Tag Archives: christian democrats

Honduras

LIBRE, Nasralla could leave no party with majority in Honduran Congress

3 Comments

rigobetolena

TEGUCIGALPA — One of the most interesting aspects of the birth of the new leftist Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation) in Honduras has been the way it’s opened the door to a new multipolar political system where there had once been just two traditional parties.honduras flag icon

The general consensus is that LIBRE is here to stay, no matter if its presidential candidate Xiomara Castro de Zelaya wins the November 24 presidential election.  One of the reasons for its staying power is the likelihood that LIBRE remains very much in a three-way fight for seats to the Congreso Nacional (National Congress), Honduras’s 128-member unicameral legislature.

In the past, the predominance of the conservative Partido Nacional (PN, National Party) and the centrist Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party) meant that the winner of the presidential election could typically count upon a narrow victory in the National Congress as well.

But this year’s multi-party race means that there’s a real chance no party will win absolute control of the National Congress.  While parties have failed to win an absolute majority in the past, the leading party has always fallen short by just a handful of seats.  This year, the largest bloc could fall 10 or 20 seats short, given Honduras’s electoral system.

That means that the ultimate winner of the presidential election will face an immediate challenge of assembling a majority coalition.  Given that many members of the Liberal Party and the National Party teamed up to support the 2009 coup against former president Manuel Zelaya and the ensuing interim regime of Roberto Micheletti, that could mean trouble if Castro de Zelaya, the wife of the former president, wins on Sunday.  If the two traditional parties team up against her for the next four years, she would face a presidency of gridlock and a narrower mandate.

Other Hondurans believe that the ultimate winner could easily trade economic or political favors to buy — or at least rent — a congressional majority.

“The correct thing would have been to reform the electoral law, and to create a second round so that alliances could be formed,” said Germán Leitzelar, a former labor minister between 2002 and 2006 and a congressman representing the Partido Innovación y Unidad (PINU, Innovation and Unity Party).  “Now, there won’t be any alliances, but there will be ‘economical understandings.’  It will be an agreement based on convenience, and not based on the best interests of the country.”

The National Party’s presidential candidate, Juan Orlando Hernández, is currently the president of the National Congress, where the National Party controls 71 seats to just 45 seats for the Liberal Party.  Hernández’s wide majority makes him, in key ways, more powerful than outgoing Honduran president Porfirio Lobo Sosa, and he’s used his perch as congressional president to push through key legislation, including the ‘charter city’ law (subsequently overturned by the Honduran supreme court), a new security fee and the creation this autumn of a new military police.

But that’s not atypical.  Since the return of regularly scheduled elections in 1981, the party that’s won the presidency has also won the largest share of seats in the National Congress.  Between 2006 and 2009, Zelaya could count on 62 seats in the National Congress, just shy of an absolute majority.  Between 2002 and 2006, former president Ricardo Maduro’s National Party controlled 61 seats.

What’s more, the congressional presidency has long been a stepping stone to the presidency — Lobo Sosa held the office between 2002 and 2006, Liberal president Carlos Flores held the office for four years prior to his election in 1997, and Rafael Pineda, the 2001 Liberal presidential candidate, also held the office.

If Hernández wins the presidency and the National Party claims dominance over the National Congress as well, the top two candidates to become the next congressional president are Lena Gutiérrez (pictured above, center) and Rigoberto Chang Castillo (pictured above, left).

Gutiérrez, at age 36, is a rising star of the Honduran right, and currently the first vice president of the National Congress.  Fluent in English, Gutiérrez studied engineering at the Texas A&M University.  She entered the National Congress in 2009, and she’s focused mainly on laws boosting education and development.  Chang Castillo, a Tegucigalpa attorney, another rising star and a top Hernández ally, is the first secretary of the National Congress.  Both hold seats from the department of Francisco Morazán, which includes Tegucigalpa and surrounding areas, and which will elect 23 members of Congress, more than any other department.  The department of Cortés, which includes San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-most populous city and its industrial capital, will elect 20 members.  In each department, a voter will have as many votes as the number of seats — a voter in Tegucigalpa will be allowed 23 congressional votes, but a voter in the Bay Islands department will have just one vote. Continue reading LIBRE, Nasralla could leave no party with majority in Honduran Congress →

Czech Republic

Sobotka turns to forming government after troubling internal ČSSD revolt

Leave a comment

zemansoboktka

Normally, party leaders face the boot when they lose elections, not after they win them.czech

But that’s what happened in the Czech Republic, when the center-left Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party) narrowly topped the country’s parliamentary elections in late October with just over 20% of the vote.

Though the Social Democrats won the election, they took just 50 out of 200 seats in the Poslanecká sněmovna (the Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of the Czech parliament, and only nearly edged out a new populist, anti-corruption, business-friendly party, the Akce nespokojených občanů (ANO, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens), founded just two years ago by wealth businessman Andrej Babiš.

