Germany's non-crisis crisis

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel hasn't yet negotiated a new government coalition after last month's election. She has been working on a coalition government with her conservative CDU, the even more conservative CSU, the liberal (in the European sense) FDP, and the center-left Greens, a so-called "Jamaica coalition." The name comes from the party colors of those parties being included on the Jamaican flag.

The FDP withdrew from the coalition talks this week. Assuming those don't resume, the two alternative coalition combinations would be another Grand Coalition (GroKo) with the CDU and CSU with the Social Democrats (SPD). The other would be a minority government in which the CDU/CSU form a government that is "tolerated" by one or more parliamentary parties, meaning a parliamentary majority would vote to form a government that includes only CDU/CSU members.

Failing either of those alternatives, a new election would be likely.

This situation has sent some commentators' imaginations soaring that Germany is now in the middle of a serious political crisis.

The usually safely mainstream Deutsche Welle fed the hype a bit with a tweet that on its face seems to be poking fun at the panic:

Germany has not had a government for 60 days now. Is this the beginning of anarchy? pic.twitter.com/rMJWKgE57B

— dwnews (@dwnews) November 21, 2017

Joerg Wolf of Atlantic-Community.org tweeted in response:

Anarchy? Stupid tweet, not even funny. Paid by fees imposed on Germans.
Of course 🇩🇪 still has a government. https://t.co/IeTIydzWiJ

— Joerg Wolf (@transatlantic) November 22, 2017

Jacob Heilbrunn gives some background on the coalition talks in Is Germany's Angela Merkel Really in Danger? National Interest 11/22/2017:

The idea of a Jamaica coalition has long been the dream of centrist Germans who were enraptured by the idea that the Greens, once vilified by conservatives as bunch of sandal-wearing, peacenik, environmental fruitcakes, could work together with the Christian Democrats. It’s already occurred at the state level, and the Greens have in fact moved a long way from their early days when “realos”—or realists—would duke it out with the “fundis”—fundamentalists. Since then the Greens have, by and large, gone mainstream. The last time the Greens were in government was under Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder when Joschka Fischer served as foreign minister.

As for the Free Democrats, it should come as no real surprise that they are reluctant to enter government. In terms of the party’s political future, it was probably the right move to pull out of the coalition talks with Merkel. The FDP’s last coalition with Merkel did not end well. Voters saw the party as a mere appendage of the Christian Democrats and the party failed to pass the 5 percent hurdle to enter the Bundestag, or federal parliament, in 2013. It was a painful climb to resuscitate the party’s political fortunes. [FDP party leader Christian] Lindner, a clever and ambitious politician, has reinvented the FDP, including taking a harder line on immigration. He can continue to push the party to the right in opposition and raise its profile ala Sebastian Kurz who heads the Austrian People’s Party. ““I have the feeling that Lindner has been looking a little too much towards Austria recently,” Green party head Cem Ozedemir said.

The SPD leaders were nuts from a party-political point of view in 2013 when they didn't even try to form a red-red-green coalition with the Greens and the Left Party. They would have had a majority in the national Bundestag. They don't in 2017. Heilbrunn points out that another four years of a GroKo would likely weaken one or both of the coalition parties by making them seem more and more alike.

Germany and the EU face two chronic, big, serious crises: the euro crisis, because the euro does not constitution an "optimal currency zone," as the economist call it; and the refugee crisis, which is being driven by wars in the Middle East and Africa as well as climate change.

But Germany in November 2017 is not in any kind of political crisis. As Joerg's tweet indicates, Angela Merkel is still Chancellor and there is still a Cabinet and parliament is functioning.

Rudolf Walther has the right idea in Mehr Mut zur Minderheitsregierung Blätter 11/2017. He points out that parliamentary systems in Denmark, Sweden and Canada have had minority governments for various periods of time. And it wasn't like President Hindenburg dismissing Parliament over and over and enabling Chancellors like Heinrich Bruning to rule in a quasi-authoritarian way, which did in the Weimar Republic.

In a minority government, the Chancellor would build a majority not with party-line majorities with the governing parties who form with government. Instead, she would need to put together different majorities in the legislature on the legislation she needs to pass. Which is similar to what happens in the executive systems in the US and Latin America. It's a different kind of challenge than a majority coalition government. But it doesn't mean that the political system is some kind of fundamental crisis. Or any crisis at all.

So when the Washington Post editorial board is saying today that Germany has been plunged "into an unprecedented postwar political crisis," well, that's just goofy. (Germany’s political crisis is the last thing the West needs right now Washington Post 11/22/2017)

Jürgen Habermas on the new Bad German phase initiated by Angela Merkel #ThisIsACoup #merkelstreichelt

Jürgen Habermas is not pleased by German Chancellor Angela Merkel's handling of the Greek crisis (Philip Oltermann, Merkel 'gambling away' Germany's reputation over Greece, says Habermas Guardian 07/16/2015):

“I fear that the German government, including its social democratic faction, have gambled away in one night all the political capital that a better Germany had accumulated in half a century,” he told the Guardian. Previous German governments, he said, had displayed “greater political sensitivity and a post-national mentality”.

Habermas, widely considered one of the most influential contemporary European intellectuals, said that by threatening Greece with an exit from the eurozone over the course of the negotiations, Germany had “unashamedly revealed itself as Europe’s chief disciplinarian and for the first time openly made a claim for German hegemony in Europe.” [my emphasis]

Obviously, in the latter he means the first time in the history of the current Federal Republic.

Habermas added: “Forcing the Greek government to agree to an economically questionable, predominantly symbolic privatisation fund cannot be understood as anything other an act of punishment against a leftwing government.”

Yes, it was.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras obviously wound up accepting a humiliating defeat. But his months-long fight to negotiate a reasonable deal with Iron Chancellor II

Joanna Slater reports (Germany is remaking the euro zone in its own image Globe and Mail 07/16/2015):

Helmut Kohl, Germany’s former chancellor, had a favourite maxim about his vision for the future, inspired by the words of the famous writer Thomas Mann. The ultimate goal, Mr. Kohl said, was “a European Germany, not a German Europe.”

Now, as Greece implements the bitterly fought agreement reached Monday with its creditors, the deal underlines the new reality of the euro zone: Germany is remaking the currency bloc in its own image.

It’s a place where the focus is on spending cuts, implementing structural reforms and abiding by the rules. It’s also backed by an implicit warning – if a country veers off track as Greece has, it will pay dearly or face a calamitous ejection from the currency union. ...

Some observers despaired of the way Greece’s predicament has been presented in Germany. “If you are breastfeeding Germans newspaper headlines about lazy Greeks,” that has an impact on public opinion, noted Ulrike Guérot of the European School of Governance in Berlin. “We need to deconstruct these arguments,” she said. “We are the biggest benefiter of the whole European project.”

By losing sight of that fact, she said, Germany risks its historical role as the country that was willing to do and pay a bit more to move the project forward – a kind of benign hegemon. These days, “we are doing hegemony without the benign-ness.” [my emphasis]

Merkel's cruel real face is being highlighted by the #merkelstreichelt Twitter hashtag.

As The Independent reports (Lizzie Dearden, Angela Merkel makes Palestinian girl facing deportation from Germany cry on television 07/16/2015):

Angela Merkel has been heavily criticised after appearing to make a Palestinian refugee cry by telling her she could not stop her family's possible deportation.

The girl was among a group of school pupils gathered in the city of Rostock on Wednesday for an appearance by the German Chancellor. ...

“As long as I don't know how long I can stay here, I don’t know what my future will be,” Reem said, in fluent German.

“I really want to study in Germany - it is unfair to watch while other people can enjoy life and you can’t enjoy it with them.”

Having expected a routine question-and-answer session for the government’s Gut Leben in Deutschland (Living Well in Germany) programme, Ms Merkel appeared momentarily thrown by the change of direction.

“I understand that, however I have to… sometimes politics is hard,” Ms Merkel said.

“You’re a very nice person but you know that there are thousands and thousands of people in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and if say 'you can all come,' and 'you can all come from Africa,' and 'you can all come,' we just can't manage that."

If Bill Clinton's trademark style was "I feel your pain," Angie's is more like, "I spit on your pain!"

Here's a video with English subtitles, Angela Merkel makes Palestinian girl facing deportation from Germany cry on television:

I'm surprised she didn't tell the little girl, "And I suppose you also expect me to spare your little dog, Toto, eh, my pretty? Bwaahahaha!"

