söder,” says the previous predecessor about his successor in the office of prime minister.
Günther Beckstein is still a regular member of the CSU board. But he no longer gets involved in day-to-day politics.
(Photo: Christian Thiel / imago images)
“If I want to say something to Söder, I call him or text him,” says Beckstein. For two hours after the Second World War, the former first evangelical Prime Minister of Bavaria talks about his faith, his search for the right place for German nuclear waste and how he dealt with Söder.
The former head of government no longer interferes in day-to-day politics. He only does things that he either enjoys or that he “at least think makes sense”. Beckstein certainly doesn’t want to be the center of attention himself. “I am not the Most High, I am responsible to the Most High.” This does not mean Markus Söder, with whom he is by no means always on the same page. Except that Beckstein doesn’t talk about it out loud.
“You can do whatever you want, there will be protests anyway”
keyword nuclear waste. Beckstein belongs to him National Advisory Board for a fair process in the search for a German repository for high-level radioactive waste. Beckstein came to this honorary post at the suggestion of a CDU politician and not because the CSU or the Bavarian government wanted it that way. 18 women and men from science and business, politics and media, churches and nature conservation want to achieve something extraordinary with what Beckstein calls a “democratic experiment”.
The aim of the committee is, as far as that would be possible at all, consensus with the population when looking for a location for nuclear waste. A very elaborate, detailed, transparent process is designed to ensure that no one is ignored. And certainly not the population in whose region the German nuclear waste is to be stored as safely as possible. Beckstein’s wife Marga is skeptical. “You can do whatever you want there, there will be protests anyway, and people will go to the barricades,” the former prime minister quoted his wife as saying.
But Beckstein has been working on the advisory committee for three years now and three more years to come. Then it’s over. It’s not a life’s work anyway, but much, much more. “It borders on human hubris to think you can predict security for a million years.” A million years, that’s how long the repository should last.
Initial investigations have shown that around half of Germany generally suitable for such a location, including about half of Bavaria. But Söder has categorically ruled out a repository for highly radioactive nuclear waste in Bavaria for years. That doesn’t fit geologically. Even when Söder recently demanded that nuclear power plants in Bavaria continue to run, he reiterated the rejection of an underground waste storage facility in his own country for the radioactive waste. “We have good technical arguments against it.”
His predecessor Beckstein is neither impressed nor disturbed by this in his role in the National Monitoring Committee. He was “not Bavaria’s representative in the National Support Committee”. Rather, it is about creating trust through the greatest possible citizen participation. Or to create the conditions for it.
The search for a repository should not be “political horse trading”.
A location decision, Beckstein believes, will probably not be made until the middle of the century or even later. Söder will then no longer be prime minister. And the repository that was then found will probably no longer be in operation in this century, says Beckstein. Nevertheless, the CSU and Free Voters are already ruling out a repository in Bavaria. The coalition agreement states on page 31: “When it comes to protecting our homeland, we think beyond generations. We are convinced that Bavaria is not a suitable location for a nuclear repository.”
Beckstein could now say a few strong words about it, but he leaves it at mild mockery. In the German search for a repository, “no one is interested in what is in the Bavarian coalition agreement”. The search for a suitable place should be “expressly no political horse-trading”. Has he ever spoken to Söder about it? The two not only send SMS and phone each other, they also run into each other in Nuremberg, where Söder comes from, from time to time.
“I asked him about it,” Beckstein replies. But what he said to Söder among CSU party friends and Franconian compatriots, he prefers to keep to himself. The 79-year-old is not concerned with short-term excitement and excitement, but with the fundamentals. “The generations living now have a responsibility to take care of the garbage they created,” he says. Politicians have the task of standing up for things that are necessary, even if they are not popular.
Beckstein doesn’t just refer to the unavoidable repository for nuclear waste, but also to many other things. Power lines, cell towers, and so on. Politicians must stand up and say: “We need this.”
Seen in this way, Beckstein should have despaired of his party long ago. And his successor as prime minister. To Horst Seehofer, who made power lines and wind turbines in Bavaria more difficult. To Markus Söder, who does not want nuclear waste in Bavaria. From this point of view, Beckstein should have bitten off his tongue long ago after the regular visits to the CSU board.
“People can correct the state government without having to vote it out”
But he still needs that in order to prepare the broadest possible consensus for the ten possible repository sites that are to be filtered out in the next few years. Where that will be, no one knows yet. There could also be a region in Bavaria; Northern Bavaria in particular could be affected. That shows the Map of those areas in Germany, which come into question for the time being. Beckstein wants to be honest about that. He doesn’t go to these regions, for example to Upper Franconia, to say “that won’t come to you”.
The former Prime Minister, gray jumper, dark suit, nothing expensive, seems as if he is at peace with himself. His wife Marga probably also contributed to this, who did not comfort him when he lost the state election in 2008 because of a scandal involving the state bank and shortly afterwards was no longer prime minister. The CSU is pretty strict about that. His wife welcomed him at home with the words, “Don’t be so self-pitying. Losing is also part of politics.” He stuck to it and got over the loss of office after a week.
Landesbank scandal, relative affair, mask deals, the history of the CSU has been rich in excesses up to the recent past that do not fit the party name at all. Beckstein has his own thesis as to why the Christian Social Union will probably be able to stay in power again this year. The citizens’ and referendums in Bavaria as “very central elements of direct democracy” are also of great value for his party. “People can correct the state government without having to vote it out.”
Beckstein complains only once in the conversation, but only a bit and rather ironically. It’s a “shame” that he won’t see where the final repository will go. Because he would be very interested to know whether the democratically conceived selection process actually works.