Armin Laschet

Laschet was born in Burtscheid, a suburb of Aachen, about three kilometres from the Belgian and Dutch borders, to parents Heinrich Laschet and Marcella née Frings; he was raised in an observant Roman Catholic family.[5] His father was a mining engineer at a black coal mine and later became an elementary school teacher and headmaster.[6] The Laschet family is originally from Liège Province in Wallonia in modern Belgium where the family's ancestor Jacques (or Jacob) Laschet lived in Hergenrath in the Duchy of Limburg in the 18th century; his paternal grandfather Hubert Laschet (1899–1984) moved from Hergenrath to Aachen in the 1920s;[lower-alpha 1] his paternal grandmother Hubertina Wetzels (1900–1979) had been born in Aachen to parents who had just moved there from Welkenraedt in Belgium.[7] Like many others in the tri-border area the Laschets had relatives across the national boundaries, who lived in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and Neutral Moresnet. Laschet maintains close personal ties to Belgium where members of the Laschet family still live.[3]

He attended the Pius-Gymnasium in Aachen and studied law at the universities of Bonn and Munich, passing the first state examination in law in 1987. He studied journalism from 1986 to 1988. In Munich he became a member of K.D.St.V. Aenania München, a Catholic student fraternity that is member of the Cartellverband.

Laschet speaks fluent French.[8]

Laschet worked as a journalist and in the publishing industry from 1986 until 1991, among other things as Bonn correspondent for Bayerischer Rundfunk. He later served as editor-in-chief of the Catholic newspaper KirchenZeitung Aachen from 1991 until 1994. From 1995 to 1999, while also serving as a member of parliament, he was CEO of the Catholic publishing company Einhard-Verlag, which had previously been led by his father-in-law Heinrich Malangré.

Laschet is married to his childhood sweetheart Susanne Malangré, whom he met as a child in a Catholic children's choir led by Susanne's father, prominent business executive Heinrich Malangré; they married in 1985.[9] The couple has two sons and a daughter.[8] The family resides in Aachen's Burtscheid district. His wife belongs to a prominent Aachen family of French-speaking Walloon origin and is the niece of CDU politician and lord mayor of Aachen Kurt Malangré; the Malangré family moved from Haine-Saint-Pierre in Belgium to Stolberg to establish a glass production business in the second half of the 19th century.[10] His son Johannes ("Joe") Laschet, who studies law, is a blogger and model, described as a fashion influencer on Instagram.[11][12]

After serving as staffer to the President of the Bundestag, Laschet became a member of the German Bundestag in the 1994 election. He was elected in the single-member constituency of Aachen I, after the incumbent Hans Stercken retired. He was on the Committee for Economic Cooperation and Development and on the Committee for European Union Affairs. In addition, he was part of the so-called "Pizza-Connection" (a reference to an American drug ring).[13] A number of informal meeting of a group of young Bundestag Members from both the CDU and the Greens. This was later seen as controversial, because it solidified an image of him as a liberal/centrist member of the CDU.[14] He lost re-election in the 1998 SPD landslide to future Health Minister Ulla Schmidt.

As Member of the European Parliament, Laschet served on the Committee on Budgets between 1999 and 2001 and on the Committee on Foreign Affairs between 2002 and 2005. In the latter capacity, he served as the Parliament's rapporteur on relations between the EU and the United Nations.[15]

Armin Laschet in Cologne in 2023.

Under Minister President Jürgen Rüttgers in North Rhine-Westphalia, Laschet served as State Minister for Generations, Family, Women and Integration from 2005 until 2010, and as State Minister for Federal Affairs, Europe and Media from 2010. In 2010, he unsuccessfully ran against Norbert Röttgen for the post of CDU chairman in the state.[16] When Röttgen resigned from that office in 2012, Laschet was elected as his successor. On 4 December 2012, he was elected as one of five deputy chairpersons of the national CDU party, serving alongside Volker Bouffier, Julia Klöckner, Thomas Strobl and Ursula von der Leyen.[17]

Laschet currently serves as state MP in the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia and also chairs the CDU's state chapter (Landesverband). From 2014 until 2016, he was a member of the North Rhine-Westphalia Commission for Constitutional Reform, led by Rainer Bovermann.[18]

In the negotiations to form a Grand Coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU together with the Bavarian CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) following the 2013 federal elections, Laschet was part of the CDU/CSU delegation in the working group on energy policy, led by Peter Altmaier and Hannelore Kraft.

