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Germany

SPD party membership approves German grand coalition

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In an overwhelming endorsement of Germany’s new grand coalition, party members of the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party) have approved the governing agreement between the SPD and chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right union.Germany Flag Icon

Nearly 370,000 German party members approved the agreement by the lopsided margin of 75.96% in a vote that was held over the past two weeks, the results of which were announced earlier today.  The vote followed the November 27 agreement struck among SPD leaders and leaders of Merkel’s Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) and Merkel’s Bavarian allies, the  Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU, the Christian Social Union).

So what next?

Expect Merkel to name a new cabinet within the next 24 hours, and expect her formal reelection as chancellor to come early next week.

You can read more background about the coalition deal here and here, but here’s a short list of points to keep in mind: Continue reading SPD party membership approves German grand coalition →

Germany

Merkel’s CDU-CSU, Gabriel’s SPD stumbling toward a not-so-grand coalition in Germany

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gabriel

We’re less than two weeks from December.  That means that the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany’s parliament, has been sitting for about a month, and we’re weeks away from the self-imposed deadline that chancellor Angela Merkel placed on securing a new coalition government.Germany Flag Icon

In case you forgot, Merkel won a handsome victory in the September 22 federal election, when her center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) — together with the Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria) — won 311 seats in the Bundestag, just five seats short of an absolute majority.  It was the biggest victory for Merkel’s Christian Democrats in nearly two decades, harkening back to the wide margins that former CDU chancellor Helmut Kohl won in 1990 and in 1994 in the afterglow of the relatively successful reunification of West and East Germany.

But while the CDU-CSU savored a sweet victory, their coalition partners between 2009 and 2013, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party) failed to win any seats in the Bundestag for the first time since 1945, leaving Merkel with two options — a minority government or a coalition government with more leftist partners.

Though Merkel flirted throughout early October with Die Grünen (the Greens), a tantalizingly novel coalition that would have remade the German political spectrum, the Greens pulled out of talks on October 16.  So for over a month, coalition negotiations have been exclusively among the CDU, the CSU and the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party).  Earlier in November, the coalition talks were going so well that CSU leader and Bavarian minister-president Hoorst Seehofer worried that the harmony would subsume the real policy differences between the German right and the German left.

As Merkel quipped earlier this year, Christmas comes sooner than you think, and Merkel, Seehofer and the SPD’s leader, Sigmar Gabriel (pictured above), are under increasing pressure to agree on a coalition agenda — and given that the CDU-CSU’s 311 seats and the SPD’s 192 seats constitute 79.8% of the entire Bundestag, expectations are high that such a wide-ranging coalition will tackle long-term reform both in Germany and in the European Union.  Moreover, any coalition deal agreed among the three parties must also win subsequent confirmation from a vote of 470,000 SPD members in December.

So what’s holding up the deal?  Continue reading Merkel’s CDU-CSU, Gabriel’s SPD stumbling toward a not-so-grand coalition in Germany →

Comparative Politics, United States

Toward a pink-blue coalition: how House Democrats can rescue Boehner’s speakership

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Last week, I noted that German chancellor Angela Merkel succeeded in achieving the post-partisanship in Germany that US president Barack Obama had hoped to achieve when he ran for president in 2008.USflag

While that’s somewhat of an unfair comparison given the collegiality and consensus that’s developed in Germany’s postwar politics, there’s perhaps a lesson for US politicians to learn from the example of German politics in resolving the current standoff that has shut down the federal government of the United States and threatens to precipitate a sovereign debt crisis later this month over the US debt ceiling.

Even after Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats won a once-in-a-generation landslide victory, she remains five seats of an absolute majority in Germany’s Bundestag (the lower house of the German parliament) and well short of a majority in the Bundesrat (the upper house), so she’s locked in negotiations — likely for the rest of the year — to form a viable governing coalition with either her rival center-left Social Democrats or the slightly more leftist Green Party.

Contrast that to the United States, where a minority of a party that controls one-half of one branch of the American government has now succeeding in effecting a shutdown of the US government.

In the US House of Representatives today, speaker John Boehner (generally) operates on the ‘Hastert rule.’  He’ll only bring bills to the floor of the House that are supported by a ‘majority of the majority’ — a majority of the 232-member Republican caucus.  So even if 115 Republicans and all 200 Democrats in the House support a bill, such as a clean ‘continuing resolution’ to end the current shutdown, they won’t be able to do so if 117 Republicans prefer to condition a continuing resolution upon a one-year delay of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly known as ‘Obamacare.’

It’s not uncommon in parliamentary systems for the ‘loyal opposition’ to sometimes lend their support for an important piece of legislation.  Earlier this year in the United Kingdom, British prime minister David Cameron passed a marriage equality law only with the support of the opposition Labour Party in the House of Commons in light of antipathy within a certain segment of the center-right Conservative Party to same-sex marriage.

In country after country in Europe, including Greece, Ireland and Latvia, traditional rivals on the left and right have sucked up the political costs of austerity and voted to accept difficult reforms, tax increases and tough budget cuts in the face of rising unemployment and depression-level economies in order to avoid the further tumult of being pushed out of the eurozone’s single currency.  If Italy’s left and right could support former prime minister Mario Monti’s technocratic government for 15 months, it’s not outside the realm of democratic tradition to believe that Boehner could form a working coalition in the US House to resolve a crisis that threatens not only American political credibility in the world and the American economy, but the entire global economy.

