Merkel is the Message
By Dr. Jackson Janes
 

Local Trends - Federal Impact?
Following last Sunday's elections in three states and communal elections in a fourth, there was a rush of political tea-leaf-reading from the results. The primary question: What do they mean for the federal elections on September 27? Answer: Not much, at least not this time around. The fact is that there was more about local politics at work here than about the national race. But there were some interesting trends worth noting for the period after the federal elections on all sides of the political spectrum.

What happened in all three of the state elections was a shared message to the Christian Democrats (CDU) and to the Social Democrats (SPD): your base is losing strength. The CDU had held the majority in both Saarbrücken (Saarland) and Erfurt (Thuringia), one in the west and one in the east. But those days are over. Now there is a possibility that a left-of-center coalition could take over in both states, made up of the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Left Party. That possibility may be less likely as long as the SPD leadership is not seriously interested in getting in political bed with the Left at this point, an attitude the Greens may also share. But this coalition possibility has not been entirely eliminated.

The alternative scenario will be for a coalition resembling that of the one currently on the national level between the SPD and the CDU, keeping the Left in the opposition - for now. Or there could be a coalition among the CDU, the Liberals (FDP), and the Greens, but that would require a lot more bridge building to get a consensus.

Demise of the Volksparteien?
Any way you look at it, we are seeing a breakdown of the composition of what was once the catch-all character of both the CDU and the SPD, which had claimed the loyalty of most of the German electorate for the past half century in what was the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) prior to 1989 and then continued into the period after unification but with decreasing impact.

But in the last two decades, the contours of the larger parties have lost their clarity to voters. The roots of both, going far back into the nineteenth century, do not appear deep enough today to attract a more diverse and indeed fractured electorate. The claim of being a people's party (Volkspartei) is no longer as persuasive when the support levels continue to dwindle for both of them.

Broadening the German Political Spectrum
While the FDP also can trace its roots back more than a century, it has never been able to reach a core level of national support much beyond ten percent. The Greens' entry on the national stage three decades ago was the forerunner of a diversifying political party system, and it was furthered by the later appearance of the Left Party (and its predecessor the PDS following unification in 1990) that added more voices and variety in the German political spectrum.

Of course there were other appearances at the state levels of government by right wing and independent parties before and after unification. But they never broke the national ceiling in large part due to the electoral system which was designed to prevent such developments. Just as the U.S. and British systems inhibit third parties from challenging the two major blocks for power, or as the Dutch system encourages it, the German system was designed to prevent populistic excesses from gaining access to the reins of government in the wake of the Nazi period.

Today's political battles at the state levels act as a weathervane for what mobilizes voters. It also demonstrates the limits and possibilities of political chemistry. A conservative-Green coalition government rules Hamburg, an SPD-Left government rules Berlin. The Left Party's predecessor, the PDS, has been engaged in state level government in the eastern states and it is possible now for the Left for the first time to aspire to a role in the western part of Germany in Saarland. Most of the states are governed by a CDU Minister-President, but all three who were in power in Saarland, Thuringia, and Saxony lost ground last Sunday - the Minister-President of Thuringia actually resigned on September 3 - leaving Saxony's leader holding on to power presumably in a coalition now with the Liberals.

Investing in Merkel
The political leaders in Berlin are watching this carefully and have adapted their strategies. For example, Chancellor Merkel has now invested all of her political clout into herself. With apologies to Marshall McLuhan's catch phrase "the medium is the message," for the purposes of this CDU/CSU campaign, "Merkel is the message." Some are unhappy with this slogan, criticizing the personification of the campaign without much content or many issues to debate. But with four weeks to go, the conservative strategists in Berlin have put all of their political capital on Merkel.

Having the public commitment from Merkel to forge a coalition with them after the election, the Liberals are arguing now that only by voting for them can the country avoid the possibility of a government in which the Left Party might have a say or at a minimum Chancellor Merkel can be given a viable option of ending the current coalition with the Social Democrats. Disaffected conservatives might find the FDP more attractive this time than in the past.

Expanding Coalition Options
And the Social Democrats are shaping their message around the argument that they can do more for the country in a different coalition than the current one. Given the poll numbers for now, the only viable one would be with the Greens and the Liberals. Yet at the state level, there could be some experiments between the SPD and the Left Party to see where and how an alliance can be forged with an eye on the next national elections in 2013. Such experiments were explored in Hesse last year and they almost succeeded until a few Social Democrats stood in the way. In the event that the election results after September 27 force another coalition between the conservatives and the Social Democrats, those experiments might pick up some traction, something Merkel herself has warned about.

The role of political charisma in politics has been increasing in importance through the increasing reach and impact of the media, for better and for worse. One need only look at the obscene amount of money spent on the last U.S. presidential campaign to measure that trend. Voters want to feel both inspired as well as informed when they go to the polls. Yet it is getting increasingly hard to predict how the voters will move on the day of elections. The pollsters predicting the results of Germany's last national elections were way off the mark of what eventually happened.

Hence the August 30 election results at the recent state and local levels may not be a reliable benchmark for what German voters will think and do on September 27. It will depend more on which message they are listening to on that Sunday. Yet, it would be wrong to discount the continuing churning of sub-national politics, as the forging of new alliances and coalitions can eventually find ways to bubble up to the national surface in the form of both issues, political movements, and even new parties. The story of Germany's last six decades of democracy offers a good case.

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This essay appeared in the September 4, 2009, AICGS Advisor.

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Want to know more?

"Big Parties' Woes Transform German Politics," By Judy Dempsey, International Herald Tribune, August 31, 2009.

Media Coverage of the August 30 Land Elections

AICGS Coverage of the 2009 German Federal Election