In November 2015, Laschet visited the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan to learn more about the plight of Syrians fleeing the violence in the ongoing Syrian civil war that erupted in 2011.[19] Between March 2015 and January 2016, he chaired the Robert Bosch Expert Commission to Consider a Realignment of Refugee Policy, an expert group convened by the Robert Bosch Stiftung.[20]

In November 2016, Laschet was elected leading candidate for the North Rhine-Westphalia state elections in May 2017 which he won in what was widely considered an upset victory.[21] He was a CDU delegate to the Federal Convention for the purpose of electing the President of Germany in 2017.[22]

In December 2016, Laschet presided over the CDU's national convention in Essen.[23]

Laschet served as the 11th Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2017 to 2021. Laschet's government was a coalition between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). As one of his state's representatives at the Bundesrat, he serves as a member of the Federal Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Defence Committee.[24]

Following Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer's announcement on 10 February 2020 that she would step down as CDU party leader before the end of 2020 and would not stand as a candidate for chancellor in the 2021 federal elections, Laschet announced at a national press conference on 25 February 2020 that he would run for the party presidency, and thus also for the chancellorship. He named Jens Spahn[25] as his vice-presidential candidate, with Friedrich Merz[26] and Norbert Röttgen[27] as his challengers.

Polls subsequently showed that voters rated Laschet's management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany's most populous state poorly.[28]

The election of the new CDU party president, after several postponements due to the coronavirus epidemic, took place only at the two-day party congress in mid-January 2021, which was the first fully digital congress in the party's history. On the second day of the congress, 16 January 2021, Laschet won 38.42% of the votes in the first round and 52.79% in the second round. He thus became the new president of the CDU.[29][30]

After his defeat at the head of his party in the federal elections, he resigned from the party leadership on 7 October. His place was taken by Merz, who finally succeeded in his third attempt, in the election of the party president on 17 December 2021.[31]

However, the strong intra-party divisions that were also evident in the vote could have led to a joint CDU/CSU chancellorship candidacy for Markus Söder, the president of the smaller Bavarian sister party, the CSU.[32] Polls conducted immediately before the party congress showed that 55 percent of voters considered Söder a good candidate for chancellor, while 80 percent of CDU/CSU supporters thought he was a good candidate, compared to only 27 percent and 32 percent respectively for Laschet.[33]

Söder opted for a wait-and-see strategy, finally announcing at a press conference in Munich on 19 April 2021 that he would not delay the nomination of his candidate for chancellor as the federal elections approached, and that he and his party, the CSU, would therefore accept the decision of the CDU's "big sister" executive board meeting, which began that day, as binding on both him and his party, the CSU. Subsequently, following a late-night meeting of the CDU leadership in Berlin, it was announced that in a secret ballot, 77.5 percent of those present at the meeting had finally backed Laschet, compared to just 22.5 percent for Söder. Thus, it was a foregone conclusion that Armin Laschet would be in the running to become chancellor of the CDU/CSU coalition in September 2021.[34] Asked why he did not step aside from his own candidacy for chancellor, as polls had shown that he had significantly worse chances than the CSU president, Laschet said he remembered it well, that during the campaign for the 2017 North Rhine-Westphalian state parliamentary elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, when he was given similarly low odds by pollsters against the then incumbent SPD state premier Hannelore Kraft, he still won the election.[35]

Subsequently, Laschet tried to "channel" the far greater popularity of his biggest rival within the CDU by recruiting Merz to his campaign team, saying that he "belonged in the team" and that his economic and financial expertise would be crucial in helping them to overcome the huge challenge of the pandemic in a sustainable way.[36]

Already at the party congress in Rhineland-Palatinate in May 2021, Laschet called for the Greens to be the main political opponent in the upcoming election campaign. He set the goal of preventing the formation of a Red–Red–Green (SPD–Left–Greens) coalition.