But as Alex Pareene at Salon wrote earlier today, the United States doesn’t have a parliamentary system, it has a presidential system where an opposition party that controls one house of Congress can cause a crisis if it wants to do so:

An American parliamentary system with proportional representation wouldn’t immediately or inexorably lead to a flourishing social democracy, but it would at least correct the overrepresentation of an ideological minority, and cut down on intentional tactical economic sabotage. The reason we’re in permanent crisis mode isn’t “extremism,” but a system of government that guarantees political brinkmanship.

There’s a bit of ‘grass is always greener’ mentality to that counterfactual.  Parliamentary systems come with their own set of difficulties, and governments in parliamentary systems can wind up just as paralyzed as the current American government seems to be — former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is causing a political crisis this very week in Italy that will culminate in a vote of no confidence on Wednesday against the fragile coalition headed by center-left prime minister Enrico Letta.  Though the government’s been in power for just five months, Italy could face its second set of elections in 12 months if Letta’s government falls.  Belgium famously went without a government for 535 days between 2009 and 2011 because no majority coalition could form a government.  Moreover, minority governments in parliamentary systems often lurch from crisis to crisis, with individual lawmakers willing and able to ‘hold up’ the government’s legislation.

But the United States need not change its entire system of government to take away a few lessons from Merkel and from Germany.

Juliet Eilperin and Zachary A. Goldfarb at The Washington Post suggested earlier Tuesday that Boehner make a push to become the first truly bipartisan speaker:

[T]he press tends to trumpet two unflattering themes: that Boehner can neither manage his own conference nor make a credible deal with the White House. As a result, the narrative runs, Americans are left careening from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis, and Congress can’t even tackle popular initiatives such as immigration reform. A host of other potential changes supported by huge swaths of both parties — from tax and entitlement reform to infrastructure spending — are also left on the table just because of the fallout Boehner faces from a few dozen, ultra-conservative Republicans.

At least that’s the rap against Boehner, whose speakership so far has been defined by blocking Obama’s priorities rather than producing significant laws. But that could all change if he were just to decide to say to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.): “Let’s enter a grand coalition. Democrats will vote for me for speaker as long as Republicans hold a majority. And we’ll do a budget deal that raises a little bit of tax revenue and reforms entitlements. We’ll overhaul the tax code for individuals and businesses. We’ll pass immigration reform and support the infrastructure spending that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and labor unions want.”

Call it a pink-blue coalition — the moderate Republicans and the Democrats.  (Or maybe the donkey-rhino‡ coalition). Continue reading Toward a pink-blue coalition: how House Democrats can rescue Boehner’s speakership →

Germany, Hesse

German election results — federal Bundestag and Hesse state results (in five charts)

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Election officials released provisional results overnight in both the federal Germany election to determine the makeup of the lower house of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, and the Hessian state elections.Germany Flag Iconhesse flag

Here’s where things stand in the total national ‘party vote’:

bundestag2013

As predicted by exit polls earlier Sunday, neither the new eurosceptic party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) nor the longtime liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party) won more than 5% of the vote — meaning that they have not won any seats in the Bundestag.

The final total won by chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) — together with the Bavarian Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union) — comes to 41.5%.  That’s exactly the same percentage that the CDU/CSU and chancellor Helmut Kohl won in the 1994 German elections, and it’s just 2.3% less than Kohl’s total in the 1990 elections, which came in the aftermath of the largely successful reunification of West Germany with East Germany.  It’s an absolutely huge win for Merkel — but we already knew that as polls closed Sunday.

Here’s a look at how Sunday’s election result compared to the previous elections in September 2009:

versus2009

There are no absolutely clear winners except the CDU/CSU, which improved on its 2009 totals by a staggering 7.8% — including a nearly 1% improvement by the CSU (which is pretty incredible, given that the CSU seeks votes solely in Bavaria, home to just 12.5 million of Germany’s 80 million residents).

The FDP obviously had a disastrous result — the party’s worst result in Germany’s postwar history, which comes after its postwar high of 14.6% just four years ago.  Both leading FDP figure and economics and technology minister Rainer Brüderle, party leader and vice chancellor Philipp Rösler and former party leader (until 2011) and foreign minister Guido Westerwelle are all likely to step aside from their top leadership positions.

The center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party) improved slightly on its 2009 result, which was a postwar low for the party under chancellor candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who served as foreign minister in the 2005-09 CDU/SPD ‘grand coalition’ government.  But the SPD’s performance under its 2013 candidate Peer Steinbrück, who served as Merkel’s grand coalition finance minister, was its second-worst result in postwar German history.

Die Grünen (the Greens) also suffered a retreat from its 2009 totals and especially from polls in 2011 that showed them winning between 20% and 25% of the vote.  The poor result follows an unfocused campaign with at least four different leaders.  The Green platform swung from promoting ‘Veggie Day’ to advocating tax increases, despite the fact that its electorate is becoming more moderate, less radical, older and wealthier.

Die Linke (the Left) appears to have retained its traditional strength as the second-most popular party in the eastern states (second to Merkel’s CDU), but it has also lost support since 2009.  Though its leaders were crowing that it will be the third-largest party in the Bundestag for the first time since reunification, the CDU appears to have made significant inroads into the Left’s eastern heartland.

