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Germany, Greece

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

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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

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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

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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 →

Germany

Photo of the day: Steinbrück gives Germany the bird

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Peer Steinbr¸ck auf Titel des SZ-Magazins

That’s not a photoshopped image — it’s really the center-left chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück giving the bird to an interviewer!Germany Flag Icon

As Spigel explains, Steinbrück was interviewed by Süddeutsche Zeitung for a regular feature, ‘Don’t Say Anything Now,’ which invites various people to answer questions with gestures instead of words:

Steinbrück was “very spontaneous”.

For Steinbrück’s spokesman Rolf Kleine, it was apparently “a little too spontaneous,” according to the paper.

So what question prompted the candidate to give what German’s call the “stink finger”? To be fair, the question was a bit obnoxious — and if this been in the middle of a bar and not in the middle of a campaign in which the man in question is trying to become a major global leader, it might not raise any eyebrows. It’s a bit base, but also very funny — defiantly so. Here it goes: “Gaffe Peer, Problem Peer, Peerlusconi — you don’t have to worry about being given any nice nicknames, do you?” The question was a reference to gaffes made by the candidate early on in the campaign.

But at the end of a nearly yearlong campaign, voters prefer chancellor Angela Merkel by a nearly 2-to-1 margin in polls and Merkel’s center-right Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union) has consistently led Steinbrück’s Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party) by double digits all year long, you’d be excused if wondering whether Steinbrück feels like flipping the bird to the entire German electorate.

Voters go to the polls on September 22 to select the members of Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag.

Photo credit to Alfred Steffen/SZ-Magazin/dpa.

 

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? →

Germany

Green is the new black: making the case for a Merkel-led CDU-Green coalition

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I argue in EurActiv this morning that the most stable possible coalition for chancellor Angela Merkel after Germany’s September 22 federal elections might be a coalition between Merkel’s Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU, Christian Democratic Union) and the increasingly centrist Die Grünen (the Greens):

The possibility, long been referred to as a ‘Jamaica’ coalition because the colors of the three parties are those of the Jamaican flag — black (CDU), yellow (FDP) and green, has never happened in the Bundestag.  State-level examples aren’t promising – Germany’s first ‘Jamaica’ coalition in Saarland collapsed after just 26 months later, and a purely ‘black-green’ coalition in Hamburg didn’t fare much better between 2008 and 2010, ending after difficulties enacting education reforms.

While it’s still more likely that Merkel will try to continue her current coalition with the liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democrats), the FDP is polling so poorly that it may not even return to the Bundestag — if it does, it will be with far fewer seats than the 93 seats it won in the previous election.  The likeliest alternative is another ‘grand coalition’ with the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party), but given the difficulty that the SPD has had in drawing contrasts with Merkel since the 2005-09 coalition, there’s reason to believe another ‘grand coalition’ would be tumultuous and likely to end with early elections.

A CDU-Green union could give Merkel the best of both worlds — a more stable majority than the FDP and a more reliable coalition partner than the SPD….

Merkel’s 2011 decision to phase out nuclear energy and to boost solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy made her an immediate ally of the Greens on their top policy priority, clearing what had been the chief obstacle to a CDU-Green partnership.  Otherwise, the Greens have long been among the most pro-European of Germany’s political parties, and former Green leader and foreign minister Joschka Fischer championed greater European federalism.

It’s not to say there aren’t problems with the idea, and there’s still a leftist contingent that would be appalled by a partnership with Merkel.  During the campaign, the Greens have called for a tax increase of up to 49% for the top rate and for an additional 15% wealth tax, and it’s unlikely Merkel’s CDU would agree to anything like that.

The Greens have always been split between fundi (fundamentalist / leftists) and realo (realistic / moderate) wings.  But the radical 1960s-era Green leadership has given way to a more moderate leadership, personified by Katrin Göring-Eckardt, one of two Green chancellor-candidates and Cem Özdemir, a son of Turkish immigrants.

Even the more leftist Jürgen Trittin, the other Green chancellor-candidate, has espoused relatively centrist views.  Meanwhile, Claudia Roth, the most stridently leftist Green leader, placed last in the race to determine who should represent the Greens in this year’s election.

Perhaps the most promising sign for a ‘black-green’ coalition is the level to which Greens have governed pragmatically at the state level.  Although the Greens came to power in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg two years ago largely on the basis of opposition to the ‘Stuttgart 21’ underground train station project, it is now Green minister-president Winfried Kretschmann working with SPD allies and business interests to develop it.

Demographic data also favors a ‘black-green’ coalition:

Polling data shows that the Green electorate isn’t incredibly dissimilar to the upper-class, middle-aged CDU electorate — and nearly half of them already prefer Merkel for chancellor.