Angie has lost her her cuddly "Mutti" image, it seems. Too bad, kid, we're gonna deport you. But "sometimes politics is hard." So stop your whining or I'll give you something to really cry about! Ask the Greeks what happens to people who mess with me, you little crybaby!

It's become obvious that Thucydides is one of Angie's favorite political theorists: “the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.” That includes you, whiny little girl!

Tsipras too:

Amanda Taub comments on this revealing performance by Merkel in Angela Merkel should be ashamed of her response to this sobbing Palestinian girl Vox 07/16/2015:

If it feels unjust to see one of the most powerful people in the world tell a crying child that her future dreams have to be destroyed because "politics is hard sometimes," that's because it is unjust. Germany's attitude toward refugees is wrong, and it's hurting innocent people. And Merkel knows that — she's just not used to being confronted with evidence of it on live TV.

In her response, Merkel was trying to imply that if Germany treats this girl and her family leniently, it will somehow be obligated to accept the entire world’s refugees. But that’s disingenuous. There is no mechanism by which that would happen. There is no rule that says that if Germany grants asylum to a family in Rostock then it has to accept every Palestinian in a Lebanese camp, or everyone from "Africa." There is no slippery slope here because there isn’t a slope at all. Right now, Germany has a legal obligation to protect refugees who are inside its borders, and no legal obligation to protect those who are outside them. Granting this girl and her family refugee status, visas, or even just temporary relief from deportation wouldn’t change that in the slightest.

What Merkel really means is that there are currently millions of people in the world who could have valid asylum claims, and she's worried they'll all come to Germany if it seems even slightly welcoming. So Germany deports people like this young Palestinian and her family to set an example that's just cruel enough to serve as a deterrent.

The "Merkel Effect" - as imagined by one of her journalistic admirers

Dirk Kurbjuweit has a piece on how, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the event that in the US came to symbolize the end of the Cold War, the heritage of East Germany affects present-day German politics, The Merkel Effect: What Today's Germany Owes to Its Once-Communist East Spiegel International 10/02/2014.

Kurbjuweit is a safely conventional reporter. So one should never expect anything particularly innovative or cutting-edge from him. So it's not surprising that he dismisses with a sneer the reservations of Günter Grass in 1990 about unification.

And he offers deep historical-sociological observations that would make Little Tommy Friedman happy, such as, "A revolution has two goals: to put an end to everything that preceded it and to create something new."

Yes, the same thing could be said for breaking up with a romantic partner. Or renovating a bathroom.

Kurbjuweit is an admirer of Chancellor Angela Merkel's de-politicizing style of leadership. Here he compares it - admiringly - to the style of the East German regime:

A dictatorship fears open discourse and conflict, and it thrives on the fiction of unity. The ruler or the ruling party claims that it is executing the will of the people, and because that will is supposed to be uniform, everyone is under forced consensus. Silence in the country is treated as approval. Merkel grew up in this system.

Elements of it are reflected in her political style. She despises open dispute, she does not initiate discourse and she feels comfortable when silence prevails. She prefers to govern within a grand coalition, because it enables her to create broad consensus within small groups. Things have become quieter in Germany.

Many people in the country like that. Eastern Germans are used to it. Even in the past, the Anglo-Saxon model, with its dualisms and heated conflicts, was suspect to most West Germans. Even the French argue more heatedly than the Germans. Merkel has enabled Germans to find themselves.

Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) have been forged into a new kind of SED, a more social-democratic one, one which generously funds the social consensus, providing money for families and retirees, as well as a minimum wage. The only party that managed to show some sympathy for Anglo-Saxon capitalism, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), has all but disappeared.

While Merkel brings the East German element of silence instead of discourse into federal German politics, President Joachim Gauck, also an East German, provides an audible dissidence. As a pastor in the northeastern city of Rostock, Gauck was no resistance fighter, yet he was a civil rights activist. He injects his energetic approach to freedom into German politics, along with the message that freedom must be fought for or defended, with armed force, if necessary. [my emphasis]

All this romantic-nationalistic jive talk about "the Anglo-Saxon model" and how Angie the Great "has enabled Germans to find themselves" could be generously described as reactionary hot air.

Merkel and her Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economic policies for the eurozone are an extreme form of the Washington Consensus/IMF neoliberal faith. Currently, the 2009 stimulus in the United States was enough of a boost to the economy to make the US a somewhat more healthy departure from the true neoliberal way than Germany and the eurozone. Britain and Australia and even Canada, are even closer to the Washington Consensus of "Anglo-Saxon capitalism" than the US itself.

In other words, "Anglo-Saxon capitalism" of the Herbert Hoover/neoliberal variety is exactly what Germany under Angela Merkel is practicing. Kurbjuweit is spinning his admiring Angie-bot propaganda out of thin air.

But despite himself, Kurbjuweit actually gets part of this right. Merkel's style of governance does seem like it's derived from the authoritarian, pseudo-consensus model of the DDR (East Germany). The comparison of her Grand Coalition to the SED, the "Socialist Unity Party" that was the formal shell for the ruling East German Communist Party, is useful as a proverbial "30,000 foot" view. She's neutralized the SPD as an opposition party, and the SPD has effectively surrendered any prospect as part of the Grand Coalition to affecting any substantive change in Merkel's Hoover/Brüning economic policies that are wrecking the eurozone economy, with a little additional help from the sanctions against Russia that Merkel and Gauck have pushed as part of their ambition to make Germany a more active geopolitical player.

But beyond that general symbolism, it's not a very helpful analogy. Merkel is head of the conservative CDU, not a communist party, and she's made a more hardline, dogmatic free-market ideology dominant in the CDU than it historically was. The effective political end of the (classically) liberal FDP largely came because the CDU so thoroughly adopted Merkel's preferred "ordoliberal" free-market economic policies that there's little market left for a tiny party devoted to a very similar ideology. And the current state of the SPD is primarily due to a 15-year process initiated by then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of the SPD backing away hard from its social-democratic tradition and embracing neoliberal economics. The SPD has since even backed away from the foreign-policy caution that led Schröder to opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

So when Kurbjuweit writes, "Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) have been forged into a new kind of SED, a more social-democratic one, one which generously funds the social consensus, providing money for families and retirees, as well as a minimum wage," it's pretty much silly. Or beat-sweetening hype. Or just Angie-bot propaganda.

I've written before about Kurbjuweit's analyses of Merkel's political style: Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel and the neoliberal depoliticization of politics: "asymmetrical demobilization" in the German case 06/05/2013 and German siesta? Or neoliberal demobilization? 08/05/2014.

The authoritarian, depoliticizing aspect of Merkel's style is the "East German" part of the present-day Federal Republic that Kurbjuweit admires.

But there's part of the "East German" heritage on which Kurbjuweit heaps more scorn:

He has encountered the most resistance from a party whose roots are also in the GDR, the Left Party. For the most part, it emerged from the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor party to the SED, and later joined forces with left-wing defectors from the SPD. The Left Party is so strong that a leftist majority could not be assembled without it. But so far the SPD has refused to entertain the idea of a coalition government with the Left Party at the national level. As a result, an eastern German party is responsible for the fact that an eastern German chancellor has managed to stay in power so long, at the head of a government with an eastern German imprint. It would, in short, be difficult to claim that Germany has retained the character of the old federal republic after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This diagnosis depends heavily on Merkel and could therefore be ephemeral. But the nation itself has also changed. It has discovered a new center.

Chuck Todd and David Brooks would be proud of such "centrism." Because it's as empty as the kind they promote. The "defectors from the SPD" is a nice polemical touch. )Regardless of what one thinks of the Left Party, the "new center" Kurbjuweit praises here is about Merkel's Hoover/Brüning economics. A "center" otherwise known as hardline rightwing politics.

Kurbjuweit calls the Left Party "the quintessentially German party," which in his strange analysis means something bad to him here. Then he proceeds in the next sentence to say, "Still, it cannot achieve majorities nationwide because it defends its position with a radical, un-German approach." Un-German meaning something bad here. It's kind of hard to keep up.

And he continues:

Nevertheless, Sahra Wagenknecht, a member of the German parliament and a Left Party leader, has managed to become a media star with her radical critique of capitalism. During the financial crisis, she gained the support of people who would otherwise have had little to do with the Left Party. Wagenknecht also represents a strong eastern element in German politics.

