Winners are Losers and Losers are Winners: Thoughts on the German Elections of September 18, 2005
By Andrei Markovits and Jeremiah Riemer

Sunday's hastily scheduled parliamentary election in Germany produced two interrelated paradoxes:

First of all, there is the incongruity of the losers calling themselves winners. As soon as the first exit poll results were posted, the two major parties that lost the most votes (compared to the last election in 2002) both declared themselves victors. Each party's leader went on television asserting a rightful claim to head Berlin's next government. Two smaller parties that dramatically improved their standing in the polls, however, are almost certain to be excluded from power.  

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and opposition leader Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (the CDU, in alliance with its Bavarian sister party CSU) each received around 3-4 percent fewer votes than they did four years ago. Yet Schröder made a triumphant appearance before a cheering throng of supporters and boasted that, because his badly divided party had beaten the odds laid down by a nay-saying media, he deserved to remain in office. Merkel, meanwhile, said that even though her lackluster campaign produced one of the worst electoral results in the CDU's history, her tiny lead over the SPD (a little above 35 percent compared to Schröder's 34 percent plus) entitled her to the mantle of leadership.

The free market-oriented party with which Merkel had hoped to form a new governing coalition, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), achieved a rare double-digit showing at 10 percent of the vote. Yet, in spite of Schröder's implicit invitation for the Liberals to join his dwindling Red-Green government and form a new majority in what would be Germany's first "traffic light coalition" (adding the FDP's yellow to the current center-left color combination), this middle class party will remain in opposition because of its campaign pledge to stick with the other "bourgeois" party, the CDU. Another small electoral group simply called the "Left" party also did well on Sunday. This socialist alliance cobbled together from former East German Communists and Western protest voters who bolted from the SPD to oppose Chancellor Schröder's last-minute social welfare reforms, scored an impressive 8.5 percent of the vote. This put them slightly ahead of the SPD's junior partner the Greens. While a hard-left "Red-Red-Green" governing alliance is a numerical possibility, Schröder has ruled it out.

And so the only plausible outcome of this election (apart from the highly unlikely "Jamaica" coalition of clerical-black Christian Democrats, "yellow" Free Democrats, and Greens) is a Grand Coalition of the poll's two losers - SPD and CDU.
   
The second paradox of this election is that everybody is talking about moving Germany forward, but both the parties and their voters have done nothing except guarantee stalemate. Schröder called the election because he was losing support from voters and his party's left wing as he attempted to introduce some belated reforms in Germany's labor markets. He now claims victory because he prevented the Christian Democrats from forming a government with the "neo-liberal" Free Democrats that would take these reforms even further. Angela Merkel claims the same because she "ended Red-Green."

Blocking some feared outcome rather than supporting a new governing agenda has also been more important to the electorate. Surveys show that many voters who only a month ago were expected to give Angela Merkel a clear mandate abandoned her because the CDU sent them mixed signals about how much tax reform and social sacrifice they were expected to bear. A coalition of the anxious - East German voters still unaccustomed to capitalism, unreconstructed West German leftists, and some trade union activists - drained support from Schröder's half-hearted attempt at "shaping globalization in a social-minded way." Middle-class anxiety also played a part: the FDP, the victorious party now stuck without a viable governing partner, got a final surge of support from voters who wanted to prevent the Grand Coalition they are now almost certain to get.

Four decades ago, postwar Germany's only other Grand Coalition ushered in an era of expansive domestic reforms and much-needed innovations in foreign policy. In the 1960s, the heyday of Keynesian economics, reform meant giving a strong executive the power to "fine-tune" the economy with the cooperation of corporate and labor leaders who believed in planning for a mixed economy. Having both major political parties in power gave business leaders the political cover they needed to accept more government intervention in fiscal policy and trade unions the respect they wanted in order to accept productivity-oriented wage bargaining. Today, "reform" means trimming the welfare state that earlier era ushered in, and most commentators in Germany believe that a coalition of Sunday's losers will only strengthen the same veto groups who created stalemate at the polls.

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Andrei S. Markovits is Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan and a member of the AICGS Advisory Council.
Jeremiah M. Riemer is a translator who has taught comparative politics in the United States and Germany.

This essay appeared in the September 22, 2005 AICGS Advisor.