Though the AfD had a superb performance, it obviously fell 0.3% short of entering the Bundestag and, while it will work hard to retain relevance in next spring’s European elections, it’s difficult to tell if it can retain and grow its strength between now and 2017.

Here’s the breakdown of the seats in the Bundestag — due to so-called ‘overhang seats’ resulting from the way in which additional seats are allocated to bring seat totals in line with the ‘party vote,’ there are 630 seats:

bundestag seats

With 311 seats, Merkel is five seats short of an absolute majority.  Without the option of her previous coalition partner, the FDP, it means that she has three options: Continue reading German election results — federal Bundestag and Hesse state results (in five charts) →

Germany

LIVE BLOG: Can Merkel win an absolute majority?

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With results yet to come in, the first exit polls show that German chancellor Angela Merkel winning a huge mandate.Germany Flag Icon

Here’s the ZDF exit poll:

  • Merkel’s center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) and its Bavarian sister party Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union): 42.5%.
  • The center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party): 26.5%.
  • The democratic socialist Die Linke (the Left): 8.5%.
  • Die Grünen (the Greens): 8%.
  • Conservative, eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany): 4.8%.
  • Liberal Merkel coalition partner Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party): 4.5%.

Let’s start with what we know.

How much of a victory is this for Merkel? It’s absolutely huge.

With 42.5% of the vote, Merkel’s CDU/CSU union would win just 1.3% less than Helmut Kohl won for the CDU/CSU in 1990 — and that was in the afterglow of reunification.

It looks like Peer Steinbrück will have led the SPD to a better result this year than Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the former foreign minister who led the SPD to win just 23% in the 2009 election.  It’s still not a great result for the SPD, and the exit polls show that the SPD didn’t actually narrow the gap in the final days as some pre-vote poll surveys had indicated.

Now let’s think about what’s still uncertain — it’s obvious that Merkel’s preferred coalition partner, the FDP, is struggling.  It would be the first time in Germany’s postwar period that the FDP fails to win enough seats to enter the Bundestag — their worst result was in 1969, when it won just 5.8% of the vote, and it follows their best-ever result from 2009 — 14.6%.  It’s been a spectacular collapse, and it’s hard to believe that Philipp Rösler’s leadership will survive very long.  There’s a lot of rebuilding ahead.

(Note that in Hesse, where state elections are being held, the FDP is falling short with just 4.8% as well.  While the CDU has won around 39%, the SPD is winning 31%, the Greens 10.5% and the Left 6% — and that means we could see another SPD-led attempt to govern with the support of the Left. Either way, it’s hard to see the current CDU/FDP coalition continuing to govern.  Here’s more on that race).

It’s still too soon to know whether the AfD or the FDP will win less than 5%.  But if they do, it’s conceivably possible for Merkel to win an absolute majority with just the seats of the CDU/CSU.  Thought 42.5% isn’t an absolute majority when the denominator is 100%, it comes very, very close when the denominator is 85.5% — the sum of the voter support of the four parties to clear the 5% hurdle.

If Merkel falls just a handful of seats short, and the FDP doesn’t enter the Bundestag, it may not be worth entering a coalition, but trying to govern with a very strong minority government.

Obviously, a ‘grand coalition’ with the SPD would be the most likely coalition, but as I’ve argued for weeks, a ‘black/green’ coalition between Merkel and the Greens has a lot of natural appeal.

* * * * *

Update, 13:51 ET.

So it seems pretty clear that the CDU/FDP coalition that governs Hesse will not be reelected.  But neither will the SPD/Green coalition have enough seats to control the Hessian Landtag.  That leaves the Left, which will win around eight seats, as the kingmaker — just as in 2008, when the SPD found itself in nearly the same situation.  When that happened in 2008, it led to a year of disorder that ultimately resulted in snap elections in 2009.  SPD leader Andrea Yspilanti faced an internal revolt when she tried to form a government with the support of the Left, and Hessian voters gave the SPD 13% less support in the 2009 elections.  This time around, we’ll have to see if Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel, the new SPD leader in Hesse, can deliver a more graceful partnership with the Left.

Volker Bouffier, the CDU leader, will also likely try to determine if there’s space for a grand coalition or even a CDU-Green coalition in Hesse.

* * * * *

Update, 14:07 ET.

Even if Merkel wins an absolute majority of 300 seats in a 598-member Bundestag, there are a couple of good reasons why she might want to form a coalition with either the SPD or the Greens:

  • CSU hardliners.  With an ultra-thin majority, Merkel will not have a huge margin for victory.  That could risk pulling her further to the right.  Even if the AfD doesn’t make it into the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament already has a mildly eurosceptic party — the Bavarian CSU.  Top CSU leaders, including Bavarian finance minister Marcus Söder have called on Greece to leave the eurozone, which makes them about as eurosceptic as the AfD.  In a world where Merkel will want the flexibility to negotiate further bailouts for Greece, Portugal and other challenged European economies, and potentially a European banking union or greater fiscal control, she’ll want the support of a strong pro-European government.
  • Bundesrat considerations. With the likely loss in Hesse, the CDU/FDP will control just 10 seats in the Bundesrat, the upper house of the German parliament.  Leftists will control 41 seats, and CDU/SPD grand coalitions at the state level will control another 18 seats.  That means that Merkel will still have to look toward consensus in order to govern, and pulling either the SPD or the Greens into government could smooth the passage of legislation through the upper house.
  • Political calculation.  It may look like joining a coalition as Merkel’s junior partner is hazardous to your health as a political party.  The SPD, after four years in a grand coalition with Merkel, had a disastrous 2009 election and now the FDP, after four years in government, will leave the Bundestag altogether.  But a coalition with the Greens could make political sense for both the CDU and the Greens.  By separating the Greens from their traditional partners in government, Merkel could generate even more disunity on the German left.  But the Greens have had a difficult election — and there’s now evidence to show that they do better under a moderate, business-friendly platform (see the success of Winfried Kretschmann, the only Green minister-president, in the German state of Baden-Württemberg) than under the kind of leftist campaign — tax increases and advocating ‘veggie day’ — that the Greens ran in the federal 2013 campaign.  A turn to the center could really maximize the potential of the Greens in the 2017 election, and nothing could telescope that shift more than a partnership with Merkel that pulls Germany’s government ever so gently from the right to the center over the next four years.

Update, 15:58 ET.

Projections are now divided between showing the CDU/CSU with 295 seats, just short of a majority, and with 303 seats, just barely a majority:

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We’re obviously going to have to wait to know the final numbers.  Keep in mind also that there’s still a chance that the eurosceptic AfD could still sneak into the Bundestag.

 

 

Germany

Germany (and Hesse) votes today!

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What better way to kick off Germany’s election day — and the second full day of Oktoberfest in Munich — with Johannes Brahms’s ‘Academic Festival Overture,’ a loose assortment of what amounts to student drinking songs?Germany Flag Icon

Germany, with 80 million citizens, is the most populous member of the European Union, and it’s also the economic engine of Europe these days, for better or worse.

Angela Merkel, chancellor for the past eight years, is almost certainly likely to continue as chancellor, with her center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) and the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union), poised to win more than 10% to 15% more than the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party).

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German voters will cast two ballots — for a local representative in each of 299 districts, plus the national ‘party vote’ for a political party to determine an additional 299 seats in the lower house of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag.  The ‘party vote’ generally determines the proportion of seats that a party will hold in the Bundestag.

The drama comes down to whether Merkel will be able to continue her coalition with the liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party) — which is polling at around just 5%, the threshold to win seats in the Bundestag — or be forced back into a ‘grand coalition’ with the SPD.  Or, as I’ve argued at EurActiv, the third possibility is a historical ‘black-green’ coalition with Die Grünen (the Greens).

We’ll have a pretty good idea in about 10 hours of the universe of possibilities.

Between now and then, check out some of Suffragio‘s prior German election campaign coverage:

Photo credit to Alex Cole.

Germany, Hesse

Close state election in Hesse could tilt federal Bundesrat further left

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bouffier

While all of Germany goes to the polls on September 22 to elect a new national government, voters in the state of Hesse will also be choosing their own state government.hesse flagGermany Flag Icon

Although Hesse isn’t as large as Bavaria, which held its own state-level elections on September 15, exactly one week before the federal vote, the election in Hesse is as much a tossup as the national election is likely to be a certain win for German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Hesse, a state in south-central Germany that borders both Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, is home to Frankfurt, the financial center of Germany and in many ways the financial center of Europe.  With just over 6 million residents, Hesse is only the fifth-most populous state in Germany, but its role in the German economy means that the result on Sunday is important — its GDP per capita, on a regional basis, is Germany’s highest (except for the small city-states of Hamburg and Bremen). hessemap

It’s also important because the result of the Hessian election will determine five votes in the Bundesrat, the upper house of Germany’s parliament — a loss here on Sunday would leave the center-right with firm control of just 10 out of 69 votes in the upper house.  That would strengthen the parliamentary check that the center-left holds through its domination of the state governments that cumulatively determine the representatives to the Bundesrat.

It’s also a state where the two main center-right and center-left forces are balanced nearly equally in polls — the race is expected to be incredibly close.

Merkel’s Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) has controlled Hesse’s government since the 1999 elections, when Roland Koch led the CDU into government alongside the liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party).

But things took a poor turn after a particularly brutal election in January 2008, after Koch and the CDU took a hard-right, anti-immigrant turn.  The CDU and the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party) essentially tied in that election — each won 42 seats in the 118-seat Landtag (state parliament).  With neither the CDU’s preferred coalition partner, the Free Democrats nor the SDP’s preferred partner, Die Grünen (the Greens), winning enough seats to form a stable majority, it left the democratic socialist Die Linke (the Left) holding the balance of power after it won 5.1% of the vote, enough to win (just barely) six seats, entering Hesse’s Landtag for the first time.

SPD leader Andrea Yspilanti ultimately decided to work with the Left — controversial for the party’s links to former communists in East Germany — but a revolt within the Social Democrats caused her attempts to fail and led to early elections in January 2009.  The Hessian electorate blamed the Social Democrats for the political crisis, and the SPD dropped 13% from its result just a year earlier, giving the CDU/FDP coalition a reprieve.

