Tag Archives: CSU

Bavaria, Germany

FDP shut out of Bavarian parliament, CSU wins absolute majority

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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:

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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 →

Germany

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

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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 →

Bavaria, Germany

Seventy years on, the politics of the Holocaust in Germany remain fraught with difficulty

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In what’s been perhaps the most boring campaign season in German politics since reunification, chancellor Angela Merkel made big headlines yesterday when she became the first acting chancellor to tour the grounds of the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau.bavarian_flag_iconGermany Flag Icon

Merkel took a somber detour from her campaign to visit the site, where 41,000 mostly Jewish prisoners were slaughtered by the Nazi regime — the concentration camp’s location in the middle of Bavaria, in contrast to even more ghastly extermination camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka in what is today Poland, has always made it a particularly wrenching site in the postwar German memory.  Merkel laid a wreath in honor of the victims, and she met with several survivors, including 93-year-old Max Mannheimer, who was imprisoned at the camp at age 24 and today chairs the Dachau camp community association.  The visit won plaudits from German Jewish groups, who praised Merkel for pausing her campaign to reflect on the atrocities of what happened seven decades ago at Dachau, not just far to the east but in the southern heartland of Germany.

It is perhaps appropriate that Merkel, the first postwar East German chancellor, was the first active German leader to visit the site.  Merkel spent the first 35 years of her life behind the Iron Curtain, first as a physical chemist and increasingly, a pro-democracy activist when the Berlin Wall fell.  Though West Germany recovered rapidly after the end of  the Nazi era, East Germans suffered through four decades of authoritarian socialist rule under the heel of Soviet Russia.  In her brief remarks, Merkel noted that ‘the name Dachau is tragically famous as it serves as a model for the concentration camps,’ adding that ‘the memory of that fate fills me with deep sadness and shame.’

But the headlines are not entirely positive — and some are downright hostile — because Merkel scheduled the visit as an aside from a reelection whistle-stop tour.  After visiting Dachau, Merkel was off to visit a beer tent in the nearby town of Dachau and delivered a political speech alongside a Bavarian brass band in traditional costume.

A leader of the opposition Die Grünen (Green Party), Renate Künast, harshly attacked what she called a ‘tasteless and outrageous combination’:

“If you’re serious about commemoration at such a place of horrors, then you don’t pay such a visit during an election campaign,” she told the daily Leipziger Volkszeitung.

But Merkel’s main opponent, Peer Steinbrück, the chancellor candidate of the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party), has not criticized her, and Jewish groups have universally cheered Merkel for her gesture, so it’s unlikely that the visit, or the controversy surrounding it, is likely to cause any lasting political damage.  Voters generally understand that incumbents running for reelection have two jobs — chancellor and candidate.

It’s a reminder that, despite Germany’s efforts to come to terms with the Holocaust, it’s not always an easy topic to navigate for German politicians, even 68 years after the end of World War II and even for a politician as skilled as Merkel. Continue reading Seventy years on, the politics of the Holocaust in Germany remain fraught with difficulty →

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

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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 →

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How Peer Steinbrück became the Bob Dole of German politics

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Peer Steinbrück is not going to be Germany’s next chancellor.Germany Flag Icon

Steinbrück’s standing in opinion polls has worsened since it became clear he would become the chancellor candidate of the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party) — the more that Germans get to know Steinbrück (pictured above), the more they dislike him, no matter how many Bavarian mountains he climbs between now and September 22.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that chancellor Angela Merkel is assured of reelection, because while her own Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union), together with the Bavarian Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union), leads the SPD in polls, it’s uncertain whether its smaller coalition partner, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democrats), will win enough support to meet the 5% threshold to win seats in the Bundestag, the German parliament, though the FDP has ticked ever so slightly upwards in polls in the past couple of months.

Polls have been consistently remarkable since before 2013 began, and they make for grim reading if you’re an SPD supporter.  Here’s the state of things with about six weeks to go until voting:

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That wouldn’t just mean a loss, it would mean a Bob Dole-style loss —  think back to the 1996 presidential election when Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton, who seemed so vulnerable after the 1994 midterm elections brought a Republican sweep of Congress, sailed to reelection against Dole.  Clinton aides disparagingly joked after the fact that it was like virtually running for reelection unopposed.  Dole won just 40.7% of the popular vote to 49.2% for Clinton — a landslide the likes of which hasn’t been seen in the United States since.

To put into perspective the kind of loss that Steinbrück and the SPD is facing, it’s important to remember what happened in the previous 2009 election, which at the time was the SPD’s worst postwar election result.  Under Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who had served as foreign minister and deputy chancellor in the Merkel-led ‘grand coalition,’ the SPD won just 146 seats in the Bundestag (a drop of 76 seats) with just 23% of the party vote and 28% of the constituency vote.  (Half of the 598 Bundestag seats are determined in first-past-the-post single-member constituencies, the other half are determined on the basis of proportional representation on the basis of statewide party lists).