Of course, many East Germans had initial difficulties in dealing with the free market economy. And perhaps the food in their restaurants still isn't very good, at least judging by the complaints of West Berliners returning from weekend outings to the surrounding state of Brandenburg. But that will disappear over time. Fundamentally, eastern and western Germans are not that different.

Yes, he bases this sociological analysis on the problems East Germans have with "the free market economy" on bitching and moaning that he's heard from Berlin tourists who were disappointed in the food they had on vacation in the surrounding state of Brandenburg.

Kurbjuweit should really set up a meet with David Brooks at Appleby's to discuss Bratwurst sociology after a visit to the salad bar.

Merkel's nationalism in the eurozone crisis is almost certainly based on part on her experience growing up in the Warsaw Pact seeing Russia's domination of that alliance, and on her experience during the transition to unified Germany, seeing how the East German delegation because instantly irrelevant in the 4-plus-1 peace talks (she was part of the delegation as a secretary) after the basic unification deal was made. Only the West German government they were joining mattered then.

Kurbjuweit provides this garbled version of that observation:

Merkel learned policy in a united and therefore complete Germany, a large country that has become more self-confident. She pays closer attention to what is in Germany's interest, and in her view this doesn't always include solidarity with other nations, especially in financial matters.

Germany dominates Europe because it is so strong economically. It is also highly self-reliant in other ways. It is no longer an obedient part of the West. When NATO launched air strikes in Libya, Merkel isolated her country from all the leading Western powers, including the United States, Great Britain and France. When Vladimir Putin took over the Kremlin, he discovered many sympathizers in Germany. [my emphasis]

Yeah, "this doesn't always include solidarity with other nations, especially in financial matters." Cute.

Of course, ole Dirk eludes an important part of Germany's economic position: that its export-heavy economy - at least the One Percent that takes most of the profits - benefits enormously from having the euro as a country, because its considerably cheaper than a separate German national currency would be. It could benefit from the euro with a stimulative, inflationary policy that would be simple, responsible macroeconomics that would save the eurozone and not drive millions of people into unnecessary unemployment and poverty.

But that's not the route that Angela Merkel, the object of ole Dirk's admiration, insists on taking.

Germany: a Grand Coalition would be a very problematic project

Former German Foreign Minister and former Green Party leader Joschka Fischer is someone I quote often here. He often has sensible, realistic observations on foreign policy and Germany's European policy.

Joschka Fischer, high-powered business consultant and former German Green Party leader

In Merkel in the Land of Smiles Project Syndicate 09/24/2013, he has more good observations. But he also shows how far he's adopted a neoliberal view of policy and politics.

Good part first:

Nothing fades as quickly as the glow of an election victory, and the German idyll will soon be disturbed by harsh reality – the European Union’s simmering crisis, Syria, Iran, and energy policy.

The need for consensus is especially acute with respect to the difficult decisions concerning Europe that the German government now faces. Greece needs more debt relief. A European banking union with joint liability cannot be put off much longer. The same is true of many other issues. A winter of discontent awaits Merkel, followed by a European election campaign that is likely to bring the CDU back down to earth.

But no one should expect a significant change in Merkel's EU policy or her approach to foreign affairs and security questions. Her positions on these issues have now been endorsed by a huge portion of the German electorate; and, from a certain age, most people – including those in high office – do not change easily.[my emphasis]

He also notes that "in these matters, there is no longer much difference between the center-right CDU and the center-left SPD."

The latter is not good news, for the reasons Fischer indicates. Merkel's policy has prolonged the euro crisis and made it chronic, squeezing out the advantages for Germany's export-oriented economy that benefits heavily from the common currency, which is considerably cheaper than a German currency would be. And the SPD hasn't yet elaborated and defended any meaningful alternative to Merkel's approach.

He also calls attention to Germany's energy industry:

It will also be interesting to see if and how Merkel tackles Germany’s muddled Energiewende (energy turnaround) – the move to a low-carbon economy that is the most important domestic project of her tenure. Either she will succeed with it, or it will become a monumental disgrace for Germany and a disaster for the German economy. The decisive questions now are whether she musters the courage to concentrate all the necessary responsibilities for this mega-project in the energy ministry, and whom she entrusts with overseeing this Herculean task.

After leaving government, Fischer has a business consulting firm, which included offering services to energy companies. One of his consulting gigs involved facilitating a pipeline project. He now consults as part of Fischer & Co. The company's website lists him as a member of the board of directors of the International Crisis Group and the European Council on Foreign Relations. The German site Lobbypedia has an entry dealing with Fischer's consulting business, which has also included BMW.

His corporate clients will presumably be cheered by most of this part of his column:

The liberals have always formed a key part of German postwar democracy; now they are gone. Responsibility for that lies, first and foremost, with the FDP. No governing party can afford such woefully incompetent ministers and leadership; Merkel had merely to stand back and watch the liberals' public suicide over the last four years.

The opposition parties, too, paid the price for their failure to come to grips with reality. The economy is humming, unemployment is low, and most Germans are better off than ever before. But, rather than focusing on the government's weaknesses – energy, Europe, education, and family policy – they bet their political fortunes on social justice. Merkel's Panglossian campaign was much more in tune with the sentiment of the German electorate than the opposing parties' tristesse about working-class distress, which was rightly seen as a ploy for raising taxes.

Governing majorities (and therefore elections) in Germany are always won in the center. Merkel’s predecessor, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Gerhard Schröder, knew this well. But this time her opponents – the SPD, Die Linke (The Left), and the Greens – cleared the center and cannibalized each other on the left. The leadership issue made matters worse – the SPD's Peer Steinbrück and the Greens' Jürgen Trittin never had the slightest chance against Merkel and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. [my emphasis in bold]

"Governing majorities ... are always won in the center." I do hate to see Joschka Fischer sounding like David "Bobo" Brooks, even if Fischer when he's really wrong is better than Bobo when he's right.

Fischer's picture of the German economy is overly rosy. I should note that he was the Green Party leader in the red-green coalition that enacted the neoliberal Agenda 2010 program, which has resulted in lower wages and a reduction in job security for many German workers. Since he bears major responsibility for Agenda 2010, it's perhaps understandable that he wouldn't want to focus on its very real faults.

But his talk about the SPD and the Greens made a shift to the left is a spin worthy of an American Pod Pundit, I'm sorry to say. Albrecht Müller writes in Für Anhänger der SPD und der Grünen folgen ein paar Hinweise auf seltsame Vorgänge, vor allem auf die fortwährenden Versuche der Fremdbestimmung NachDenkSeiten 24.09.2013

Bei den Grünen spielt sich eine Manipulation und am Ende auch Tragödie ab, die wir aus der Geschichte der SPD wie auch in Teilen der Grünen schon seit einiger Zeit kennen. Um die Ordinate in beiden Parteien immer weiter nach rechts rücken zu können, wird ein Linksruck behauptet.

With the Greens a manipulation, and in the end also a tragedy, is being played out, which we have known for a long time from the history of the SPD and also in parts of the Green Party. In order to be able shift the ordinate {coordinates} in both parties always more to the right, a shift to the left is claimed. [emphasis in original]

In other words, people who want to shift the political center of gravity to the right for both the SPD and the Greens will criticize them for having made a shift to the left. Which Fischer is doing in that quoted passage.

In fact, Green Party leader Jürgen Tritten, like Merkel a pragmatic/opportunist politician from the former East Germany, was identified with the more conservative side of the Party. And the Greens like the SPD had supporter Merkel's awful eurozone policies, which Fischer says even in that piece are temporary, inadequate fixes.

Fischer's criticisms would seemingly eliminate the prospect for the left parties (Greens, SPD, Left) to build a strong and constructive criticism of Merkel's European policies, as well as a broader profile for a red-red-green coalition of the three left parties. Fischer goes Bobo in his approving acceptance of a CDU/SPD Grand Coalition government: "So Germany will be left with a grand coalition – just as the German electorate wanted." Let's see. Forty-two percent of the voters last Sunday picked Merkel's party, giving them something just short of a majority in the Bundestag. The three left parties, on the other hand, together have a majority in the Bundestag, and their popular vote was roughly the same as Angie's CDU. Her coalition partner, the FDP lost votes to the point that it's no longer has Bundestag seats and is in serious danger of going out of business as a party.