That left the leader of the Social Democrats, Bohuslav Sobotka, in a difficult position.  The fractured result means that the Social Democrats will have to find at least another 50 deputies in order to govern — and despite the willingness of the Social Democrats to work alongside the Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy (KSČM, Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia) for the first time in the post-Soviet era, the 33 seats that the Communists won won’t alone be enough to float a Social Democrat-led government.

But what left his leadership truly in question was a split between two wings of his party, a pro-Sobotka wing that hopes to keep its distance from the Czech Republic’s new president, Miloš Zeman, and a pro-Zeman wing that seeks closer collaboration between the two.  Zeman led the Social Democrats over a decade ago, and he served as Czech prime minister from 1998 to 2002.  A falling-out with the ČSSD leadership in the mid-2000s, however, caused Zeman to quit the Social Democrats and form a new party.

Zeman triumphed in his own right in the January 2013 presidential election — the first such direct election in Czech politics — and has spent the greater part of the year trying to muscle even more power for the Czech presidency at the expense of the parliamentary government.

So almost immediately following the election, Zeman (pictured above, left, with Sobotka) and top members of the pro-Zeman wing of the Social Democrats, including the party’s deputy leader Michal Hašek, held a secret meeting.  That preceded a call for Sobotka to step down as leader on the basis that Sobotka’s personalized, centralized campaign led to a poorer-than-expected result.

The ‘coup’ soon fell apart, though — Hašek and other participants in the secret meeting with Zeman lied about it, Sobotka rallied his supporters  against Zeman’s interference in internal party affairs, Czech overwhelming blamed Hašek for causing political instability and so, for now, Sobotka remains leader and Hašek has stepped down as deputy chair.

Sobotka won a battle, but it’s far from clear that he’ll even be the next prime minister.  Continue reading Sobotka turns to forming government after troubling internal ČSSD revolt →

Germany

Merkel’s coalition talks with Green Party leaders this week seem serious

Leave a comment

kretschmann

German chancellor Angela Merkel, fresh off a victory at the end of last month in her country’s federal elections, turned this week to a once very-unlikely coalition partner — Germany’s Die Grünen (the Green Party). Germany Flag Icon

When news broke last week that Merkel would hold talks with the Greens, it was easy to blow it off as a formality.  After all, everyone assumed after the September 22 elections that Merkel’s center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) would form another ‘grand coalition’ with the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party).

But throughout the campaign, I listed all of the reasons why a ‘black-green’ coalition made a lot of sense — and those reasons still make as much sense now as they did before the election.  Merkel’s decision to phase out nuclear power in 2011 removed the key policy difference that most divided her from the Greens.  The leadership and the rank-and-file membership of the Greens is becoming older, wealthier and, in general, more like the CDU electorate.  Moreover, its younger members are less radical and more moderate, and don’t have the same antipathy to business as the (pardon the generalization) founding ‘1960s, hippie, flower child’ generation.

With the announcement that the Greens and Merkel’s CDU will explore a second round of talks over a potential coalition, however, everyone seems to be taking seriously the possibility of a ‘black-green’ coalition, which would be unprecedented in national German politics (though the Greens and the CDU joined forces in government recently, to mixed results, in Saarland and Hamburg).

There were always really compelling reasons why another CDU/SPD ‘grand coalition’ makes little sense.

After all, Merkel’s near-landslide victory left her CDU and the more Catholic, conservative, Bavaria-based Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union) just five seats short of an absolute majority.  She doesn’t need the SPD’s 192 seats, she needs five votes.  Moreover, the SPD’s collaboration with Merkel won it few votes, neither in Germany’s 2009 federal elections when the grand coalition’s foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier led the party to its worst election result in postwar history nor in the most recent elections when the grand coalition’s finance minister Peer Steinbrück led the SPD to its second-worst result.  As such, the SPD is looking to draw a contrast with Merkel over the next hour years, not prop up Merkel’s government as her junior partner.

That means that the SPD will be looking for the first opportunity for snap elections — and it’s not exactly a foregone conclusion that Merkel will lead the CDU/CSU into a fourth consecutive campaign.  At first glance, a coalition with the Greens may seem more bold, but it might well be the more cautious option for Merkel.  They’ll be less likely to cause problems for Merkel and, with a smaller parliamentary caucus,

Here’s the breakdown of seats in the lower house of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, following the September 22 vote, which will have 630 seats — a ‘grand coalition’ would amount to about four-fifths of the entire Bundestag.

bundestag seats

Given that the CDU’s coalition partner between 2009 and 2013, the liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), failed to surpass the 5% electoral threshold and lost all of its seats in the Bundestag in September, there’s only one other party to which Merkel can turn — the Greens.