But if Steinmeier’s 2009 performance was a tragedy, Steinbrück’s 2013 performance is turning out to be a farce.  It’s amazing to believe that Steinbrück is in danger of leading the SPD to an even poorer result that Steinmeier’s in 2009, especially with the Greens set to improve on their 2009 performance.  Continue reading How Peer Steinbrück became the Bob Dole of German politics →

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Much Ado about Nothing? The non-politics of privacy in Germany

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allyourdataisbelongtous

Guest post by Mark Dawson and Jacob Krumrey

With German chancellors Angela Merkel’s personal approval rating at 62% and her CDU/CSU leading over the opposition SPD by around 15%, the result of Germany’s upcoming general election seems to be all but a foregone conclusion.  In the midst of a flaccid campaign, the U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has now not only revealed that Germany is one of the principal targets of the NSA’s internet surveillance operations (‘Prism’) but also accused the German intelligence services, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), of collusion with the NSA – of being ‘in bed’ together.  These revelations could potentially stir up an otherwise all too quiet campaign.Germany Flag Icon

The opposition SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Social Democratic Party) are sensing an opportunity to attack Merkel’s integrity and competence, her main assets in the campaign.  In a thundering editorial in Germany’s leading tabloid newspaper, Bild, last week, their parliamentary leader, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, demanded answers on the steps Merkel had taken to protect German interests.  The chancellor now seems to be facing a dilemma: either she was aware of the extent of data-sharing between the NSA and BND, and therefore lays accused of obfuscation, or was not aware at all – and therefore less competent than her public image suggests.  At the very least, the opposition hope to cast Merkel as an unprincipled populist: cozying up to the United States when spying on internet users in Germany and sharing intelligence beneficial to German security, while chastising the very same practice when it is found to be in breach of civil rights.

Merkel’s CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands, Christian Democratic Party) / CSU (Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern, the Bavarian Christian Social Union) government, meanwhile, are trying to counter the allegations by adopting an assertive posture: Interior Minister Friedrich has travelled to Washington, D.C., to demand answers from the US government.  Merkel herself, in a packed press conference on Friday, insisted that, in Germany, German law has to apply unconditionally.  At the same time, however, Merkel was forced into delaying tactics.  The German weekly Der Spiegel had just published fresh allegations about the extent of collusion between German and American authorities: she would answer questions but only after having received further information from the Americans.

It is too early to gauge definitively the impact of these allegations on the election campaign.  So far, however, the SPD have not been able to turn the tide in their favour. The latest ZDF opinion polls show that even though the CDU/CSU have suffered small losses, the SPD remain at a dismal 29%.   Only the FDP, traditionally strong on civil rights, have gained: perhaps even enough to clear the five-per cent threshold necessary to allow them to stay in parliament. Ironically, the ‘spy scandal’ – through a reinvigorated FDP – could re-open the prospect of the current CDU/FDP coalition staying in power.

What could explain this paradox?  To begin with, the SPD face a credibility problem of their own.  As the government have been quick to point out, cooperation between U.S. and German authorities on intelligence is long-standing.  Steinmeier himself was responsible for Germany’s intelligence services during the previous ‘grand coalition’ government, during which many of the programmes now being investigated were launched.  When it comes to privacy, moreover, German votes usually credit niche parties such as Die Grünen (The Greens) or the libertarian FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei, Free Democratic Party).  More important perhaps, German voters show little appetite for a polarized campaign in the first place.  Asked in a recent ZDF poll about their desired coalition, a majority of Germans said they would like to see a grand coalition of the two main contenders.

Beyond campaign politics, the larger question is about the attitude of Germans towards privacy – supposedly the source of a transatlantic conflict of values. The same ZDF poll suggested that a vast majority of Germans find the charges of collusion credible: 79% believe that Merkel’s government were aware of the NSA’s activities in Germany.  At the same time, in a different poll, only 5% argued that the issue would have a significant impact on their voting intentions. The party with the strongest stance on data protection, Die Piraten (the Pirate Party), has struggled to even register in current polling in spite of the prominence of privacy on the campaign trail. The lesson may well be that German voters care about privacy in theory but are, in practice, unwilling to make it a make-or-break issue.

Mark Dawson is a professor of European law and governance at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and Jacob Krumrey is a graduate of the European University Institute. 

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A version of this piece was published at the Hertie School’s blog on Germany’s upcoming September 22 elections.

Read more of Suffragio‘s coverage on Germany here.