So just how is that a voter endorsement of a Grand Coalition that would continue to follow the European policies that Fischer criticizes? There is considerable protest from state and local SPD parties against a Grand Coalition, the sentiment being what's depicted here:

So a lot of the SPD doesn't have the sense that supporting Merkel was what their voters elected them to do.

As Von Sebastian Kempkens und Anna-Lena Roth point out in Neuer Bundestag: Die Gefahren einer Zwergen-Opposition Spiegel Online 25.09.2013, a Grand Coalition would be facing a relatively small opposition consisting of the Greens (less left than the SPD) and the Left Party (more left than the SPD). At a time when Germany and the EU really need a serious opposition criticism and resistance to Merkel's disastrous austerity policies, that would not be a good thing. And with less than a fourth of the votes - the Grand Coalition would have 503 to the opposition's 127, with 210 votes being the one-quarter level - they would not be able to use some opposition tools, like the ability to conduct special investigations of governmental operations or to call special sessions of the Bundestag.

It will be a major missed opportunity for all three of the left parties if they don't either insist on forming a red-red-green government or staying in the opposition. All the hype about Merkel's election victory is obscuring the fact that the opposing parties have very strong cards to play. And also that going into a coalition with Merkel's CDU is a virtually guaranteed way to lose votes int he next election.

Finally, Fischer is making even a fairly superficial criticism of the FDP's failure to get into the Bundestag. Wolfgang Münchau takes a broader strategic look at their current position in Neuer Liberalismus: Drei Fragen für die FDP Spiegel Online 25.09.2013. The depression has shown how bankrupt their free-market, deregulation-oriented economic policies are. Even Merkel's "ordoliberalism" sees a stronger regulatory and protective role for the state than the FDP's approach does. Although in Merkel's case that has meant putting the euro and even the EU at high risk for the sake of providing protection to German banks, at the cost of huge suffering in Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, german politics

Merkel tries to form a government

Michael König reports that German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Bavarian Minister-President (Governor) Horst Seehofer have a good cop/bad cop routine going in the negotiations with the SPD to make them a junior partner in a Merkel-headed Grand Coalition that would continue to wreck the eurozone and the European project just as Angie wants. (Gute Merkel, böser Seehofer 24.09.2013)

Seehofer's Christian Social Unio (CSU) just won a majority in Bavarian state elections. The CSU operates in practice as the Bavarian branch of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), although they are technically a separate party. Bavaria is a stronghold of the CDU/CSU.

Seehofer may be the "bad cop" in the current negotiations with the SPD. But the former CSU leader Edmund Stoiber reminds us that Angie is a real Frau Fritz. (Robert Treichler, Edmund Stoiber: „Merkel ist knallhart” Profil 22.9.2013) He says of her, "Sie hat unbestritten einen Machtwillen, aber sie ist durchgehend persönlich und freundlich, gleichzeitig aber auch knallhart in der Sache" ("She underdoubtedly has a desire for power, but she is thoroughly personable and friendly, but also at the same time ruthless when it comes down to it.").

The "bad cop" pitch to the SPD sounds like a real sucker's pitch to me. You SPDers have to be responsible, it goes. You have to act like the adults in the room, to borrow an American metaphor. We'll toss you some minister posts and give you a couple of things you want, like a minimum wage law. But you have to play along on everything Frau Fritz wants to do to Europe and her deregulation policies and the neoliberal Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA, formerly known as TTIP). If it makes you lose even more votes and kicks your own voters in the face, well, you have to be the grownups in the room. Besides, as the Very Serious People say, "In politics, to put something through against your own people is taken as evidence of strong leadership."

Social Democrats opposed to a Grand Coalition have created a Facebook page, Sozialdemokrat_innen gegen die Große Koalition. They are providing a stream of links to articles on the sentiment against such an arrangement coming from state and locals SPDs like those in Leverkusen, Mainz, Munich, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate and Thuringia.

Fabian Reinbold in Fahrplan für eine neue Regierung: Der lange Weg ins Kanzleramt Spiegel Online provides a guide to the formal rules for building a new government. To broadly summarize, if Merkel can't build a coalition government in 2-3 months (it took her 65 days after the 2005 election), the Bundestag could vote on whether to accept her as Chancellor, and if she gets a majority she can form a new government. If the Bundestag fails to get a majority after four rounds of voting, the Federal President (head of state) Joachim Gauck can request Merkel to form a minority government. If that doesn't happen, new elections would have to be held.

More on Merkel's record:

Anna Giulia Fink und Robert Treichler, Angela Merkel: Eine Frage der Ära Profil 23.9.2013

David Crossland and Friederike Heine, World From Berlin: Triumph Confirms 'Era of Merkelism' Spiegel International 09/23/2013

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, german politics

Coalition politics in Germany

Jörg Diehl and Veit Medick have a good article in Spiegel Online on the SPD's consideration of building a Grand Coalition government as the junior partner to Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU/CSU, Poker um Schwarz-Rot: Gabriels Kraft-Probe 24.09.2013.

They cast it in terms of two SPD leaders and what it might mean for their personal prospects in the SPD leadership. Such considerations are always at work in politics. Party Secretary Sigmar Gabriel is seen as more favorable to a Grand Coalition, North Rhein-Westphalia (NRW) Minister-President Hannelore Kraft as opposing. Kraft is also the leader of the majority SPD/Green (red-green) alliance in the upper house of the Parliament, the Bundesrat. In the German system, the upper house is composed of representatives of the states (Länder), not by directly elected members.

Diehl and Medick don't cite opinion polls on the subject. But they make it clear that there is considerable sentiment in the SPD voting base against a Grand Coalition. They report that there's considerable sentiment in the SPD in the states of Rheinland-Pfalz und Baden-Württemberg for a referendum among the Party members over any proposed Grand Coalition arrangement.

Diehl and Medick seem to have a touch of what we know in America as the Very Serious People syndrome. They write, "Etwas gegen die eigenen Leute durchzusetzen, gilt in der Politik als Ausweis von Führungsstärke. Gabriel braucht einen solchen Moment." ("In politics, to put something through against your own people [base voters] is taken as evidence of strong leadership. Gabriel needs such a moment.")

Let me understand this. Pissing off your own base supporters is a sign of "strong leadership." Even if you're doing it because you're a corporate ho' who wants to help Angela Merkel keep the EU being a neoliberal deathtrap for the very kind of social and regulatory policies your own people need and for which your own voters vote for you. Even if the last time the SPD was a Merkel coalition partner (2005-9), your party lost votes big-time in the next election. To the point that today, the SPD can no longenr compete head-to-head against the CDU. Even if Merkel's outgoing current coalition partner, the FDP lost enough of their votes that in Sunday's election, they didn't even make it into the Bundestag and are in serious danger of dying out as a party. Even if Merkel's high-risk policies have the eurozone in a chronic crisis and the EU may not survive her nationalistic European policies and the SPD would be signing up to share the blame for the ugly effects on Germany of that policy unraveling.

But, hey, "In politics, to put something through against your own people is taken as evidence of strong leadership"! Awesome. If the German press keeps descending toward American levels, Germany has even bigger problems than Angela Merkel.

Still, they manage to point out after they get through the favorite reporters' gossip that the Left Party, now the third largest party in the Bundestag, stands to gain big-time if the SPD goes into another Grand Coalition with Merkel. If she serves the full four years of this term and does so in a Grand Coalition with the SPD, that would mean of 12 years of the Merkel Era, eight of them would have been made possible by the SPD serving as a junior partner in her Grand Coalition. It doesn't sound like the way to create a competitive political profile for the SPD. Another Grand Coalition would give the Green a prime chance to take SPD votes from the center-left and the Left Party to take them from the left.

Still, "In politics, to put something through against your own people is taken as evidence of strong leadership." Except for, you know, among the people who actually vote for you. Because not many of them are saying, "Oh, my party never does what I vote for them to do, but they show such strong ... leadership! Ohhh-hhhh!!"

A Grand Coalition is a definite possibility. And at this stage, all the major players have to be attentive to negotiating strategy.

Of course, Gabriel's negotiating position would be stronger if her were giving credible indications he would be willing to consider an SPD/Green/Left Party alliance.