It’s not that it’s the likeliest coalition to emerge on September 23, but the chances of a ‘black-green’ government are currently underreported.

Here’s more on Germany’s upcoming elections from Suffragio, including:

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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merkeldachau

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 →

Germany

How Peer Steinbrück became the Bob Dole of German politics

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steinbruck

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:

0804pollofpollsgermany

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 →

Germany

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

Entinhaltlichung: the best thing you’ve read so far on German politics this year

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Angela Merkel gibt Einblicke in Privatleben

Neal Ascherson turns his gaze toward German chancellor Angela Merkel, her opponent Peer Steinbrück, the former East German ghosts that haunt Germany, and the Hartz IV labor reforms that also haunt it, in a superb essay for the London Review of Books that’s probably the best thing you’ve read so far this year on Germany, its politics, the importance of regional governance in an increasingly federal Europe and the north-south (and west-east) European divide.Germany Flag Icon

On Berlin, Ascherson captures in one paragraph the idiosyncratic nature of Berlin, which is really unlike any other city in Europe, which he argues ‘will never be a real capital again’:

When people talk about ‘Berlin’, they usually don’t mean the government of the most powerful nation in Europe. They mean Klaus Wowereit, the gay mayor, or the film festival, or a new café on the Oranienburgerstrasse, or the botched plan for yet another unnecessary airport. There is no centre. Even Bonn, in the years when the federal government was there, seemed more in command than Berlin is now.

Ascherson uses reunification as an analogical point — it’s the moment the West German social welfare model fell apart, for better and for worse:

And when the West Germans won that war and annexed East Germany (the best word for it), the aftermath was uncannily like Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Here was repeated the economic collapse, the inrush of greedy carpetbaggers from the victorious West, the purging of an entire elite from management, teaching and social leadership, the abolition of institutions and, of course, the liberation of the slaves – this time, into mass unemployment.

And as for Merkel herself, Ascherson nails it:

As for Merkel, sometimes she looks placid, sometimes she looks cross and disappointed, sometimes she smiles politely at foreigners over coffee and cakes. So she reminds people of Mum, and those who want to keep holding her hand think they know what she wants. Others, in despair, confess they have no idea what she wants. These days, she seems to have no policy of her own. Instead, after a suitable delay, she takes on opposition policies in a diluted form. Intellectual critics complain that she has no ‘idea’, no ‘concept’. And to describe what she does, or rather doesn’t, they have coined a frightful new German word: Entinhaltlichung. ‘It means what it says,’ a Berlin friend tells me: ‘Decontentification.’

Spiegel journalist Dirk Kurbjuweit summarized Merkel’s Entinhaltlichung earlier this month by comparing it to the Biedermeier era — the sleepy, happy period between 1815’s Congress of Vienna and the return of revolutionary spirit in 1848:

At the federal level, though, Merkel’s Germany is by and large somnolent, in part because of the government’s failure to present new ideas and plans. The chancellor gets by without them, and even the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), the junior partner in the ruling coalition, can’t seem to muster up much of an alternative, happy to avoid any danger of becoming a target of hostility…

By and large, things are calm in Merkel’s republic — and that really is something new…. as chancellor, she quickly became “mommy,” a nickname that seemed silly at first but has since proved apt, in the sense that a “mommy” is someone who takes care of the home, makes life pleasant and keeps worries at bay.

Ascherson’s essay strikes many parallel notes, even its title: ‘Hanging on to Mutti,’ a reference to an informal term for the German word for mother, Mutter, and both Kurbjuweit and Ascherson wrangle with the fundamental question of why Merkel herself remains so apparently popular despite leading a government that’s neither incredibly remarkable or popular.

What’s been clear for some time, at least since late last year when it became clear than the rather wooden Steinbrück would be the chancellor candidate of the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party), is that the September federal election is going to be all about Angela. Continue reading Entinhaltlichung: the best thing you’ve read so far on German politics this year →

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What Iceland’s election tells us about post-crisis European politics

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Iceland was supposed to be different.Iceland Flag IconEuropean_Union

In allowing its banks to fail, neo-Keynesian economists have argued, Iceland avoided the fate of Ireland, which nationalized its banks and now faces a future with a very large public debt.  By devaluing its currency, the krónur, Iceland avoided the fate of countries like Estonia and others in southern Europe trapped in the eurozone and a one-size-fits all monetary policy, allowing for a rapid return to economic growth and rapidly falling unemployment.  Neoclassical economists counter that Iceland’s currency controls mean that it’s still essentially shut out from foreign investment, and the accompanying inflation has eroded many of the gains of Iceland’s return to GDP growth and, besides, Iceland’s households are still struggling under mortgage and other debt instruments that are linked to inflation or denominated in foreign currencies.