As his party's candidate to succeed Merkel in the national elections, Laschet was initially seen as having made an uncertain start to his campaign[37] and faced calls to chart a more right-wing course to win back voters disenchanted by the incumbent coalition government. However, the party's win in the Saxony-Anhalt elections was later interpreted as a boost to Laschet.[38]

Laschet presented the joint CDU/CSU election platform with Söder on 21 June 2021. In the programme, they stated that combating the pandemic, climate change and defending prosperity and freedom are global challenges, and that their goal is to create a Germany open to the world, which strives for both modernisation and green policies.[39]

While visiting Erftstadt, a flood-hit town, Laschet was caught laughing on camera and came under fire later despite his apology that 'It was stupid and shouldn't have happened and I regret it'. This was a decisive factor in the fact that all but 7 percent of those surveyed were positive about the provincial premier's management of the flood crisis. Following this incident, CDU/CSU suffered heavily in opinion polls and SPD took the lead.[40][41] Laschet faced another scandal at the end of the month, when it emerged that he, like his fellow Green Party candidate for chancellor Annalena Baerbock, was facing accusations of plagiarism. Die Aufsteigerrepublik. Zuwanderung als Chance, was written in 2009 and he finally admitted his "mistake", and apologised.

In the 2021 German federal election on 26 September, Laschet had to compete for the post of Chancellor against Olaf Scholz, the SPD candidate for Chancellor, and Annalena Baerbock, the candidate for Chancellor of the Alliance 90/The Greens. Unlike his rivals, Laschet did not contest an individual constituency.[42] His home constituency of Aachen I, which he had represented from 1994 to 1998 and was expected to be his constituency, swung to the Greens on election day.

Opinion poll predictions came true,[43] with Scholz and the SPD winning the most votes (25.7%), while Laschet and the CDU/CSU had their worst result ever (24.1%), with Baerbock and the Greens not even half their popularity from the spring, finishing third with a disappointing 14.8%. In the battle for third place, the FDP trailed the Greens by only a small margin (11.5 percent) and were the "kingmakers". Aware of this, and despite the huge ideological differences between them, they started negotiating with each other after the elections to find the least common multiple in order to maximise their political power. Given the relatively small electoral margin between the SPD and the CDU/CSU, it is also possible that the latter could eventually form a government. The Greens would prefer the SPD, while the FDP would be a natural ally for the CDU/CSU.[44] The AfD achieved 10.3 percent, while the Linke 4.9 percent in the federal election.[44] Following the federal election, Laschet claimed personal responsibility for the disastrous result.[45]

Laschet has been criticised for hesitancy in efforts to mitigate climate change.[46][47][48][49] As Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia he claimed that the state was a "pioneer" in climate protection. Environmental organisations have rebuked this claim.[50][51] In his tenure the expansion of wind power "collapsed" in North Rhine-Westphalia while under his leadership the state government enforced a phaseout of three coal-fired power plants not before the maximum date of 2038.[50]

In 2018, shortly after taking over as Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia, Laschet supported the minister of the environment Christina Schulze Föcking's decision to dismantle the state's administrative department for environmental crimes.[52] Public broadcaster WDR reported that prior to its dismantling the department had been investigating accusations over pig farming at the farm of Schulze Föcking's family.[52]

During the 2021 floods in the district of Ahrweiler, he said, "One does not change one's politics because today is such a day."[53]

Armin Laschet with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen in 2015, while they were deputy leaders of the CDU

On European integration, Laschet seeks to strengthen the European Union on issues such as fighting international terrorism and organized crime, as well as energy policy. He also wants to see the President of the European Commission be elected directly by EU voters.[54]

During the European debt crisis, Laschet called for an "open discussion" toward a broad solution to the debt crisis, of which Eurobonds could be a part.[55] He argued that a Greek exit from the Eurozone could trigger undesirable upheaval in southern Europe: "(An exit) could lead to instability in a NATO member state. Russia is standing ready with billions to help Greece in such a scenario."[56] In October 2011, he signed George Soros' open letter calling for more European Union involvement in the single currency turmoil.[57]

In 2020 alone, Laschet met with French president Emmanuel Macron three times. Alongside Jens Spahn, Laschet was invited by Macron of France to attend the 2020 Bastille Day celebrations in Paris, in a sign of gratitude for their role in helping French citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic in France.[58] In an honour reserved for special guests, Macron invited Laschet into the Élysée Palace's gardens.[59]

Laschet was a fierce defender of Chancellor Merkel's migration policies during the European migrant crisis of 2015.[60]

In 2016, Laschet dismissed proposals for a so-called burqa ban as a "phony debate" and distraction from more pressing issues. However, his party later adopted this policy as a core issue.[61][62][63]

