Peter Neumann is not a politician.

In order to determine this, the preliminary remark that he himself made on Friday of his introduction as a member of Armin Laschet's “future team” didn't really need to be made.

Because the way in which the professor from London then worked for the Union chancellor candidate would have been very daring for a politician.

His motivation to work for the NRW Prime Minister at least until September 26th was due to Laschet himself, according to Neumann, who, unlike many other politicians, was “genuinely interested in topics”;

Such a link between one's own role and the fate of a candidate would be poison for a professional politician.

Lorenz Hemicker

Editor in politics

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However, the 46-year-old from Würzburg can confidently neglect such considerations.

At least since the triumphant advance of the “Islamic State” (IS), Neumann has been one of the most cited terrorism researchers.

When everyone wondered who was the brainchild of the assassins and self-proclaimed warriors of God, the "International Center for the Study of Radicalization" founded by at King's College in London, where Neumann holds a chair, provided answers that many security agencies did not yet have .

The fact that Neumann, even after 21 years in London, knows how to formulate cosmopolitan and, as a former journalist, at the same time catchy, fueled the demand even more.

Risky Herculean task

The "IS hunter", as a tabloid newspaper once headlined, is now an established guest at the largest security conferences and has been invited to the White House as well as to the United Nations. In 2017 he was appointed "OSCE Special Representative on Combating Radicalization". Neumann has long since expanded his portfolio and is now doing intensive research into right-wing extremist ideologies and ideologues, which he believes have a lot in common with radical Islamists. And he advises.

Armin Laschet had already brought him to his team in 2017 before the state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Even then, the CDU challenger did not look like the born winner.

He still won in the end.

Neumann, who himself has been a CDU member since 1996, is now supposed to be responsible for the topic of networking internal and external security.

A complex that could play an important role in the course of the disastrous end of the Afghanistan mission in the last few weeks of the federal election campaign.

Neumann should also be able to warn his candidates against careless statements such as the demand that the Europeans themselves should be able to secure an airport like the one in Kabul without the Americans - a risky Herculean task.