Thorsten Denkler in Fünf Gründe für eine große Koalition Süddeutsche Zeitung 23.09.2013 makes a very conventional pitch for why it would be a sensible, responsible thing for the SPD to make a Grand Coalition under Merkel. None of them have anything to do with Europe or the euro crisis or Merkel's austerity policies. He doesn't consider that with the SPD down 16 points in Sunday's election against the CDU what that would do the SPD's electoral profile. Except that it would presumably make them look like responsible grown-ups to the kind of people who say, "In politics, to put something through against your own people is taken as evidence of strong leadership."

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, german politics

The "Merkel feeling" - can it make a political marriage?

German Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel is being understandably hailed for her clear victory in Sunday's national elections in Germany.

Building a governing coalition out of her victory, though, is still going to be a challenge, as Germany and Austrian cartoonists have been noting. Thomas Wizany of the Salzburger Nachrichten 09/23/2013:

Merkel to potential coalition partners: "Well, boys, who's got the nerve?"

Klaus Stuttmann 09/23/2013:

Merkel to potential coalition partners:  "Does anyone there want to help me carry it?"

The Merkel Feeling that Stefan Reinecke writes about in Das Merkel-Gefühl taz 22.09.2013 is a variation of the much-used imagery of German Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel as "Mutti," the kindly, Warren G. Harding-esque figure who makes conservatives and people who just want to live in peace and quiet and not think much about politics feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Das Erfolgsrezept der Kanzlerin ist relativ einfach. Alles bleibt im Ungefähren. Die Politik, die sie präsentiert, hat keine hoch gesteckten Ziele. Und fühlt sich nett, hübsch und samten an. Und wenn wir uns alle anstrengen, geht es immer so weiter. Immer weiter bergauf. So in etwa funktioniert das Merkel-Gefühl.

[The Chancellor's recipe for success is relatively simple. Everything stays a more-or-less. The politics that she presents has no grand goals tucked away. And it feels nice, pretty and velvety. And when we all exert ourselves, it will go on the same way. Always onward and upward. Something like that is how the Merkel Feeling functions.]

All of which is a fluffy way of saying that Germany has done well during the depression relative to the southern eurozone countries because Frau Fritz has made sure that Germany gets short-term benefits that are directly derived from the economic distress in Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. It's an unsustainable political and economic model that will cost Germany dearly in terms of its internal economic well-being and its external influence. And I stress relative benefits, because Merkel has made use of the monumentally ill-conceived Agenda 2010 program of the red-green coalition that preceded her to substantial reduce the incomes and job security of many Germans.

But the taz description of the changes in the Union (her CDU/CSU party) under Frau Fritz' leadership is considerably more plausible than the lavish praise she's getting from some of her fans in the press. Taz:

Die Basis für den Erfolg der Union ist die Verwandlung von einer weltanschaulich verankerten Traditionspartei in eine Organisation, die an nahezu alles anschlussfähig ist. Merkel hat die kulturelle Modernisierung der Union übrigens nicht erfunden, noch nicht mal besonders gefördert. Sie hat nur die Tür offen gehalten für das, was früher oder später sowieso fällig war.

[The basis for the Union's success is the metamorphosis of a tranditonal party anchored in a world-outlook {Christian Democratic conservatism} into an organization that is ready to adopt nearly anything. Merkel did not invent the cultural modernization of the Union, and didn't even particularly encourage it. She just held the door open for that which sooner or later would have happened anyway.]

Again, this has to be qualified with the reality of Merkel's dogmatic adherence to the hard-line austerity program of "ordoliberalism," which is also very much a part of the tradition of the German Christian Democrats.

The taz editiorial also states straightforwardly one of the political realities resulting from Sunday's election:

Und die politische Linke? Rot-Grün ist endgültig tot. Das einst „Neue Mitte“ getaufte Bündnis von Bildungsaufsteigern und Facharbeitern mit dem exalternativen Neobürgertum ist im Bund nicht mehrheitsfähig. Das war auch 2005 und 2009 so. Nichts spricht dafür, dass sich dies ändern wird. Rot-Grün wird es in Zukunft, wenn überhaupt, nur mit der Linkspartei geben.

And the political left? Red-green is finally dead. {What is meant here is the credibility of an SPD/Green coalition as a competitive alternative to a conservative one.} The once-christened "new middle" alliance of career climbers and technical workers with the formerly "alternative" neo-citizens is no long able to build a majority at the national level. That was also so in 2005 and 2009. Nothing indicates that that will change. Red-green in the future will only be possible, if at all, with the Left Party.]

Which brings us to the question of why the kindly "Mutti" figure may face such a problems building a coalition.

Well, it's lonely at the top. Despite the fawning of her admirers in the press, other politicians regard her more as a shark. The SPD was in a coalition with her for four years and lost lots of votes, recovering some after being in the opposition for four years. The FDP was in her coalition the last four years, and didn't even make it into the Bundestag this time, putting their future existence in doubt. Roland Nelles says she has a reputation as coalition-partner killer (Roland Nelles, Merkels Machtoptionen: Stell dir vor, es war Wahl, und niemand will mitregieren Spiegel Online 23.09.2013) She's earned it. Nelles makes the point rhyme in German, "Wer mitregiert, verliert." ("Whoever governs with her, loses.")

When it comes to fawning on politicians, though, American columnists make a specialty of it. Roger Cohen floats off into the ether in praise of Frau Fritz in Merkel the Great New York Times 09/23/2013:

Yet she is the face in the crowd rather than the face that stands out. Rumpled, awkward, with her de rigueur blazer and slacks (the former often just a touch too tight), Merkel can seem a study in orchestrated ordinariness, a brilliant creation of election strategists attuned to the post-traumatic German psyche. Perhaps it costs a lot of money to look this plain. But over time it becomes clear that she just is who she is, unchanged by power; a woman, like Margaret Thatcher, who is "not for turning."

Merkel is a phenomenon. She has captured something in the zeitgeist. In this look-at-me age of image traffickers and spin merchants, she is the sobering antidote. She works hard and is humble. "Power to the Imagination," went the slogan of the 1968 revolutionaries in Europe. The chancellor is the diametric opposite of that. She is a study in predictability. In the words of Rainer Stinner of the ousted Free Democratic Party, she is "the ultimate incrementalist." For a post-ideological age, that works.

That is just sad. If he has a clue about what Merkel's euro policies mean for the rest of Europe and what a high risk they are for Germany, it sure doesn't come across in this column. He even claims he had "a tour as a correspondent" in Germany. Did he spend the whole time hanging out in bars with Americans tourists sounding off about things they didn't know anything about? No, that's really unfair to drunk American tourists.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, german politics

Merkel's high point (let's hope!) (Updated)

Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel may be a terrible leader for Europe. But she's a great politician inside Germany. At least until her euro crisis policies unravel and German voters themselves have to face the realities of her dogmatic, brutal and stone-conservative economic policies.

Her current coalition partner party, the Free Democrats, failed to achieve the 5% vote hurdle needed to get seats in the Bundestag for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic. The SPD gained back some of the votes it lost in 2009 after its stint as Grand Coalition junior partner with Merkel and her CDU in her first government. The drop in vote percentage for both the Greens and the Left Party would indicate that some voters unhappy with the SPD's performance in that coalition moved by to the SPD.

In other words, despite their lackluster campaign and pathetic Chancellor candidate this time around, the SPD managed to regain some of the ground it lost as the compliant junior partner to Angela Merkel previously.

Only parties that get 5% (or three direct mandates) get Bundestag seats. The seats are apportioned among the parties with representation according to their vote percentage. The vote of the parties in the new Bundestag based on Sunday's election will be, according to the breakdown on the front webpage of Die Zeit at this writing break down this way:

CDU/CSU: 41.7%;296 seats
SPD: 25.6%;182 seats
Left Party: 8.5%;60 seats
Greens: 8.4%;60 seats

Those totals account for all 598 Bundestag seats. The parties that passed the hurdle received 84% of the vote.

Update:In the German system, depending on the final votes, the total number of seats can vary. As the Deutscher Budestag English-language website states of the outgoing Bundestag, "The 17th German Bundestag has 620 Members, eleven more than in the last electoral term."