Koch stepped down as minister president in August 2010 to pursue business interests, handing over the reins to trusted acolyte Volker Bouffier (pictured above, left, campaigning with Merkel).  Bouffier previously served as Koch’s decade-long minister of the interior (and sport), embracing more robust surveillance and police techniques throughout the 2000s, which earned him the nickname, ‘Black Sheriff.’ Continue reading Close state election in Hesse could tilt federal Bundesrat further left →

Germany

Your weekend cocktail-party glossary for the German election

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Plakate zur Bundestagswahl

You’ve mastered the Syrian chemical weapons crisis, you’re ready for the showdown over the US government shutdown and the debt ceiling fight, and you’re ready to hit the party circuit this weekend, wit and pith at the ready.Germany Flag Icon

But wait! You’ve forgotten that Germany, the most populous and arguably the most important country in Europe, is going to the polls on Sunday to elect a new government.

You know that Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor for the past eight years, is likely to return for a third term chancellor, even though it’s less clear which governing parties will join her in coalition.

You know that her center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) holds a wide, double-digit lead over the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party).

And you know that, as far as elections go, it’s been a particularly boring one — even by the standards of Germany’s relatively muted consensus-driven politics.

But what else should you know about Sunday’s election?

Not to worry.  Here’s all the lingo you need to sound (and be) in the know about what’s likely to happen this weekend in Germany — and what might happen in its aftermath. Continue reading Your weekend cocktail-party glossary for the German election →

Germany

What is Helmut Kohl thinking by endorsing the FDP in Germany’s elections?

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kohl

In an election campaign with few twists and even fewer turns, leave it to a blast from Germany’s past to shake up politics just 12 days before Germans head to the polls.Germany Flag Icon

In a move that seems baffling at first glance, former chancellor Helmut Kohl spent the weekend welcoming Rainer Brüderle, a former economics and technology minister, and Philipp Rösler, the vice minister for economics and vice chancellor, and the leader of the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), to his home — and indicating that he was all but endorsing the FDP in elections later this month.

It’s odd for many reasons, not least of which because Kohl (pictured above, center, with Brüderle left and Rösler right), the longest-serving chancellor since Otto von Bismark, was the longtime leader of the center-right Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU, Christian Democratic Union) that chancellor Angela Merkel now leads.  Kohl, now age 83, has been out of frontline politics since 1998, when he lost his bid for reelection.  Among Kohl’s top accomplishments are vital roles in engineering both the reunification of West and East Germany and the development of the European single currency.

So what is Kohl up to?

There are a handful of reasons why Kohl might be campaigning so openly for the Free Democrats in the last stretch of the campaign, but none are as compelling as the explanation that Kohl is actually doing Merkel and the CDU a huge favor by boosting their coalition partners.

The Free Democrats are the junior partners in Merkel’s governing ‘black-yellow’ coalition, and though Merkel would prefer to continue governing alongside the Free Democrats, their support has dropped so low that it risks missing the 5% threshold necessary to win seats in the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament.  With the Christian Democrats holding a consistent double-digit lead over the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party), and with voters preferring Merkel with a two-to-one margin over Social Democratic chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück, there’s not much risk that the CDU will lose on September 22 — together with its Bavaria sister party, the Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union).

So if Kohl can bring a few crossover voters from the CDU to support the FDP, he can help guarantee that the Free Democrats make it back into the Bundestag with at least a minimum of seats, therefore facilitating the possibility that Merkel can continue her preferred coalition in a third term without resorting to a grand coalition with the Social Democrats (as she did from 2005 to 2009).  Crazy like a fox.

It’s a dangerous game, though, because there is some risk in that strategy.  Steinbrück delivered a strong performance in last week’s debate with Merkel and while it hasn’t helped him in the polls so far, the race could tighten in the closing days.  Moreover, the newly formed Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany), the country’s first eurosceptic party could steal votes from Merkel on the right, and it’s the one party that’s gaining in polls over the past week — it could even hit the 5% threshold to enter the Bundestag.  But at this point, with less than two weeks to go, a massive change would require a year’s worth of stubborn German public opinion to transform virtually overnight.  So it’s a risk that Kohl — and likely even the cautious Merkel — are probably happy to take.  Continue reading What is Helmut Kohl thinking by endorsing the FDP in Germany’s elections? →

Bavaria, Germany

Bavarian elections provides Merkel, CSU a dress rehearsal for federal German vote

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seehofer Exactly one week before Germans go to the polls to choose between center-right chancellor Angela Merkel and her center-left challenger Peer Steinbrück, Bavarian voters will elect its local state government in a key test for Merkel’s regional allies.Germany Flag Iconbavarian_flag_icon

The outcome isn’t incredibly doubtful because since 1947, Bavaria’s staunchly Catholic, business-friendly, socially conservative Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union) has controlled the 187-seat Landtag, the state legislature of Germany’s second-most populous state.

Given that the state has one of Germany’s — and Europe’s — best economies, the CSU looks set to strengthen its hold on Bavarian government in what amounts to a test run of many of the arguments that Merkel hopes will power her Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) to victory on September 22 alongside the CSU, which has been united with the CDU in federal politics for decades.  Merkel, who currently governs in an alliance with the liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), hopes that voters will give her credit for steering Germany — and the entire eurozone — through the worst of a sovereign debt crisis that began in 2010 and an economic recession from which Europe may already be recovering.