Though Merkel’s coalition partners might both regret their cooperation (i.e., the SPD and the FDP both notched postwar nadirs in 2009 and 2013, respectively), there’s a strong case that a ‘black-green’ coalition could give the Greens a new identity at the very heart of Germany politics.  As a junior partner in Merkel’s third consecutive government, its supporters wouldn’t expect much, so to the extent that the Greens moderate Merkel’s agenda over the next four years (through policies that boost renewable energy or reduce CO2 emissions), their core voters should be fairly satisfied.  But the Greens stand to pick up many more centrist voters that might otherwise vote for the SPD or even for the CDU or the FDP.

The Greens ran an undeniably leftist campaign, pledging tax hikes and a 15% wealth tax to boot, along with the oft-ridiculed national ‘Veggie Day,’ and one of its four leaders, Jürgen Trittin, a former environmental minister from 1998 to 2005, faced ridicule over his approval of a pamphlet from 1981 that appeared to call for the legalization of sex between adults and minors.  Despite polls that in 2011 showed the Greens winning up to 25% or even 30% of the vote, they finished with just 8.4% of the vote — a swing of 2.3% less than their 2009 total.

Former Green Party leader and foreign minister Joschka Fischer, among others, took the Greens to task for their campaign within 48 hours of the election:

“It looks almost as though the current leadership of the Greens has gotten older but still hasn’t grown up,” Fischer told SPIEGEL following Sunday’s vote. “They followed a strategy that not only failed to win over new voters, but drove away many old ones.” Noting the party’s focus on tax hikes and social spending during the campaign, Fischer said that emphasizing a “leftist course” was a “fatal mistake.”

Former party head Reinhard Bütikofer has likewise not been complimentary of the current Green leadership. “The failure … to engage in a serious debate with Chancellor Merkel regarding … her policies for Europe granted her political hegemony” on the issue, he told SPIEGEL. He also criticized Trittin for being a mouthpiece of the party’s left wing.

Since the election, the Green leadership resigned en masse, and they elected two new leaders, including the centrist rising star Katrin Göring-Eckardt, who had served as one of two chancellor-candidates for the Greens during the election.  The Greens, who have long been divided between a more centrist realo (‘realist’) faction and a more radical fundi (‘fundamentalist’) faction, have long elected leaders in pairs (the new leftist Green leader is Anton Hofreiter, who, unlike Trittin, comes from the new generation of Greens parliamentarians).

But the clear exemplar of Greens success is Winfried Kretschmann (pictured above), the first and only minister-president of any of Germany’s 16 states — and in Baden-Württemberg, a wealthy (and relatively conservative) state in Germany’s southwest that’s a hub for commerce and industry.  Though Kretschmann came to power in 2011 on a wave of opposition to the Stuttgart 21′ rail development project, Kretschmann is now helping to implement the project after it won nearly 60% support in a subsequent referendum specifically on the project’s future.  Kretschmann, who’s firmly within the ‘realo,’ right wing of the Green Party, has won plaudits from business leaders as well, and he’s apparently playing a role in the CDU-Green negotiations.

Severe obstacles remain to a ‘black-green’ coalition. Continue reading Merkel’s coalition talks with Green Party leaders this week seem serious →

Norway

Norway’s new center-right minority government is official

Leave a comment

jensen-solberg

Having narrowed coalition talks from four to two parties last week, it didn’t take long for Norway’s new government to emerge formally on Monday.norway

As I wrote late last week, Norway is set to have a minority government that will likely be its most right-wing government in postwar history:

As widely anticipated, the leader of the center-right Høyre (literally the ‘Right,’ or more commonly, the Conservative Party), Erna Solberg, will become Norway’s next prime minister, but she’ll lead a minority government in coalition with just one of Norway’s three other political parties, the controversial anti-immigrant Framskrittspartiet (Progress Party) after two smaller center-right parties pulled out of coalition talks earlier this week.

I wrote before the election that pulling together all four parties on the Norwegian right might prove problematic.  Sure enough, both the Kristelig Folkeparti (Christian Democratic Party) and Venstre (literally, ‘the Left,’ but commonly known as the Liberal Party), which will hold 10 and nine seats, respectively, in the next parliament, will not join the government.  Though both parties have agreed to provide support to Solberg from outside the government, it’s not an auspicious start for the broad four-party coalition that Solberg hoped to build after last month’s victory.

It was no surprise on Monday to see Erna Solberg, the leader of the Conservatives and Norway’s likely next prime minister (pictured above, right) and Siv Jensen, the leader of the Progress Party (pictured above, left) announce their governing agenda.

That agenda came with few surprises from the general framework largely set forth last week — a push to tightening Norway’s immigration laws (for non-Europeans), lowering Norway’s tax burden and, importantly, an agreement not to deviate from the ‘4% rule’ that prohibits more than 4% of the country’s massive $790 billion oil fund to be used in the annual Norwegian budget, and a commitment to avoid exploration for resources in protected Arctic areas.

Both parties generally hope to unlock economic growth and modernization through tax cuts and decentralization of power from Norway’s central government.