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

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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, Greece

Samaras ‘negotiations’ with Berlin not going so swell

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It didn’t go so well for Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras on his visits with European Union leaders in Berlin.  His plea for more time to come up with cuts to the Greek budget is being met with stony nonchalance from both German chancellor Angela Merkel (pictured above right, with Samaras) and French president François Hollande, to say nothing of German civil society.

Samaras has requested an additional two years to come up with an additional €11.5 billion in cuts to the Greek budget.  While Merkel — and especially Hollande — were sympathetic to Samaras’s plea and reiterated their support for Greece to remain in the eurozone, Samaras will return to Athens having won no concessions from Berlin or Paris.

Business daily Handelsblatt writes:

“Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras does not tire of making new demands. Now he wants more time, for the health of his economy. Not more money, only more time — at least according to his requests to Berlin and Brussels. And, in Berlin and Brussels, there will be much discussion about whether Greece should be granted more time.”

“Our instinctive reaction regarding Samaras’ request is, well, that could be something. Given the near 40 degree Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) temperatures that Germany experienced last weekend, we can empathize with Greek lethargy.”

“But is the Greek prime minister right? Is time instead of money really better? I say no.”

“We have known for a long time that time is money. Perhaps Angela Merkel will also say that to the Greeks. Despite the hot and sweaty 40-degree temperatures, there will be no more days off.”

Athens News reports that Merkel’s comments at a joint press conference with Samaras Friday were particularly tense:

“We expect Greece to deliver all that has been promised,” Merkel declared. In remarks that were unusually sharp for a joint news conference, she stressed that Berlin has heard words in the past but now expects deeds.

The tough talk contrasted sharply with the head of state honours and diplomatic smiles with which Samaras was received on his first official visit, complete with red carpet and band.

Merkel said that Samaras’ visit is a sign of the “very close ties” between the two countries, only to add later that each side had lost credibility in the eyes of the other and that trust must be regained.

And these are demands from someone who ‘Europe’ was desperate to win June’s Greek parliamentary elections.

Can you imagine how horrific the reaction would have been if the request had come from Alexis Tsipras, the leader of SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left — Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς)?

Merkel spent Sunday trying to calm the waters against anti-Greek feeling in Germany, after German Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann attacked the European Central Bank’s buying of state debt, and Alexander Dobrindt, general secretary of the governing Christlich-Soziale Union (Christian Social Union), the Bavarian conservative party and sister party of Merkel’s own Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union), speculated that Greece would leave the single currency by next year.

Bavaria, European Union, Germany

Is Bavarian finance minister Markus Söder really the most dangerous politician in Europe?

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Der Spiegel ranks the top 10 most dangerous politicians in Europe, and you might be surprised at who comes out on top.

The piece targets Markus Söder, the finance minister of Bavaria since November 2011:

The politician from the [Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union)], the conservative sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, is known for his tub-thumping rhetoric and has stepped up a gear in the euro crisis with vitriolic comments about Greece. “An example must be made of Athens, that this euro zone can show teeth,” he told the Bild am Sonntag tabloid newspaper this week. “Everyone has to leave Mom at some point and that time has come for the Greeks.”

It also points the finger at Alexander Dobrindt, general secretary of the CSU to which Söder also belongs — Dobrindt has also called on Greece to exit the eurozone by paying its debts in drachmas instead of euros.

Söder, an up-and-coming politician in the CSU, has previously served as minister for environment and health from 2008 to 2011 and from 2007 to 2008, as minister for federal and European affairs.  He’s a solid populist, to be sure — for example, he’s in favor of Bavaria’s ban on the wearing of Muslim head scarves (but not nun’s habits).

But it’s easy enough to explain away the relatively strident tone from Söder and the CSU as political posturing in advance of Bavarian state elections that must take place sometime in 2013.  The CSU will be struggling to maintain the grip that its held on Bavarian state politics since the 1950s.  At the federal level, although the CSU-backed Angel Merkel has walked a tight line when it comes to balancing national and federalist European interests, but her leftist opponents are even more federalist when it comes to Europe and the eurozone.

The Spiegel list is dominated by some of the nationalist right’s usual suspects: Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and a member of the European Parliament; Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front national in France; Timo Soini, leader of the Perussuomalaiset (PS, True Finns) party, also a member of the European Parliament; Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom); and Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Austrian Freedom Party).

They seem like odd choices, though, because none of them (except perhaps Strache) seem to be on the upswing.  Wilders is polling quite dreadfully in advance of the Dutch elections on Sept. 4.  Farage and Soini are sideshows at best.  Despite her strong showing in the French presidential election in April and the shadow she casts over the French center-right, Le Pen failed to win a seat in France’s national assembly in the June elections — and her party won just two seats in total.

To me, the following politicians are far more “dangerous” — by “dangerous,” I mean the ability to win real power or to be more effective in making mischief: Continue reading Is Bavarian finance minister Markus Söder really the most dangerous politician in Europe? →