As of around 4:15 Monday morning German time, both Die Zeit and Spiegel Online have the seat count at 630 seats. The revised breakdown for both sources is:

CDU/CSU: 41.5%;311 seats
SPD: 25.7%;192 seats
Left Party: 8.6%;64 seats
Greens: 8.4%;63 seats

The parties that passed the 5% hurdle received 84% of the vote.(End Update)

With that count, Merkel's CDU is three seats short of an absolute majority. She can form a CDU-only government if the other parties, or even one of the other three parties, agrees to it. In terms of right-to-left configuration, a CDU-green coalition would be the most likely majority coalition. But in current conditions, that sounds unlikely. The big question will be whether she will try to form a Grand Coalition with the SPD as junior partner. (A CDU-Left coalition isn't even a consideration.)

An obvious implication of this is that if the SPD wants to increase its own voting percentage - which normal Madisonian political thinking would assume that it wants to - their most obvious road to doing that would be to (l) stay out of a Grand Coalition; (2) establish a distinct oppositional profile to take maximum political advantage of the all-but-inevitable unraveling of Frau Fritz' euro policies; (3) develop the kind of cooperation with the Greens and the Left Party that could lead to a red-red-green government after the next election. And there's a good chance that the next one won't be so long as four years from now when the euro policies unravel.

Lenz Jacobsen discusses that option in Opposition ist doch kein Mist Die Zeit 22.09.2013. He reports that SPD Chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück, in perhaps the best thing he's done in the whole campaign, is recommending that the SPD pursue the opposition course. Jacobsen notes that the SPD's vote was 16% below the CDU/CSU, which means that Angela Merkel is the only mass German Party at the moment. ("Angela Merkel ist jetzt die einzige wahre deutsche Volkspartei...") If the SPD cares about competing as a mass party with the CDU/CSU, they have to distance themselves from Merkel.

That in itself won't be enough if they faithfully agree to everything Frau Fritz wants to do, especially her neoliberal eurozone policies that are not only bad in themselves but will at some point start blowing up politically.

The fact that it would make sense politically and serve the interests of the voting base of the SPD do pursue such a course does not mean that they will, though. Merkel may try to rope them in to a Grand Coalition, which she knows could put the CDU on the road to being an actual majority party and hammer the SPD at the next election.

Jacobsen also points out the combined SPD/Green vote of 34% is so far from the CDU's 42% that a red-green coalition no longer looks so good as a strategic option. This creates a strong incentive to work on the red-red-green option.

Making the eurozone work is not identical to saving the EU, which is also threatened by Britain's strong inclination at the moment to bail out of the whole project, given the increasingly nationalistic inclinations of David Cameron's government.

But the failure of the eurozone would, at best, set back the European project to something like the pre-1992 state. Not only will saving it not be easy. But if there is going to be anything "left" to the left/center-left parties, they have to demand drastic changes to the basic EU organization. As long as it continues in its existing form, its going to be a neoliberal death-trap for progressive social and economic policies. The Fiscal (Suicide) Pact, to take just one example, essentially bans counter-cyclical (Keynesian) economic policies in recessions and depressions. Even requires pro-cyclical ones in a recession, because it requires arbitrary deficit and debt limits, the latter tied to percentage of GDP.

As Andreas Fisahn puts it in "Vier Jahre Merkel, vier Jahre Eurokrise," Blätter für deutsche un internationale Politik 09/2013

Tatsächlich ist die aktuelle Krise keine Euro- oder Schuldenkrise, sondern eine Krise der europäischen Wirtschafts- und Finanzverfassung. Ein emanzipatorischer Ausweg aus der Krise kann daher nur in einer grundsätzlichen Revision der Europäischen Verträge bestehen.

[In reality, the current crisis is not a euro or debt crisis, but rather a crisis of the European economic and financial constitution. An emancipatory way out of the crisis can therefore only occur in a basic revision of the European treaties.]

Frau Fritz has been so consistently nationalistic in her approach to the euro crisis that it's hard to see her pulling such a thing off. More accurately, maintaining the neoliberal structure and restrictions of the current EU has been so central to her policies, she would probably prefer to take down the EU altogether than let it be saved by an "emancipatory way out of the crisis." For her, the European project is a One Percenter affair.

How that is playing out for the people of Spain right now, Paul Krugman explains in part in The Pain In Spain Is Not Hard To Explain (Wonkish) 09/22/2013. The pseudo-economics that austerity advocates have been using to justify their policies assumes that a 25% unemployment rate - one out of every four people in the labor force without a job - is pretty much normal. As his title explains, Krugman gets into the weeds on what that means. It has to do with the EU Commission's official estimates of the output capacity of the Spanish economy being unrealistically low and then using that over-conservative number to minimize the real harm that their austerity policies - largely dictated by Frau Fritz - are doing to people in Spain.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, german politics, spain

German national election tomorrow

German election tomorrow. This endorsement of Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel for another term as Chancellor from The Economist is pretty funny (One woman to rule them all 09/14/2013):

Ever since the euro crisis broke in late 2009 this newspaper has criticised the world’s most powerful woman. We disagreed with Angela Merkel’s needlessly austere medicine: the continent’s recession has been unnecessarily long and brutal as a result. We wanted the chancellor to shrug off her cautious incrementalism and the mantle of her country’s history—and to lead Europe more forcefully. She is largely to blame for the failure to create a full banking union for the euro zone, the first of many institutional changes it still needs. She has refused to lead public opinion, never spelling out to her voters how much Germany is to blame for the euro mess (nor how much its banks have been rescued by its bail-outs).

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

The following is interesting both for what it reports and the propaganda spin it puts on it:

She is far more popular than her main opponent, Peer Steinbrück. He is an engaging politician from the liberal wing of the Social Democratic Party who was an excellent finance minister in Mrs Merkel's 2005-09 grand coalition, and his party has at times suggested braver answers to the euro crisis than Mrs Merkel has. But the Social Democrats have veered sharply left, with a redistributive manifesto of tax rises on the rich, a new wealth tax and a high minimum wage. The party has become anti-reform, to the extent of largely disowning the Agenda 2010 labour-market reforms made by the previous Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.

The SPD is likely to come in second to Merkel's CDU tomorrow. And Steinbrück has said he will step down as Party leader if that happens, which would be almost enough to make me want to vote for Merkel's CDU if I were a German voter. So I hardly feel the energy to bitch any more about what a pathetic candidate and SPD leader he's been.

Yeah, Herr Steinbrück, back atcha:

They call that a "stink finger" (Stinkefinger) in German. That Economist editorial description of Steinbrück above is pretty good, as long as you keep in mind that when they say he's from "the liberal wing" of the SPD, "liberal" there means what in American political vocabulary would be "corporate ho". I hope he retires from politics altogether and goes around "consulting" with lobby groups and giving overpriced speeches to finance and industry groups and stops pretending to be anything but what The Economist editors call "liberal" there. This business about how the SPD has "veered sharply left" is just political fluff. A Party that selects a shameless corporate tool like Steinbrück who faithfully supports Frau Fritz' disastrous eurozone policies has not "veered sharply left."

Also, economic "reform" for The Economist and for the Very Serious People generally these days means basically anti-labor, Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning policies to slam down the income of the 99% to cater to the whims of the One Percent. Schröder's SPD/Green coalition did enact the neoliberal Agenda 2010 program, and Frau Fritz has milked it for all its destructive potential. (Something else Paul Hockenos seems to have overlooked in his Foreign Policy puff piece on Frau Fritz, Angie the Revolutionary 09/18/2013, in which he tries to make her sound like the Second Coming of
Kurt Schumacher.)

The Economist editorial ends this way:

This adds up to a formidable domestic agenda. But in the end Mrs Merkel’s real legacy lies in reshaping the EU. Again her instincts are promising: she wants to build a stronger financial union, to push more liberal policies, to complete the single market, to cut welfare and to trim regulation. She wants to keep Britain in the club, though not at any price. Assuming she wins the chancellorship, she will be Europe's dominant politician. Our bet is that she will want to be remembered as a decider not a ditherer.

Angela Merkel, a Decider not a Ditherer. How does one get to a conclusion like that? Something like this way, with "the right stuff":



Another Economist article, Angela Merkel: A safe pair of hands 09/14/2013, describes what a corporate ho' Steinbrück is and how foolish the SPD and Greens have been to go along with Frau Fritz' euro policies (though they don't phrase it quite that way!):

A good bit of what passes for campaign fisticuffs between these two politicians [Merkel and Steinbrück] is in fact kabuki. They know and respect each other. In Mrs Merkel's first term, from 2005 to 2009, she led a "grand coalition" between the CDU and the SPD ... with Mr Steinbrück as her finance minister. They worked well together. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, the two gave a joint press conference to assure German savers that their bank deposits were safe. That image endures as the moment when the German public calmed down. ...