But perhaps the most ambitious item is a plan to develop a new infrastructure fund of up to 100 billion kroner ($16.75 billion) for what Solberg and Jensen hope will a five-year mission to improve Norway’s roads and railroads — as well as its educational system:

Kristin Skogen Lund, director-general of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise, welcomed the “shift in direction for Norwegian politics”….

Ms Skogen Lund also welcomed the shift in focus of the oil fund from consumption to investment. The outgoing government had spent only about 14 per cent of annual proceeds from the fund, she said, when all of it was supposed to be directed into infrastructure, education and tax reduction.

That’s important in light of Solberg’s goal to reduce the value of the krone, Norway’s currency — inflation, along with high labor costs that have made Norway’s exports relatively uncompetitive, are the largest challenges to an economy that’s at risk of overheating (to the contrary of much of the rest of Europe).  Though the ‘investment’ will surely stimulate Norway’s economy, it will do so for long-term benefits.  That makes the Solberg ‘investment fund’ plan unlike, say, the 2009 US stimulus package enacted into law by US president Barack Obama designed to do the opposite — boost short-term aggregate demand.

Solberg’s government will also explore the possibility of splitting the country’s oil fund, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, into two smaller entities to encourage competition and maximize Norway’s investment returns.

The two parties remain at odds over cabinet posts, though it’s widely expected than Jensen will hold the finance portfolio.

By way of background, the Conservative/Progress coalition will hold 77 seats — and all four center-right parties will hold 96 seats — in the 169-member Storting, Norway’s parliament.  Though the center-left Arbeiderpartiet (Labour Party) of outgoing prime minister Jens Stoltenberg won more seats than any other party in the September 9 election, its coalition allies suffered huge losses — the Conservatives placed a close second and the Progress Party finished third, and a broad center-right government had been widely expected even before the election.

storting

Top photo credit to Vegard Grøtt / NTB scanpix.

Norway

Norway’s new government will be more right-wing and more fragile than expected

1 Comment

ernaPM

Just less than a month after Norwegians went to the polls, the contours of Norway’s new government are taking shape — and it’s not exactly what everyone expected.norway

As widely anticipated, the leader of the center-right Høyre (literally the ‘Right,’ or more commonly, the Conservative Party), Erna Solberg, will become Norway’s next prime minister, but she’ll lead a minority government in coalition with just one of Norway’s three other political parties, the controversial anti-immigrant Framskrittspartiet (Progress Party) after two smaller center-right parties pulled out of coalition talks earlier this week.

The difference is that instead of a 96-seat majority in the 169-member Storting, Norway’s parliament, Solberg’s government will hold just 77 seats, eight short of an absolute majority:

storting

I wrote before the election that pulling together all four parties on the Norwegian right might prove problematic.  Sure enough, both the Kristelig Folkeparti (Christian Democratic Party) and Venstre (literally, ‘the Left,’ but commonly known as the Liberal Party), which will hold 10 and nine seats, respectively, in the next parliament, will not join the government.  Though both parties have agreed to provide support to Solberg (pictured above) from outside the government, it’s not an auspicious start for the broad four-party coalition that Solberg hoped to build after last month’s victory.  The absence of the Christian Democrats is particularly difficult, given that they led the last center-right Norwegian government — that of prime minister Kjell Magne Bondevik between 1997 and 2000 and 2001 to 2005.

The Progress Party, meanwhile, will enter government for the first time since its foundation in the 1970s.  Founded as an anti-tax movement determined to roll back the Norwegian social welfare state, the Progress Party has also become increasingly anti-immigrant.  While it’s certainly tame compared to many of Europe’s more xenophobic anti-immigrant parties, it’s easily the most controversial party in Norway (not least because mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was once among its members).  Anxiety about the Progress Party’s new, unprecedented role in government is one of the reasons that the Christian Democrats and Liberals may have been wary of formally joining Solberg’s coalition, which will now become Norway’s most right-wing government in a century.

Solberg, on the other hand, slowly gained the trust of Norwegians after rebranding the Conservatives into a more welcoming, more national party that’s transcended its base catering to business interests in Oslo.  Although the Conservatives and the Progress Party agree on economic policies like tax cuts, the Conservatives have positioned themselves as an ever-so-slightly right-of-center party who would leave in place much of the mainstream policy preferences of the outgoing center-left Arbeiderpartiet (Labour Party) — you can characterize ‘mainstream’ in Norway as full commitment to a  generous social welfare state, mixed with strict fiscal discipline that diverts much of Norway’s oil largesse into its $780 billion investment fund, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund.

Given that the Labour Party, led by the popular outgoing prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, still managed to win more votes than any other party — and seven more parliamentary seats than the Conservatives — last month (a feat Labour has repeated in every national election since 1918), that’s a wise move on Solberg’s part.  But balancing the moderation that Norwegians expect from her with the Progress Party’s expectations was always going to be difficult, and Solberg’s dream of a broad four-party coalition will be the first casualty of those competing expectations.

