What Color is My Coalition?
By Dr. Jackson Janes

Changing alignments in Germany and the U.S

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press suggested that "there are many more shades to the American political landscape than just the red and blue dividing the Electoral College maps last November 2 - significant cleavages within parties not only runs counter to the widespread impression of a nation increasingly divided into two unified camps, but also raises questions about political alignments in the future."

In other words, American voters are more volatile, less predictable, and harder to pigeonhole today, a circumstance that causes political party leaders to worry about their own futures. The same might be said about Germans and other Europeans. Be it domestic or EU issues, questions about voter behavior are increasingly difficult to answer. Heide Simonis (SPD), prime minister of Schleswig-Holstein since 1993, found that out the hard way this year after she lost an election most people expected her to win. In the upcoming election race in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), it looks like the CDU/FDP has the edge over the current Red-Green coalition. Yet the SPD Prime Minister Peer Steinbrück is far more popular than his challenger Jürgen Rüttgers. What will the voters decide? How will they decide? Who will decide at all?

In the case of the proposed EU constitution, it was the politicians who decided. This past week, avoiding a true debate of the issues and leaving the German voters uninformed and uninvolved, the Bundestag voted with a strong majority to support the proposed European Union constitution. If Germany had permitted a referendum, and the public debate attached to this, would the vote have gone as smoothly? Will the French, who do have a referendum on May 29, choose to support the constitution? No one really knows.

In Germany, it seems, voters increasingly understand their vote, or their withholding of it, as a direct signal to the political leadership, either as a sign of approval or, more often, as punishment. It is also clear from the consistently shrinking number of party members, particularly in the SPD and the CDU, that the major parties are no longer commanding the same level of loyalty of core groups traditionally affiliated with them. One explanation is that the parties' profiles have blurred in the eyes of many voters, who are now uncertain about their party's platform and unclear about what to expect anymore.

More importantly, the ability to mobilize core voters may also be weakening in the face of voter disenchantment with the policies and politics of the parties' leadership. In NRW, where the SPD has traditionally had its strongest base, rounding up those core supporters for the party and getting them to vote will be critical to its chances for victory. But the CDU is equally challenged to turn out the vote, as are the two main smaller parties, the Greens and the FDP.

The question about the catalysts for such mobilization is as complicated in Germany as it is in the United States. There is a clear trend toward the personalization of voter preferences, a factor which has been central to the American political campaigns since the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, but which has also gained in importance in Germany during the past few elections at the federal and now state level elections.

And just as the mid-term Congressional elections in the United States are seen as a bellwether for the presidential campaign two years later- particularly for the ambitious candidates seeking the nomination of their party - some of the state elections are barometers for the German national elections. The race in NRW is being billed by both sides as a benchmark for success fourteen months from now. In fact, the SPD-Green coalition in Düsseldorf is the last remaining of its type in any of the states. A loss for the SPD in NRW would give the opposition the absolute majority in the Bundesrat, the upper chamber representing the sixteen states in Germany, and allow it to essentially block all major legislation needing Bundesrat approval. Yet the more important asset for the opposition here could be to show what, in fact, it might be able to do if it could win the national elections. But there is doubt among the voters as to whether a new team can be substantially different in their options, policies, and choices.

There are those who argue that it is best that an SPD-Green team try to push through the remaining changes needed to get the economy back into gear. If they were to land in the opposition in 2006, the concern is that the conservative coalition would be facing a very mobilized SPD-Green opposition and the results would not be more but less progress on the policy front.

Just as the Republican control of Washington, DC, has not prevented cleavages within the party over serious issues, there remain serious cleavages between the CDU and the CSU over policies, leadership and personnel. The FDP has also not been spared internal battles over the future of the party. And, in the wake of the visa affair, the Greens are in the midst of a discussion about the future of their leadership and policy choices.

Meanwhile in Berlin, the SPD and Green leadership has to be focusing on Plan A and B, depending on who wins the largest and most important state election before the national elections next year, a process which is also generating a lot of friction and will continue to do so. But the bottom line is that, regardless of who wins in NRW, it is no guarantee who will win the national elections next year. In politics, a day is a very long time, let alone fourteen months between mid-May, 2005, and mid-September 2006. In politics, things happen. Like floods.

Is this a time to be thinking about a grand coalition in Berlin, like the one recently installed in Kiel? Is voter frustration in Germany such that voters would want such a solution to the logjam in Berlin? The likely answer is no. But the fact is that Germany's one time experience with a grand coalition at the national level (1966-69) might warrant a new look four decades later. In any case, voters are making it clear that they are reconsidering their options.

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This essay first appeared in the May 19, 2005 AICGS Advisor.