The German Patient Revisited
By Thomas Kielinger

Germany after the election reminds one of Churchill's famous dictum about the erstwhile Soviet Union: "A riddle inside an enigma wrapped in a mystery." The many paradoxes inherent in the election result can only make the enigma appear murkier still.

Obviously, the voters have handed down a non-decision, postponing the day of reckoning. Given the chance to choose new leaders, Germans simply declined the offer. One-third of the vote went to the ruling Social Democrats, one-third to the Conservatives, and almost one-third to the three minor parties. Unlike in Britain where Tony Blair, given a similar share of the vote, can govern with an absolute majority, in Germany, with its PR electoral system, a vote distribution as described can only lead to gridlock. Do Germans fear change more than the further decline of their country?

But the paradoxes go deeper. For this election to have been called in the first place, brought forward by a year, Chancellor Schröder first had to publicly admit to political bankruptcy. Having lost the election in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous of the sixteen regional states ("Länder"), he no longer felt confident in his party members and in the stability of his own government. Thus he asked the members of the Bundestag - the German parliament - to cast a formal vote of no confidence in his leadership. The majority of members, some of them with obvious delight, dutifully obliged and put him out of his misery.

When Horst Köhler, the Federal President, officially acknowledged the dissolution of parliament and declared an early election constitutionally valid he addressed the nation as follows: "In the grave situation we are in, our country needs a government that can pursue its aims in a sustainable and decisive fashion. For this to happen, such a government must have the support of a reliable, functioning parliamentary majority." Sustainable, decisive, reliable, functioning - the election has produced the opposite of what the President had publicly stated was required.

For Gerhard Schröder, too, the situation was similarly wayward of his hopes. By going for an early election, he thought he could be calling his unruly party's bluff: there would be no alternative to "coming home" to Gerhard and continuing the course of modest reform. That way, he calculated, the danger of major defections from the party would be eliminated. Instead, he got exactly the rival from the left he had hoped to avoid. The new party, the "Linke," composed of doggedly reform-averse Social Democrats and the equally disposed "Party of Democratic Socialism" (PDS), the heirs to the former Communists, cost him the majority of his SPD-Green coalition. Checkmate.

Germany now finds itself saddled with another small grouping that brings the total of parties represented in the Bundestag to five. In fact, in one fell swoop, the New Left overtook the Greens by gaining three more seats in the election (54 as opposed to 51). Schröder's gamble in going for early elections has misfired spectacularly. He swapped the frying pan for the fire.

And yet, he is presenting himself as the irrepressible winner he clearly is not. True, he came miraculously close to catching Ms. Merkel at the finish despite being far behind in the early opinion polls. But a loser is a loser is a loser and 34.3 percent of the popular vote was one of the worst results for the SPD ever, just like his challenger, who scored the second-worst result for her Conservatives - 35.2 percent. That is just 0.1 percent better than Helmut Kohl's score in 1998, the year he became a "has-been." But it is one thing for a chancellor to leave the stage so disappointingly after sixteen years in office and quite another for Ms. Merkel to produce the same pipsqueak performance at the beginning of her career.

Has the fifty-one year-old protestant minister's daughter from East Germany been mortally wounded? Not yet, not for the time being, anyway, thanks largely to Mr. Schröder's post-election arrogance when he seemed to lay down as a diktat that his party would never go into a grand coalition with the Conservatives as long as Ms. Merkel remained their leader. Predictably, the parliamentary party defied such boldness this week by electing Ms. Merkel as their new/old chair person with almost 99 percent of the vote. The post-mortem investigation into why the CDU/CSU and Ms. Merkel lost so much of their initial luster will have to wait for another day. Now is the time to be standing tall and appearing ready to talk confidently to all sides about forming a hoped-for coalition.

Little mileage can be gained from speculating about how such a government might be formed, and by whom. Almighty horse-trading in smoke-filled rooms will go on for weeks, fueling wild speculations in the interim. The talk is about a "Jamaica" coalition (black, green and yellow - i.e. CDU/CSU, Greens, and Free Democrats) or one made up of "traffic lights": red, green and yellow (SPD, Greens, and Free Democrats). A grand coalition seems as likely as no coalition at all; in the latter case, the President might see fit to call new elections.

In the meantime, it is worth dwelling a little longer on the dramatic decline of the two main parties, the SPD and the CDU/CSU. For the first time in post-war German history, the two so called "catch-all" parties have failed to attract a combined 70 percent of the popular vote, leading to fears that the middle ground of German politics has nearly collapsed. Actually, "catch-all" no longer applies to them. That label better fits the ever-growing camp of swing voters who vacillate between the various political offerings like so many faithless, rootless stragglers. Undecided until the last moment, they caused Ms. Merkel's near-defeat at the ballot box.

I based my thesis on the lack of a decisive election result and that the risk-averse voters' fear of change seems greater than their fear of further decline. But from another angle, the reluctance to decide may have its roots in the very unattractiveness of what the two main parties have to offer. In a way, both the SDP and the Conservatives, during their respective years in office, have betrayed the electorate by not giving them the leadership it needs, no, secretly craves.

During the campaign Gerhard Schröder, forever the supreme opportunist, almost walked away from his own reforms, the "agenda 2010" he had begun to initiate, albeit timidly. "Reform" was deleted from his vocabulary, swapped for indulging rhetoric about social justice and attacks on the "heartless" agenda of the Christian Democrat Angela Merkel.

The Conservatives, for their part, had built up virtually no record at all as hands-on reformers in Kohl's later years. Under Merkel's tutelage, while suddenly talking tough and willing to take on Germany's structural rigidities, they went overboard by allowing ill-considered ideas like the flat tax or a further rise in VAT to enter the political debate and create opportunities for their opponents to tear them apart. The Social Democrats are riven by internal strife about the way to go forward. The Conservatives, converts to decisive change, appear too inexperienced to credibly tackle the glaring underperformance of Germany's economy. Either way the public is withdrawing more and more of its support for the catch-all parties, splitting the vote amongst assorted smaller parties, as they can do under Germany's have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too PR electoral system.

We are witnessing a slow polarization of the German political landscape. That is particularly bad news for a traditionally Christian party like the CDU/CSU. Given the fact that strong political allegiances are almost disappearing and that eastern Germany is almost wholly atheistic, quite apart from suffering economic hopelessness (unemployment there is over 20 percent), what have the Conservatives to offer an increasingly alienated populace? Giving Christian rhetoric a facelift seems mawkish vis-à-vis the dramatic decline in the country's economic fortunes. First things first: the compounded problems of hugely unaffordable social regimes, an insufficiently deregulated labor market, consistently high unemployment (11 percent or more), and the resulting total collapse of consumer spending has reached dramatic proportions. To remedy this requires expertise, leadership and yes, Christian charity - which, proverbially, begins at home.

Ms. Merkel, who has appeared far too uneasy in her public role and consequently practices a somewhat wooden, uncommunicative style, may become a spent force before long. Yet her party has everything to play for provided they align themselves resolutely on the side of economic progress with a human face and develop a consistent rhetoric to buttress it.

Is Germany "a riddle inside an enigma wrapped in a mystery"? Perhaps not. It is probably more a case of continually unsuccessful and uninspired leadership. The rest of the world finds it hard to believe that a society of 82 million cannot do better than that.

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Thomas Kielinger is the UK correspondent of the German national daily Die Welt and a frequent contributor to AICGS.
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This essay originally appeared in The Tablet, as well as the September 30, 2005 AICGS Advisor.