One of the problems for the SPD and the other large opposition party, the Greens, in running against Mrs Merkel is that, in an admirable display of responsibility, they both voted with her at every step in the euro-rescue. Yes, the Greens, in particular, would have liked to go faster and would have been open to Eurobonds (issued separately by each euro-zone government but guaranteed by all), which Mrs Merkel has ruled out. Bolder action at the beginning might have nipped the crisis in the bud, says Jürgen Trittin, a leading Green; instead Mrs Merkel "always delays, then eventually does what we said". But to most Germans, this just sounds like nitpicking.

That piece notes that Steinbrück failed to get much traction on attacking Frau Fritz' muddling-along approach in the euro crisis, doing just enough to solve the crisis of the moment but making the survival of the euro highly doubtful. Besides being a generally clutzy Chancellor candidate, Steinbrück has been so joined at the hip with Frau Fritz on euro policy that he was just not a credible spokesperson for the SPD to criticize her over the euro crisis.

Wolfgang Münchau earlier argued that just because of his lack of credibility, Steinbrück should use Frau Fritz' dithering over the NSA scandal to attack her just-enough-to-get-by approach. (Aussitzen ist die teuerste Option Spiegel Online 24.07.2013) But Steinbrück and the SPD didn't do much with that either. Münchau's also gave a great description of how the SPD hogtied itself by its general embrace of neoliberal hoodoo economics, its support of Frau Fritz' euro policies and its selection of Steinbrück as Chancellor candidate, thus depriving themselves of what should have been their strongest campaign issues. (Die SPD kämpft die falsche Schlacht Spiegel Online 31.07.2013)

This get-out-the-vote image from the SPD's Facebook page gets at the notion of Frau Fritz' dangerous dithering: "govern whichever way the wind blows". But even it doesn't reference the euro crisis.

Maybe the SPD's vote will surprise everybody tomorrow. Miracles do happen. And a miracle is what it would take to have this be a happy outcome for the SPD.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, german politics

Pre-election English-language press on the German campaign

English-language articles are popping up in anticipation of Sunday's national Bundestag (Lower House of Parliament) elections on Sunday.

Sudha David-Wilp and Jessica Bither write in Merkel's Disorganized Opposition Creates Coalition Uncertainty GMF Blog 09/20/2013 provide both news on the "horse race" and political analysis, such as:

Meanwhile, the SPD – now in its 150th anniversary year – is loath to enter into a grand coalition with the CDU. SPD Chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrueck has said he will have no part of it, and even if the election results point to that possibility it will be hard for his party to contemplate a repeat of the 2005 grand coalition, which culminated in the SPD’s worst post-War electoral showing in 2009. Most German voters are left-of-center, but are fragmented. The SPD has been hemorrhaging supporters, most of them opting not to vote and others joining forces with the LEFT party and the CDU.

If it is to spend another four years in the wilderness, the SPD should start utilizing its talents at the state level and reaching out to the elder statesmen in its party for advice. The Social Democrats have to challenge Merkel for highjacking core aspects of the social democratic platform – such as minimum wage – and show voters why they are better caretakers in a globalizing labor market. After all, former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s reforms over a decade ago helped Germany to weather the current economic crisis. [my emphasis]

They may be projecting too much sensible strategizing onto the SPD leadership. Peer Steinbrück has campaigned in such a lackluster fashion that it's hard not to think having the SPD be the junior partner in yet another Grand Coalition has been his real goal.

Yes, it likely would be bad for the SPD future prospects. David-Wilp and Bither make a good point that their previous participation in a Grand Coalition headed by Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel "culminated in the SPD's worst post-War electoral showing in 2009." And they haven't made very good use of their role as the largest opposition party since, pretty much cheerfully agreeing to Frau Fritz' disastrous austerity policies for the eurozone crisis countries. He's said he'll resign as Party leader if the SPD doesn't come in first on Sunday. But regardless who the top leader is, if the SPD joins in another Merkel government now and doesn't quickly position itself as a critic of her eurozone policies, it could find itself on the way to competing with the Greens and the Left Party for second place in national elections.

They don't talk much about the Left Party and they don't discuss the possibility of a red-red-green (SPD/Left/Green) coalition, which the SPD and Steinbrück have foolished ruled out anyway.

Marc Jones reports on the election for Reuters in Analysis: Market faith in Merkel overrides German coalition uncertainty 09/20/2013:

Merkel's Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party would prefer four more years in coalition with the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP).

However, recent polls show her junior partner only just above the five percent threshold for staying in parliament. Should the FDP stumble, Merkel may be forced back into a "grand coalition" with the Social Democrats (SPD), like her first government of 2005-2009.

But most of the article is about various speculations on how the election results may affect the stock market. Jones notes, "Germans are electing the Bundestag lower house for the first time since the euro zone debt crisis erupted in 2010, and any major protest vote could punch a hole in market confidence that Berlin will do whatever is necessary to keep the euro together." I assume by protest vote, he means a vote for the rightwing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) large enough (5%) to get them seats in the Bundestag.

Paul Hockenos has a piece in Foreign Policy Angie the Revolutionary 09/18/2013 which is so fawning that you may get confused and think you're reading a piece in Politico about an American politician. This cringe-inducing puff piece doesn't get to Frau Fritz' mismanagement of the euro crisis until near the end:

Likewise, Merkel's reaction to the eurocrisis has been anything but proactive -- though enormously successful in the eyes of average Germans. She waited and dithered and waffled as the financial crisis in 2008 turned into the eurocrisis and eventually brought both the common currency and the European Union itself to the brink of collapse. Despite her initial promises to the contrary, Germany made concession after concession to its European partners. The list of flip-flops includes the creation of a permanent bailout fund, a significantly broader mandate for the European Central Bank, and the direct recapitalization of eurozone banks, among others. A third Greek rescue package, which now seems inevitable, would come on top of these back-downs.

Yet at home, Germans see Merkel as tenaciously defending their interests on the European stage. The buzz terms in her campaign ads -- stability, security, continuity -- are cryptic references to the way she has managed the eurocrisis, ensuring prosperity in Germany while bailing out the Southern Europeans and rescuing the European Union. This, at least, is the way many Germans see it. ...

As frustratingly gradual and tempered as Merkel's conservative revolution has been, it has helped make Germany as a whole more modern and, ultimately, more powerful. The German economy's fortunes, called by some a second Wirtschaftswunder, have only augmented this clout.

Yet, this is power that Merkel has yet to wield for any real purpose other than sentencing the Southern Europeans to a future of austerity and mounting debt. In Europe and beyond, statesmen are calling for Merkel to step up to lead Europe out of the economic crisis and become more active on the global stage. Even on topics that don't require force of arms, like global warming, Germany has become almost mute; once a pioneer in clean energy production, Merkel has now backed off, cowed by the implications of its success. Today, Germany's foreign minister travels from one conflict region to another mouthing truisms and promising aid. Merkel has indeed changed Europe -- but in taking Germany off the world stage, cautiousness has not proved to be her greatest virtue. [my emphasis]

Actually, Merkel's policies in the euro crisis have been based on continuing relative German prosperity at the expense of brutal austerity policies and "internal devaluation," i.e., imposing conditions on Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain that it's hard to imagine will be politically supportable in those counties much longer. If - much more likely, when - countries start leaving the eurozone, Germany will face a sharp exchange rate increase that will hammer its export-oriented economy and deliver a major setback to the EU project, if not destroying the EU altogether.

We'll see what the German voters decide on Sunday.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, german politics

German election Sunday, southern Europe's ordeal to continue

The national German elections for the Bundestag (lower house of Parliament) are on Sunday. Most of the polls show that Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel's Christian Democratic (CDU) will win a plurality and that she will form the new government, either a continuation of her current "black-red" coalition (CDU and the Free Democrats, FDP) for a Grand Coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SDP) as a junior partner.