That balancing act informs much of the resulting agreement between the Conservatives and Progress and, more generally, among the four right-wing parties that Solberg will need to satisfy to keep her minority coalition in government — it’s more notable for what the government won’t do than what it will.  The government faces a much different challenge than the rest of Europe — with GDP growth holding steady at around 2%, it’s overheating, not recession, that threatens the economy.  Solberg’s challenge is how to keep the Norwegian krone from further appreciating, given that the country’s high wages are already making exports less competitive.

Notwithstanding the election campaign, lowering the value of the krone might ultimately be the Solberg’s most pressing policy imperative.

Here are the highlights of how Norway’s next government will unfold under Solberg’s leadership:  Continue reading Norway’s new government will be more right-wing and more fragile than expected →

Germany, United States

That ‘transcending ideology’ thing from Obama 2008? Angela Merkel did it. Obama hasn’t.

1 Comment

merkelobama

Last Sunday’s election wasn’t just a victory for the German center-right — it was a very personalized victory for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, who will become just the third postwar chancellor to serve three terms.*  USflagGermany Flag Icon

Germans largely saw Merkel as the only viable chancellor candidate (sorry, Peer Steinbrück!), and they flocked to support Merkel for steering Germany largely unscathed through a global financial crisis and a subsequent eurozone crisis in an export-oriented economy that’s still growing and producing jobs for Germans.  They admire the fact that she’s steered the eurozone through the worst of its sovereign debt crisis and avoided the single currency’s implosion, all while tying bailouts for Greece and other Mediterranean countries to austerity and reform measures that would make more profligate countries (like Greece) more ‘German’ in their approach to state finances.

But beyond the infantilizing ‘Mutti’ meme or the idea that Merkel represents a ‘safe pair of hands,’ she has won over many Germans because she’s been such a pragmatic and non-ideological leader.  Though Merkel leads the ostensibly center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party), it’s really hard to know what the CDU stands for these days other than the continuity of another Merkel government — and that’s likely to pose a difficult challenge for Merkel’s successor in 2017 or 2021 or whenever.

Merkel’s made some ideological compromises to her Bavarian counterparts, the Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union)  — for instance, she has avoided the question of marriage equality, preferring that the German constitutional court largely deliver equal rights and benefits to same-sex partners at a time when both conservative governments (in the United Kingdom) and leftist governments (in France) deliver legislative solutions.

By and large, though, Merkel eschews ideological litmus tests.  Merkel campaigned on an economic agenda that varies only slightly with that of her rival center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party).  While the SPD favored a €8.50 minimum wage, Merkel pushed a sector-by-sector minimum wage approach.  Both parties supported increasing elements of the German social welfare model, such as child allowances and a rise in pensions.  While the SPD and other leftists pushed for tax increases, Merkel has been content to draw a line at merely no tax increases, to the disappointment of Merkel’s liberal coalition partners, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), who were completely wiped out of Germany’s parliament in Sunday’s elections.  After the nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima reactor in Japan in 2011, Merkel announced that Germany would phase out nuclear energy, thereby accomplishing in one fell swoop one of the German left’s top priorities since the 1970s — and perhaps the top policy goal of the Die Grünen (the Greens).

German political scientists refer to it as ‘asymmetric demobilisation‘ — Merkel has so blurred the lines between her position and the SPD position that on the top issues — economic policy, Europe, foreign affairs — the SPD can’t draw an effective contrast to her.

Merkel, in essence, has governed as a perfectly non-ideological leader.

Sound familiar?

It should to most Americans, who elected Barack Obama in 2008 in large part due to his pledge to transcend the increasingly polarized politics of the United States.  Here’s what Obama said upon accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president that summer:

America, our work will not be easy. The challenges we face require tough choices, and Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past…. For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past. You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result.

In effect, Merkel has done, in her quiet and unassuming way, what Obama has utterly failed to do — govern in a way that transcends traditional ideological divides.

You could say that Obama’s rhetoric is the standard boilerplate that any change candidate serves up in American politics — the same ‘Washington-is-not-the-answer’ tropes that Republicans and Democrats have rolled out since Ronald Reagan swept to power 33 years ago on an appealing anti-government message.  But Obama’s reputation in 2008 came mostly from his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic national convention on this precise issue:

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

So there’s a lot of reason to believe that Obama genuinely believed he could transform the political dynamic in American politics.

But his absolute lack to do so is perhaps Obama’s greatest failure as a president.  Say whatever you want about his policies, the Obama era in many ways constitutes a high-water mark for American political polarization.  Republicans now lean even more to the right, in the thrall of a tea party movement that demands no compromise from Republican officeholders.

There are all sorts of rationales that explain why Merkel has succeeded in becoming non-ideological and why Obama hasn’t — but none of them are completely satisfying.  Continue reading That ‘transcending ideology’ thing from Obama 2008? Angela Merkel did it. Obama hasn’t. →

Germany, Hesse

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

4 Comments

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?