Ahead of a parliamentary vote in June 2017, Laschet expressed his opposition against Germany's introduction of same-sex marriage,[64] going so far as to say it would be unconstitutional.[65] During the 2021 German federal election Laschet gave a different position in a town hall, where he claimed he would have voted in favour of same-sex marriage.[66]

In 2018, Laschet described the treehouses protesting the destruction of Hambach forest as "illegally occupied areas" and stated that RWE had the right to clear the forest. "The state government is there to ensure that the law that applies is enforced," he said during a talk show on German public broadcaster WDR.[67]

Laschet considers Germany to be insufficiently prepared for global political challenges. In his view, the country lacks the will to pursue a foreign policy that is independent of other major powers such as Russia or the US. Laschet also hopes for more strategic thinking and action from the EU, saying it "must become fit for global politics."[68]

In 2015, Laschet was criticised for not standing up for German interests when it was revealed that US intelligence agencies are illegally spying on German citizens and businesses.[69] German experts estimate that by the year 2000, American industrial espionage was already causing annual economic losses of at least €10 billion per year due to stolen inventions and development projects – the number having likely only risen since then due to the increase of digitisation. Despite these revelations, Laschet supported Angela Merkel's policy, which in leaked cables was revealed to be to "sit out" the pressure from the German public and Bundestag.[70]

Laschet is considered by some critics as taking a soft stance on the government of President Vladimir Putin.[71][72] Laschet has voiced support for Nord Stream 2 and for a closer relationship with China and is against excluding Huawei from Germany's 5G network. However, Germany's Federal Office for Information Security has supported Laschet's position, saying that comprehensive investigations into Huawei's hardware and software have produced no evidence of wrongdoing and that an exclusion is unjustified.[73] Barkin further argues that Laschet has also been against "demonizing" Putin for the Russian annexation of Crimea.[74] At the same time, Laschet said that Germany should increase military spending and take on a greater share of military burdens within NATO. He argued that the Bundeswehr should take on more responsibility in Africa, around the Mediterranean and in Mali.[75]

In 2018, Laschet cancelled his appearances at the Ruhrtriennale arts and music festival due to the festival allowing supporters of the BDS movement to perform.[76] In 2021, he pledged support for Israel: "We stand by Israel's side without reservation."[68]

In 2013, Laschet criticised Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle's support for rebels in the civil war in Syria: "It is absurd that the same people we are fighting in Mali are being supported in Syria. It is the terrorist groups al-Nusra and al-Qaida, financed from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who are introducing Sharia courts and fighting Syria's religious diversity".[77] In 2013, Laschet also criticised Westerwelle's demand to release former President Mohammed Mursi after the coup in Egypt in 2013, as minorities and Christians in particular had suffered under Mursi.[77]

Laschet described the chaotic withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan and Fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021 as the "biggest debacle that NATO has suffered since its founding".[78]

• RAG-Stiftung, Member of the Board of Trustees (since 2017),[80] Chair of the Board of Trustees (since 2022)[81][82]

• Heinz-Kühn-Stiftung, Member of the Board of Trustees (since 2023)[83]
• Tarabya Cultural Academy, Member of the advisory board (since 2022)[84]
• Leo Baeck Foundation, Member of the Board of Trustees (since 2022)[85]
• Atlantik-Brücke, Member
• Bonner Akademie für Forschung und Lehre praktischer Politik (BAPP), Member of the Board of Trustees,[86] Joint President of the Board of Trustees[87]
• Campus Symposium of the Business and Information Technology School, Member of the Advisory Board
• Central Committee of German Catholics, Member
• Charlemagne Prize, Member of the board of directors
• European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Member
• European Foundation for the Aachen Cathedral, Member of the Board of Trustees
• Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Policy Fellow
• Karl Arnold Foundation, Member of the Board
• Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Member of the Planning Committee
• Peace of Westphalia Prize, Member of the Jury[88]
• missio, Member of the Supervisory Board
• St. Maria zur Wiese, Member of the Board of Trustees[89]
• United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN), Member of the Presidium[90]
• Development and Peace Foundation (SEF), Ex-Officio chairman of the board of Trustees (2017–2021)
• Kunststiftung NRW, chairman of the board of Trustees (2017–2021)[91]
• North Rhine-Westphalian Foundation for the Environment and Development (SUE), Ex-Officio chairman of the board (2017–2021)[92]
• Theodor Heuss Foundation, Member of the Board of Trustees (−2015)