The best part of this scenario is that the neoliberal hack and corporate tool Peer Steinbrück, the SPD's stunningly uninspiring Chancellor candidate, has announced that he will renounce his leadership role in the SPD if he loses. That would leave Party Chairman Sigmar Gabriel to handle the coalition negotiations and presumably to assume the Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister role in a Grand Coalition. (Veit Medick, Mögliches SPD-Bündnis mit Merkel: Gabriels Machtfrage Spiegel Online 17.09.2013)

Wolfgang Münchau in Schafft die Fünfprozenthürde ab! Spiegel Online 18.09.2013 looks at some of the likely combinations of post-election coalition strategies among the CDU, SPD, FDP, Greens, Left Party and AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, a hardcore rightwing anti-euro party). It's fascinating for poli sci geeks because it involves various parties and "second votes". If Chuck Todd had to explain what Münchau is talking about there, his head would very likely explode.

But that's not my main interest here. The two things I'll be watching for most closely on Sunday is how the AfD does - not getting the 5% they need to have Bundestag representation would be the preferable outcome - and how the Greens do. The Greens have recently been dropping in the polls, with the usual accompanying speculation about why. One likely reason is that Frau Fritz stole one of their favorite issues by committing her conservative government to the complete phase-out of nuclear power, an issue the Greens had owned for a long time. She may be happy to carry water for the financial industry and pretty much every other business lobby. But the nuclear-power lobby jacked her around when she was Environmental Minister and Angie hasn't forgotten. Or, alternatively, she decided a complete phase-out was a really good idea after the not-so-black-swam event of the Fukushima disaster. That was her official reason for adopting that policy. And it could be true. Even a committed conservative austerian like Angie isn't into the kind of reality-denial in which American conservatives pride themselves.

The Greens also decided that a parliamentary election year would be a good time to have extensive public discussions to analyze and repent for pedophiles who associated themselves with the Green Party in its early days in the 1980s. We're not talking about Party officials who molested children at day-care facilities. It's that in the early life of the Green Party it was a fairly loosely-structured organization, and some pedophiles tried to use the party as a vehicle to loosen laws designed to protect children from people like them. The Party got it together pretty quickly and excluded such advocates. It's admirable and in keeping with the Green Party principles that they would want to understand and account for failings of the past.

But we're also not talking here about something like the Catholic Church abuse scandals, where the institution itself was knowingly protecting child abusers, rapists and criminals and even giving them new opportunities to prey on children. It's basically an issue of whether the national party was rigorous enough in the way it screened local Green Party candidates three decades ago. Given that the them is both sensational and has a high "ick" factor, it's hard to fathom why they picked a national election year to highlight discussion of the Green Party and pedophilia. If any conventional political advantage has come to them because of it, it would be that it also drew attention to the fact that the FDP also had a history in the 1980s of some of its affiliated members advocating for similar changes in law that pedophiles wanted. (Liberalismus: FDP war gegenüber Pädophilen toleranter als bislang bekannt Spiegel Online 01.09.2013) One FDP Bundestag candidate withdrew her candidacy when the press got wind that as a 19-year-old in 1980 she published an article describing an intimate relationship with a 13-year-old girl in a book of essays titled Pädophilie heute (Pedophilia Today), which advocated for legalizing sex between adults and children. (FDP-Politikerin zieht Kandidatur zurück Die Zeit 10.08.2013)

Like I said, the Ick Factor is strong on this issue.

It's been a sad election season in Germany. Frau Fritz' austerity policies have led to immense economic suffering in Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. They have made actually saving the euro and even the European Union itself far more difficult, the former likely impossible. This is a year in which serious challenges to an incumbent German government's economic policies were seriously, urgently needed. Instead the SPD puts forward a poor candidate who has consistently supported Frau Fritz' damaging, reckless austerity policies for euro crisis countries. Münchau has previously noted that the Greens and the Left Party are the only two parties whose campaign programs address the euro crisis in a meaningful, constructive way. But the Greens have also supported Merkel's disastrous euro policies, if with a bit more grumbling about how they weren't perfect that the SPD has usually managed. And they decided this would be a good year to highlight their repentance for their past in relation to (gulp!) pedophilia, a topic that most voters would likely never have noticed had the Greens not taken the initiative to do so.

Another possible coalition after Sunday would be a red-red-green coalition (SPD, Left Party, Greens) but the SPD and Steinbrück have been ruling out that possibility so far.

Another poli-sci-geek point in Münchau's article is that he is recommending scrapping the current proportional representation system in German elections in favor of relying on individual mandates. Which sounds like he is advocating something like the British system which would create strong pressure for a two-party system. Not a proposal likely to get much traction in Germany in the foreseeable future, I would guess.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, german politics

Merkel: great politician, or lucky tiger-rider?

Wolfgang Lieb in „Mutter Camouflage“ – Wie Merkel mit der Opposition Hase und Igel spielt NachDenkSeiten 01.08.2013 argues that German Chancellor Angela Merkel can outshine her main opposition, the SPD, because the Sozis (SPD) are so feckless in being so eager to avoid posing clear alternative programs. It allows here to play tortoise-and-hare with them.

I'm not sure that's the best metaphor for what he describes. But his description of Merkel's political success is more realistic than those of her defenders that rely on some more-or-less vague cultural mood that she supposedly promotes. Especially because he focuses on the effects of how the SPD has effectively imploded in the current depression by sticking with the neoliberal faith and nominating one of its most loyal proponents, Peer Steinbrück, as their Chancellor candidate for September's elections. Steinbrück is a strong candidate only for the distinction of being possibly the most pitiful campaigner for the Chancellorship in the history of the SPD.

What Lieb describes is Merkel's focus on what is actually conventional politics. When the SPD and the Greens - who are seated to the right of the SPD in the Bundestag, i.e., they are officially considered more conservative than the SPD - propose an issue like a national minimum wage or affirmative action targets for women and the issue starts to catch on among the public, Angie proposes some similar idea along the same lines and presents it as "sogar als noch besser und durchdachter" (even much better and better thought out) than the SPD-Green proposals.

This is normal politics, of course. If it sounds a little exotic in the context of current American domestic politics, it's because the Republican Party is largely dispensing with normal politics in favor of "fundamental opposition" politics in domestic affairs.

At some level, the measure of a "good politician" is her ability to win elections and accomplish her policy goals. And in that sense, Merkel has shown herself to be a good politician. And she's had some success with the press. Lieb notes that she's gotten the press to talk about the conservative policies of her CDU/CSU as the "social-democratization" of the CDU/CSU. Polls are showing her far above Steinbrück in being more committed to social justice.

This is a reflection of the extent to which the Social Democrats have conservative-ized themselves over the last decade or more. Steinbrück himself is identified with the raising of the retirement age from 65 to 67, a policy enacted under the SPD/CDU/CSU Grand Coalition government headed by Merkel in which Steinbrück was Finance Minister. And he faults Steinbrück and the SPD for, in particular, not offering any substantive alternative to Merkel's eurozone policies.

Mark Schieritz (Wollen Sie uns verschaukeln, Peer Steinbrück? Zeit Herdentrieb 07/31/2013) points to a recent proposal by Steinbrück to combat youth unemployment in the eurozone, which when examined just a bit is basically the same of Merkel's. "Das ist das Grundproblem der SPD: Sie bietet in Wahrheit keine Alternative, aber sie gibt vor, eine zu haben." ("That is the SPD's basic problem: in reality they offer no alternative, but they claim to have one.")

Merkel's euro crisis policy is actually dangerous for Germany. I think Merkel probably knows that she's riding the tiger, that if the eurozone disintegrates, Germany's economy will be hammered by a 30% or more rise in prices, by huge expenses to recapitalize the Bundesbank for losses under the euro-based Target 2 clearing mechanism, and by bank losses from sovereign debt defaults. The IMF is warning now that under the current course of Angie-nomics, Greece in 2020 will still be carrying debt equal to 124% of its GDP. Which means that there is effectively no end in sight under Angie's austerity policies for Greece's depression and the increasingly acute suffering it's bringing there.

But that's the problem. Merkel seems dogmatically committed to "ordoliberalism" economic doctrine. And aside from the obligatory cliches, she is not committed to anything like European solidarity. Her perspective is nationalistic. And she has consistently framed the euro problems in nationalistic terms, for the most part with the support of the SPD and Greens in doing so. So there is no immediate constituency for a drastic course change, even if Merkel were capable herself of pulling one off.

Even if the euro crisis takes another acute turn between now and next month's elections, it's doubtful that the SPD could capitalize on it politically. Steinbrück is too unattractive a candidate. And the SPD has really not been offering any kind of alternative framing to Merkel's nationalistic and austerity-obsessed eurozone policies.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, german politics, peer steinbrück, spd