1 Comment

Screen Shot 2013-09-22 at 12.48.24 PM

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:

Screen Shot 2013-09-22 at 3.52.18 PM

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!

3 Comments

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).

merkel2013

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

Has the first Ossi chancellor been good or bad for the former East Germany?

Leave a comment

merkel1990

Does the rise of an East German (or ‘Ossi’) chancellor in Germany just 15 years after reunification — and her likely reelection 23 years after reunification — showcase just how fast the two Germanies have sutured into a common nation?Germany Flag Icon

Or does it highlight the extent to which the eastern former German Democratic Republic (GDR) has failed to catch up with the western former Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)?

The six eastern German states are home to just 16.3 million Germans today, a vast minority of the country’s 80 million-strong population.  But two days before Germans choose whether to give a third term to chancellor Angela Merkel (pictured above in 1990 as an activist for democracy in East Germany) — who was born in Hamburg, but grew up in the eastern city of Templin, in Brandenburg, where her father was a pastor — it all depends on whether you think the glass is half full or the glass is half empty.easternstates

Merkel comes from the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party), and it was her mentor Helmut Kohl who pushed for the swift reunification of Germany after the historic 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, which had since 1961 divided the eastern city of Berlin into GDR and FRG sectors.

By some accounts, the six states that comprise what used to be the GDR are doing as well as can be expected less than a quarter-century after transitioning from a command economy to a market economy, and the end of ‘East German identity’ is already at hand:

The end of a country is on the horizon, a country that never formally existed: East Germany. A demographic group that also never formally existed is coming to an end, as well: the East Germans. It’s time for an obituary….  The old eastern German issues have been dealt with. The adjustment of pensions to western German levels is almost complete, and hopefully a uniform minimum wage will clear away some of the absurd differentiation into east and west. Eastern Germany no longer means very much to high-school and university students today. When younger people are asked where they are from, they usually mention the name of a city, a region or a state.

After all, Germany has had an eastern chancellor for the past eight years and, since March 2012, an eastern president in Joachim Gauck who fought hard against the DGR’s authoritarianism before 1990 and spent the first decade after reunification chasing down the phantoms of the DGR’s secret police, the Stasi.  The most significant transitional figure of post-reunification eastern politics, Matthias Platzeck, who has been minister-president of Brandenburg, the largest eastern state, since 2002 and a member of its government continuously since 1990, resigned for health reasons in August of this year.

Merkel and the CDU, according to polling data, are polling up to 37% — an increase from the 30% that the CDU won in the previous September 2009 elections.

But economic conditions in the six eastern states still lag behind the rest of Germany.

At the end of 2012, Germany’s unemployment rate stood at 5.5% (it’s 5.3% today going into the federal elections).  In each of those six states, the unemployment rate was significantly higher than the national average — compare that to the five largest states, all of which are in what used to be West Germany:

regional unemployment

Continue reading Has the first Ossi chancellor been good or bad for the former East Germany? →

Germany, Hesse

Close state election in Hesse could tilt federal Bundesrat further left

2 Comments

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

1 Comment

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, Greece

What kind of a deal can Greece expect after the German elections?

1 Comment

merkelsamaras

Europe may be a non-issue in the German election campaign, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that Europe will occupy a chief role in the agenda of Germany’s next chancellor, perhaps more so than exclusively German domestic issues.Greece Flag IconGermany Flag Icon

Though center-right chancellor Angela Merkel and center-left challenger Peer Steinbrück are both stridently pro-Europe, it’s an open question how to next German government should deal with the poster-child of the European financial crisis — Greece.  To understand Germany’s options requires an understanding of the underlying Greek politics — and how a Greek political crisis could plunge the entire eurozone back into panic mode.

Even as Germany and the eurozone as a whole pulls out of the worst of the most recent recession, Greece continues to struggle with economic contraction.  The economy is set to shrink by between 4.5% to 5% this year, the unemployment rate is a staggering 27.6%, and this follows five consecutive years of recession capped off by a 7.1% contraction in 2011 and 6.4% contraction last year.  Greece remains trapped in a grueling internal devaluation where the private sector is being forced to accept leaner wages to make exports more competitive and the public sector is being forcibly downsized by the terms of the bailout programs agreed to by the ‘troika’ of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund.  Greece today is not a fun place to live, and Greek voters are angry at Germany in particular for forcing so many Greeks into poverty and joblessness while doing little in terms of fiscal or monetary policy to boost the country’s medium-term growth prospects.

But German voters have their own narrative — while they’re still generally supportive of ever close union within Europe, they’re nonetheless wary of the European Union becoming a transfer union where wealth from German productivity flows to Greek profligacy.  That underlies the collective angst within the entire Germany political community late last month when Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, indicated that Greece would require a third bailout — perhaps up to €11 billion, which is still a fraction of what the troika has already lent to Greece.  (For the record, Portugal’s government is also likely to require a second bailout of its own early next summer.)