But the CSU and Bavaria’s minister president Horst Seehofer (pictured above) can make an even more sanguine case on the basis of the Bavarian economy, which showcases several star multinational corporations, such as BMW, Siemens, and adidas.  Whereas the European Union had an average unemployment rate of 10.4% in 2012 and Germany had an unemployment rate of 5.5%, Bavaria’s was just 3.2%.  To consider just how staggering that is, consider that United States last had an unemployment rate that low in October 1953. It’s an economy that, at around  €465 billion ($610 billion), is about as large as the economy of the US state of Pennsylvania and even larger than the entire economy of Saudi Arabia, and nearly 1.5 times the size of the economy of neighboring Austria.

If the CSU is successful on September 15, it will mark a rebound from the previous September 2008 election, the CSU’s worst performance since 1954.  Five years ago, Bavarian voters went to the polls in the middle of an uncertain future, with the collapse of US financial firm Lehman Brothers and a global financial panic topping world headlines.  It was also a period of uncertain leadership within the CSU, Bavarian minister-president Edmund Stoiber resigned after 14 years in office following the resignation of his chief of staff, Michael Höhenberger, which itself followed accusations that Höhenberger snooped on the private life of one of Stoiber’s critics.  Günther Beckstein, Stoiber’s longtime interior minister, succeeded Stoiber and led the CSU through the 2008 election, but stepped down following the CSU’s historic loss.

Even though the CSU won just 43.4% of the vote (a drop of over 17% from its prior performance) and lost its absolute majority in the Landtag, it remained the largest party in Bavaria by far, outpacing the second-place Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party) by nearly 25% of the vote and Seehofer, a former health and food minister, easily won election as Bavaria’s minister-president in October 2008.

As the CSU and the SPD both suffered historic losses, two additional groups on the Bavarian right made extraordinary gains.  The first is the Freie Wähler (FW, Free Voters), a bloc of independent, unaffiliated center-right deputies, which won 10% of the vote, largely from disappointed CSU supporters, and entered the Bavarian Landtag for the first time.  The second is the FDP, which won 8% and 16 seats, returning to the Bavarian legislature for the first time in 14 years and providing the CSU with a stable coalition partner in Munich.  Even the socialist Die Linke (The Left) competed for the first time and won 4.3%, impressive in a state as conservative as Bavariabavaria Five years later, although polling data isn’t as ubiquitous for Bavaria’s state election as for the wider federal German elections, the CSU is polling higher than in 2008, and it may win over 50% of the vote, restoring the absolute majority that it enjoyed in the Landtag without interruption from 1962 to 2008. That’s good news for Seehofer, because the FDP is faring as poorly in Bavaria as it is in federal polling — the Free Democrats are in danger of missing the 5% threshold required to win seats in the Bavarian Landtag (and in the federal Bundestag as well).  Meanwhile, the Social Democrats are in danger of setting a new postwar low in Bavaria on September 15 and in federal elections a week later — it’s polling at around 18% in Bavaria, which is even worse than its 2008 result (18.6%).  Continue reading Bavarian elections provides Merkel, CSU a dress rehearsal for federal German vote →

Germany

Assessing the potential coalitions that might emerge after Germany’s federal elections

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roslerFDP

With now less than 40 days to go until Germany’s federal elections, polls show that chancellor Angela Merkel is by far the most popular candidate to return as chancellor and her party, the Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU, Christian Democratic Union), will clearly be the largest bloc in Germany’s Bundestag after the election. Germany Flag Icon

Polls have been remarkably consistent throughout much of the year leading up to the September 22 vote.  The center-right CDU, together with its Bavarian sister party, the Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union), overwhelmingly leads Germany’s largest center-left party, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party), and voters overwhelmingly prefer Merkel to the SPD’s candidate for chancellor, Peer Steinbrück — by a nearly two-to-one margin.  Here’s the trendline from Infratest dimap, which released its latest poll this week:

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This week’s news that Germany leads GDP growth in the eurozone, which itself pulled out of recession in the second quarter of 2013, will only buoy Merkel’s chances.  Barring a huge shift in public opinion that has only calcified over the past year, Steinbrück, a bland technocrat who comes from the right wing of the SPD and who served as finance minister in the ‘grand coalition’ government of 2005 to 2009, will lead the SPD to a loss of nearly historic proportions.  But while that means Merkel is very likely to return as chancellor, the composition of Merkel’s third government is less certain.

That’s because support for Merkel’s current coalition partners, the free-market liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), has collapsed since the previous September 2009 election, when it won 14.6% of the vote and 93 seats in the Bundestag, a record-high electoral performance for the party.  But since 2009, the FDP has struggled to maintain a presence in local Germany elections, losing support in state after state.  Its decade-long leader Guido Westerwelle, the first openly gay party leader in German history, stepped down in April 2011 as party leader and vice chancellor (though he remains foreign minister) after the FDP won barely 5% in the state elections of Baden-Württemberg.  His successor as FDP leader is the Vietnamese-born Phillip Rösler (pictured above), who began his career in Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) and who had served previously as health minister in the CDU/FDP coalition government from 2009 to 2011.

