THERE IS a particular vulnerability to the position of state president in a parliamentary democracy like ours. Although vested with substantial constitutional responsibilities and powers, presidents in Ireland and Germany are deliberately politically neutered, in the latter’s case for reasons of very sound historical precedent, their pronouncements and activities confined to the ceremonial or the most general expressions of national aspirations or moods.
Mary Robinson expanded the parameters and succeeded in moving the invisible line in the sand that defined the “political”. But, cross that line, intentionally or not, as Germany’s now-ex-President Horst Köhler has discovered, and the president is likely to enter the quicksand of political controversy. Unable to defend his ideas or office, resignation becomes the only way out.
So it was with President Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh in 1976. Having exercised his constitutional right to refer the Emergency Powers Bill to the Supreme Court, Ó Dálaigh was unable because of the constraints of office to respond to political attack first from the British prime minister’s charge that he was “a menace to civilisation”, or from Minister for Defence Paddy Donegan’s “thundering disgrace”. With the taoiseach unwilling to sack Donegan or defend him publicly, Ó Dálaigh felt he had little option but to resign.
Köhler’s resignation on Monday has resonances of Ó Dálaigh’s. He had come under severe criticism following comments that linked Germany’s economic interests globally with the need for international engagement by its armed forces, an issue of considerable controversy in a country with strong pacifist instincts. “A country of our size,” he had said, “with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests, for example, when it comes to trade routes, for example, when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs and incomes.”
At its most benign, such comments could be seen as a justification for involvement with Nato against pirates off Somalia. A more malign interpretation would see it as a rationale for wholesale colonialist/imperialist adventurism. Köhler’s purpose was probably somewhere in between the two – to contribute an uncontentious explanation for the growing willingness of Germany to contribute to multilateral peacekeeping operations. But, feeling unable to correct what he saw as a deluge of gross misinterpretations, he said he could not stay on in the face of such intense criticism and lack of “necessary respect for the presidential office”.
Like Ó Dálaigh was, Köhler is accused of being unduly thin-skinned, a prima donna too ready to “stand on his dignity”. But such expectations of robustness, while applicable to TDs or ministers involved in the rough and tumble of politics, do not sit as comfortably on the shoulders of the circumscribed holders of presidential office. They are the custodians of the office which they must uphold or they have nothing.