Back in Greece, that means a politically radioactive set of negotiations at a time when Greece’s government is reeling.  A coalition between the two once-dominant parties since the return of Greek democracy in 1974, the center-right New Democracy (Νέα Δημοκρατία) and the center-left PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement – Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα) holds just a cumulative 155 seats, giving it the barest of majorities in Greece’s 300-member Hellenic Parliament.  After the disastrous shutdown of Greece’s public television station ERT in June, the anti-austerity Democratic Left (Δημοκρατική Αριστερά) left the governing coalition — its leader Fotis Kouvelis previously agreed to join the coalition after Greek’s June 2012 elections in order to provide more stability for the country.

Snap elections seem likely in any event sometime next year.  If elections were held today, SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left — Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) seems likeliest to win them, according to a recent poll, making the young, massively anti-austerity opposition leader Alexis Tsipras Greece’s radical new prime minister.  The Sept. 11 Public Issue poll showed SYRIZA moving into first place with 29%, New Democracy with 28%, and the far-right, neo-fascist Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή) would win 13%.  PASOK, meanwhile, would fall to just 7%, the Greek Communist Party (KKE) would win 6.5%, the right-wing, anti-bailout Independent Greeks would win 5.5%, and the Democratic Left would win just 2.5%, less than the 3% threshold for entering parliament.

SYRIZA has essentially consolidated much of the support of the anti-austerity left, so it’s puzzling how PASOK still attracts even 7% support, given that it’s subjugated itself almost completely  to prime minister Antonis Samaras’s agenda.  But Golden Dawn’s support is rising, and it’s likely to pull support from increasingly frustrated right-wing voters that once supported New Democracy, suggesting that if economic conditions keep deteriorating, Golden Dawn could draw even more support to a largely xenophobic, nationalist agenda.

If those numbers held up in a new Greek election, Merkel and her colleagues in Paris, Brussels and other European capitals, would probably regard it as a disaster for Europe. Continue reading What kind of a deal can Greece expect after the German elections? →

Germany

Top German Green Party leader tagged with sensational sexual politics kerfuffle

1 Comment

tritten

The final weeks of the German election campaign have been marked by something less than substantive debate, what with the largest turn of events being center-left chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück posing on the cover of a top news magazine giving German voters the bird.Germany Flag Icon

But with just six days to go until voting to determine the membership of the German Bundestag, the lower (and most important) house of its parliament, all eyes are on Jürgen Trittin and Die Grünen (the Greens) after a sensational story has put Trittin, a longtime Green leader, very much on the defensive.

The scandal involves a Green Party pamphlet from Göttingen in 1981 — just two years after the Greens formed as a political party — that Trittin approved and which called for the legalization of sex between minors and adults.  Trittin was a student at the time, one of five members of an editorial board that approved the manifesto, and claims not to have known the extent of the pamphlet.

Trittin, who served as the environmental minister in center-left chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s government between 1998 and 2005, today accepted full responsibility for the pamphlet and apologized for any minor role he played, which he claimed incorporated the stance of a radical gay rights group.

No one disputes the substantive content of the actual allegation, but it’s hard not to see the kerfuffle as a dirty trick against the Greens — family minister Kristina Schröder was quick to demand Trittin’s resignation, and other members of the center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) were also quick to attack Trittin and the Greens.  Alexander Dobrindt, the secretary-general of the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria, the Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union), called Trittin a front man for a ‘pedophilia cartel.’

Dobrindt himself is no stranger to controversy after calling on Greece to leave the eurozone last year during the heart of the eurozone’s financial crisis, and his CSU is the main force preventing the legislative adoption of marriage equality in Germany.

The CDU/CSU’s sanctimonious tone against Trittin is akin to demanding that Merkel to resign because of her now documented, minor involvement with the communist Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unity Party) as a young scientist in East Germany.  Even though Merkel had ties in her student days to the SED, so did most prominent East Germans, due to the nature of living in an authoritarian dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s.  No one credibly believes that any minor collaboration should outweigh the role she played as a democratic activist in the late 1980s or doubt her legitimacy over two decades as a top policymaker in the reunified Germany.

But the Greens, which got their start as a radical leftist group and emerged from the new political movements of the 1970s, including the environmental movement, the pacifist movement and the sexual revolution, formally endorsed Germany’s anti-pedophilia laws in 1989.  The Green Party has been hit with charges of supporting pedophilia in the past, and it was Franz Walter, a political scientist investigation the party’s past affiliations with pedophile activists, who discovered to link to Trittin.