Although Rösler has not lifted the FDP back up to its 2009-level heights, he has managed to staunch the party’s decline.  In the May 2012 elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, the FDP managed to win 8.6% of the vote, an increase of nearly 2% from the previous election, though that’s largely due to the popularity of Christian Lindner, who led the FDP’s 2012 campaign.  More recently, though, in Lower Saxony’s state election in January 2013, the FDP won 9.9% of the vote, a gain of 1.7%.

It’s also because Germany’s electoral system is notoriously complex.  Germans will actually cast two votes in September — the first is for a candidate to represent one of 299 electoral districts in Germany, the second is for a German political party.  The second ‘party vote’ is meant to determine the party’s ultimate total share of seats in the Bundestag, and so a party will receive additional seats on the basis of the party vote sufficient to provide that its percentage of seats in the Bundestag is roughly equal to the percentage of votes it received pursuant to the party vote (so long as the party receives at least 5% of party vote support).  That means that the number of seats in the Bundestag changes from election to election — although it must have a minimum of 598 seats, it has had as few as 603 and as many as 672 since German reunification.

The FDP has struggled all year long to achieve merely 5% support in opinion polls and, while it’s doing better in polls than it was at the beginning of the year, there’s no guarantee that it will meet that threshold:

trendline2013germany

That means that, more than anything else, the composition of Germany’s next government turns on the FDP’s performance.  If it wins less than 5%, Merkel will not have the option of continuing a coalition with the FDP.  Moreover, even if the FDP wins more than 5%, it may still not win enough seats to cobble together a CDU/FDP majority in the 598-member Bundestag.

Furthermore, polls show that while German voters overwhelmingly prefer Merkel as chancellor, they actually favor a return to the CDU/SPD grand coalition, more than the current CDU-led government or a potential SPD-led government:

preferredcoalitions

Two additional coalitions — a CDU/Green government and a united left coalition among the SPD, Green and Die Linke (the Left Party) — also win significant support.

But what are the chances that any of these five coalitions will actually emerge after September 22?  Here’s a look at each potential coalition and the chances that it could form Germany’s next government.

CDUpreferredcoalitionThe current government: CDU/FDP.

Merkel prefers to continue her current coalition over any alternative because her political agenda matches well with the FDP’s political agenda.  Any negotiations between Merkel and the SPD or the Greens would entail huge concessions from Merkel that she would not otherwise have to make in coalition with the FDP.  But, as noted above (and as represented in the graph to the right, on the basis of current polls), it’s unclear if that coalition can win a majority.

Under Rösler’s leadership, the FDP is running on a campaign of lower taxes and liberalizing Germany’s economy, which is standard Free Democratic fare, and both the FDP and Merkel’s CDU oppose new tax increases.  Their largest policy difference might be same-sex marriage — the FDP supports it and the CDU (and especially the Catholic-influenced CSU) oppose it, although the FDP has taken a much stronger stand on privacy rights than Merkel’s CDU.

Even if they win enough seats to form a majority, no one expects the margin to be larger than the government’s current 21-seat margin.  So even a single-digit majority could turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory if Merkel finds herself forced to look outside her own government to enact her legislative agenda on an ad hoc basis, especially with respect to European Union matters, given the sometimes eurosceptic nature of many CSU deputies.  That’s hardly a recipe for stable government.

Polls in August show that together, the current government will win between 44% and 47% of the vote if the election were held today.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t give us much of an idea about whether they’ll have enough support in the Bundestag to form a majority.  Since reunification, Germany has held only six federal elections — they’ve resulted in three CDU-led governments, two SPD-led governments and a single CDU-SPD grand coalition. Continue reading Assessing the potential coalitions that might emerge after Germany’s federal elections →

Germany

As U.S. awaits DOMA decision, Germany’s constitutional court weighs in on gay rights

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merkelwesterwelle

By the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court will render decisions in two of the most important legal cases to affect same-sex marriage in the United States: Hollingsworth v. Perry, which could result in the repeal of California’s Proposition 8, a ballot measure that overturned the state legislature’s enactment of same-sex marriage, and United States v. Windsor, which could strike down the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act.  DOMA, a 1996 law that prohibits same-sex couples from federal benefits of marriage, has been struck down by lower U.S. courts as a violation of the ‘equal protection’ clause of the 14th amendment of the U.S. constitution.  Others have argued that it violates the right of states to determine their own marriage laws and the ‘full faith and credit’ clause of the U.S. constitution that requires states to recognize the law, rights and judgments of the other U.S. states. Germany Flag Icon

Both decisions are among the most highly anticipated opinions of the Court’s summer rulings.

But Germany’s top constitutional court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, got out in front of the U.S. Supreme Court last week with a landmark decision of its own that in many ways mirrors what proponents of same-sex marriage hope will be a harbinger of the U.S. decision on DOMA.

In a decision that could place pressure on chancellor Angela Merkel in advance of Germany’s federal election in September, the constitutional court ruled that same-sex couples in registered civil partnerships are entitled to the same joint tax filing benefits as those in opposite-sex marriages, exactly the rights that DOMA was originally enacted to prohibit in the United States.  The decision put the fight for German same-sex marriage on the front page of European newspapers in a summer when the parliamentary battles to enact same-sex marriage in the United Kingdom and France have otherwise dominated headlines.