It’s also not difficult to understand why the CDU/CSU is brimming with such stern disapproval — the profile of the Green Party’s electorate has become older and wealthier over the past decade.  So if the latest scandal causes Green voters to think twice about their support (especially soft Green supporters), many of them will consider voting for the CDU or the CDU’s liberal junior coalition partner, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party) instead of the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party).  That’s important — while the CDU/CSU leads the SPD by between 12 and 16 points in most opinion polls, the FDP is winning around 5% in polls, which is the threshold for winning seats in the Bundestag on the basis of proportional representation.

So in a world where the Green vote collapses, it would be much better for Merkel if the SPD gains a few more votes, so long as the FDP gains a few more votes (at least enough to win 5% of the electorate).

Given the state of the campaign, the Greens have already been doing a pretty good job of confirming their own irrelevance.  If it’s been a horrible campaign season for the SPD and the FDP, it’s not been an easy one for the Greens.  Polls show the Greens winning between 9% and 11% of the vote, and markedly less than the 20% to 25% that polls showed the Greens winning in much of 2011 — after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan but before Merkel announced her support for phasing out Germany’s nuclear energy. Continue reading Top German Green Party leader tagged with sensational sexual politics kerfuffle →

Bavaria, Germany

FDP shut out of Bavarian parliament, CSU wins absolute majority

3 Comments

horst

The result of today’s state elections in Bavaria has both good news and bad news in terms of Angela Merkel’s hopes to win a third term as chancellor in exactly one week.bavarian_flag_iconGermany Flag Icon

With results still coming in, the center-right Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union) will improve vastly upon its historically poor result in the prior September 2008 election, giving Bavaria’s minister president Horst Seehofer (pictured above) an absolute majority in the 187-member Landtag, Bavaria’s unicameral state parliament.

The current projection gives the CSU 101 seats, with just 43 seats for the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party) and 18 seats each for Die Grünen (the Greens) and the center-right group of independents, the Freie Wähler (FW, Free Voters).

Here’s the latest snapshot of the result:

bavaria2013

That’s great news for the CSU, which has controlled Bavaria’s state government consecutively since 1947.  The Bavarian-based CSU is the sister party of Merkel’s Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party), which competes everywhere else in Germany, and the two parties work together as a union for federal political purposes.  So the fact that the CSU increased its support by over 5% in what was already a center-right heartland is a sign that Merkel will be able to drive up the number of seats that the CDU/CSU will win in next week’s federal elections.

It’s an amazing turnaround for the CSU, which won less than 44% five years ago and was polling just 40% as recently as 2010.  It’s a huge win for Seehofer personally as well, given that his personality dominated the CSU’s presidential-style campaign, the same tactic that Merkel and the CDU have deployed for next week’s federal elections.  It puts Seehofer alongside recent CSU leaders who have dominated Bavaria’s recent past, such as Franz Josef Strauß in the 1970s and 1980s and Edmund Stoiber in the 1990s and 2000s.  Given the relative strength of the Bavarian economy vis-à-vis Germany and, especially vis-à-vis Europe, the CSU’s win is not surprising — Bavaria’s reputation long ago solidified its image as the land of laptops und Lederhose.

But it’s horrible news for the liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), which won just 3.2% today, falling far short of the 5% threshold required to win seats in the Landtag.

Seehofer and the CSU depended on a governing coalition with the Free Democrats for the fast five years, and Merkel and the CDU/CSU govern in coalition with the Free Democrats at the federal level as well.  Since riding a wave of popularity in the late 2000s (the Free Democrats won nearly 15% of the vote in the 2009 federal elections), its public support collapsed shortly thereafter.  After a series of poor performances in state elections, foreign minister Guido Westerwelle stepped down as the party’s leader.  But its new leader Philipp Rösler, Germany’s first Vietnamese-born party leader, has hardly done much better.  Under his leadership, though, the Free Democrats actually gained support in two key state-level votes — in the May 2012 North Rhine-Westphalia election and the January 2013 Lower Saxony state elections.

The FDP’s loss in Bavaria comes at a devastating time, however.  Seehofer and the CSU in Bavaria will no longer need a coalition partner, but that’s not likely to be the case for Merkel next week, so Merkel needs the Free Democrats to perform much better nationwide in seven days.  While Merkel’s CDU/CSU widely leads in the polls in advance of next week’s federal election, Merkel is unlikely to win the kind of outright majority that Seehofer won today (because the rest of Germany tilts further to the center and to the left than the Catholic, socially conservative Bavaria).  Just as for Bavaria’s state elections, there’s a 5% threshold for winning seats on the basis of proportional representation in the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany’s national parliament, and polls show the Free Democrats treading at about 5% support nationally.

So if the Free Democrats win less than 5% next week, Merkel will be forced to look to other alternatives: an unstable minority government, return to a ‘grand coalition’ with the rival Social Democrats or a more creative solution, such as a ‘black-green’ coalition with the Greens.  Even if the Free Democrats win more than 5%, their ranks are likely to be so decimated that Merkel may be forced into an alternative anyway.  Continue reading FDP shut out of Bavarian parliament, CSU wins absolute majority →