It’s surprisingly in many ways that France and the United Kingdom have been more progressive on same-sex marriage rather than Germany.  Although polls show nearly two-thirds of the British and the French support same-sex marriage, a February 2013 poll showed that three-fourths of Germans support same sex-marriage.  Moreover, UK prime minister David Cameron is the center-right leader of a Conservative Party that faces its most pressing political pressure today from the right, not from the center, and the virulent anti-marriage rallies in France and the widespread opposition to same-sex marriage on France’s center-right means that French president François Hollande’s push for marriage equality, a policy that he campaigned on in 2012, has met significant turbulence.

But Germany’s evolutionary approach to marriage equality has taken a more subdued path through the constitutional court in Karlsruhe as much as through the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament.  Former chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his coalition partner Volker Beck successfully pushed for the enactment of the Life Partnership Act in 2001 when the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party) controlled the government in coalition with Beck’s Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (the Greens).  Following the German constitutional court’s blessing of the law in 2002, the Bundestag followed up in 2004 with revisions to the law that increase the rights of registered life partners, including rights to adoption, alimony and divorce, though not parity with respect to federal tax benefits.

Since taking power in 2005, chancellor Angela Merkel has not pushed additional rights for same-sex couples, which puts her at awkward odds with her coalition partners, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), which supports marriage equality and whose former leader Guido Westerwelle (pictured above with Merkel), Germany’s foreign minister and its vice-chancellor from October 2009 to May 2011, is openly gay.

Both Merkel’s Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) and the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria, the more socially conservative and Catholic-based Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria), have been traditionally opposed to gay marriage, and as recently as March, the CDU and the CSU reaffirmed their opposition to extending tax benefits to same-sex partners, even though the February 2013 poll showed that two-thirds of CDU-CSU supporters favored same-sex marriage outright.

Despite parliamentary inactivity in Berlin, last week’s decision by Germany’s constitution court, however, is just the latest decision from Karlsruhe that has edged same-sex registered partnerships ever closer to full marriage equality.  Continue reading As U.S. awaits DOMA decision, Germany’s constitutional court weighs in on gay rights →

Germany, Lower Saxony

Merkel shouldn’t despair over center-right’s Lower Saxony loss

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weil

Voters in Germany’s fourth-most populous state, Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), have elected popular Hannover mayor Stephan Weil (pictured above) its new minister-president after an incredibly narrow victory for the center-left coalition, according to official provisional results.
lower_saxonyGermany Flag Icon

The predicted victory would mean that the center-right coalition headed by minister-president David McAllister, a high-profile (and half-Scottish!) politician within the ruling Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union) of German chancellor Angela Merkel would lose power for the first time in a decade.

As such, the German media is already reporting that the election is a setback for Merkel in advance of expected federal elections later in September or October 2013.  While the election is somewhat of a barometer for federal politics, generally (it’s where former chancellor Gerhard Schröder got his political start — he served as the state’s minister-president from 1990 to 1998), there’s actually a lot of positive news for Merkel in the Lower Saxony result.

Provisional results give the center-right CDU around 36.0% of the vote, a small lead over the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party), with just 32.9%.  Unfortunately, however, that represents around a 6.5% drop in support from the previous regional elections in 2008:

Niedersachsen

Although the CDU’s traditional coalition partner, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democrats), will have increased their share of the vote to around 9.9% (despite polls showing the FDP with support running at around 5%), the SPD’s traditional coalition partner, Die Grünen (the Green Party), has won around 13.5%.

According to projections, that means the CDU will hold 54 seats in the Landtag, Lower Saxony’s regional unicameral parliament (a 14-seat drop from the current representation) and the FDP will gain a seat for a total of 14.

The SPD will gain just one seat to hold 49, while the Greens have gained eight seats to hold 20.

Together, therefore, the center-left is likely to hold 69 seats to just 68 seats for the center-right, giving Weil the narrowest of margins in the Landtag. 

The key factor is the loss of all 11 seats currently held by the more radical Die Linke (The Left Party), which is projected to have won just 3.1% of the vote, lower than the 5% required to win seats under Lower Saxony’s electoral system.  That means that all of the center-left seats won in Sunday’s election will have gone to the SPD-Green coalition, rather than split with the Left Party, which has historically rejected the possibility of joining a coalition with the SPD.

The Piratenpartei Deutschland (Pirate Party) also fell far below the 5% threshold.

So the result is quite a setback for McAllister, who was contesting his first election as minister-president, and has been mentioned as a potential successor to Merkel as a federal chancellor.  There’s a fair chance that Merkel could bring McAllister into her federal government as a top aide and minister (she once attempted to appoint him as the head of the CDU federally).

Although McAllister isn’t incredibly unpopular in Lower Saxony, he became minister-president in 2010 after Christian Wulff, premier since 2003, resigned to assume Germany’s largely ceremonial presidency — Wulff resigned in February 2012, however, amid allegations that he concealed a private loan from a wealthy friend with business interests in Lower Saxony.

Given the scandal around Wulff, the fact that the CDU has held power for a decade and was seeking its third consecutive mandate for forming a government, and the fact that Germany is slipping into recession, McAllister was always going to have a tougher run in this year’s elections than Wulff had in 2008.

But, as I noted above, there’s a lot of good news for Merkel in advance of this autumn’s elections: Continue reading Merkel shouldn’t despair over center-right’s Lower Saxony loss →