But Iceland’s weekend parliamentary election shows that both schools of economic thought are right.

Elections are rarely won on the slogan, ‘it could have been worse.’ Just ask U.S. president Barack Obama, whose efforts to implement $800 billion in stimulus programs in his first term in office went barely mentioned in his 2012 reelection campaign.

Iceland, as it turns out, is hardly so different at all — and it’s now virtually a case study in an electoral pattern that’s become increasingly pronounced in Europe that began when the 2008 global financial crisis took hold, through the 2010 sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone and through the current European-wide recession that’s seen unemployment rise to the sharpest levels in decades.

Call it the European three-step.

In the first step, a center-right government, like the one led by Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (Independence Party) in Iceland in 2008, took the blame for the initial crisis.

In the second step, a center-left government, like the one led by Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir and the Samfylkingin (Social Democratic Alliance) in Iceland, replaced it, only to find that it would be forced to implement harsh austerity measures, including budget cuts, tax increases and, in Iceland’s case, even more extreme measures, such as currency controls and inflation-inducing devaluations.  That leads to further voter disenchantment, now with the center-left.

The third step is the return of the initial center-right party (or parties) to power, as the Independence Party and their traditional allies, the Framsóknarflokkurinn (Progressive Party) will do following Iceland’s latest election, at the expense of the more newly discredited center-left.  In addition, with both the mainstream center-left and center-right now associated with economic pain, there’s increasing support for new parties, some of them merely protest vehicles and others sometimes more radical, on both the left and the right.  In Iceland, that means that two new parties, Björt framtíð (Bright Future) and the Píratar (Pirate Party of Iceland) will now hold one-seventh of the seats in Iceland’s Alþingi.

This is essentially what happened last year in Greece, too.  Greece Flag IconIn the first step, Kostas Karamanlis and the center-right New Democracy (Νέα Δημοκρατία) initially took the blame for the initial financial crisis.  In the second step, George Papandreou and the center-left PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement – Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα) overwhelming won the October 2009 elections, only to find itself forced to accept a bailout deal with the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.  In the third step, after two grueling rounds of election, Antonis Samaras and New Democracy returned to power in June 2012.

By that time, however, PASOK was so compromised that it was essentially forced into a minor subsidiary role supporting Samaras’s center-right, pro-bailout government.  A more radical leftist force, SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left — Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς), led by the young, charismatic Alexis Tsipras, now vies for the lead routinely in polls, and on the far right, the noxious neo-nazi Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή) now attracts a small, but significant enough portion of the Greek electorate to put it in third place.

The process seems well under way in other countries, too.  In France, for examFrance Flag Iconple, center-right president Nicolas Sarkozy lost reelection in May 2012 amid great hopes for the incoming Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party) administration of François Hollande, but his popularity is sinking to ever lower levels as France trudges through its own austerity, and polls show Sarkozy would now lead Hollande if another presidential election were held today.

It’s not just right-left-right, though. The European three-step comes in a different flavor, too: left-right-left, and you can spot the trend in country after country across Europe — richer and poorer, western and eastern, northern and southern. Continue reading What Iceland’s election tells us about post-crisis European politics →

Germany, Lower Saxony

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

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Voters in Germany’s fourth-most populous state, Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), have elected popular Hannover mayor Stephan Weil (pictured above) its new minister-president after an incredibly narrow victory for the center-left coalition, according to official provisional results.
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The predicted victory would mean that the center-right coalition headed by minister-president David McAllister, a high-profile (and half-Scottish!) politician within the ruling Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union) of German chancellor Angela Merkel would lose power for the first time in a decade.

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

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

Niedersachsen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Germany, Lower Saxony

Lower Saxony state elections also a mild barometer for Merkel’s federal CDU

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State elections in Lower Saxony later this month are to Germany’s center-right what elections last year in North-Rhine Westphalia were to Germany’s center-left. Germany Flag Iconlower_saxony

Last year, state elections in North-Rhine Westphalia were somewhat of a barometer of German federal politics, and the incumbent minister-president Hannelore Kraft’s win in May 2012, extending the strength of her Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party) as well as of her coalition partner, Die Grünen (the Green Party).  Her commanding position as a pro-growth, pro-Keynesian premier in Germany’s most populous state instantly made her a possibility for a future jump to federal politics — and until she ruled herself out, a likely more savvy challenger against chancellor Angela Merkel in federal elections expected later this autumn (certainly more charismatic, in any event, than the SPD’s chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück).

Although Lower Saxony is only just Germany’s fourth-most populous state, it lies just to the north of North-Rhine Westphalia, and like North-Rhine Westphalia, it’s a bit of a political weathervane.  It launched the career of former chancellor SPD Gerhard Schröder, who was minister-president of Lower Saxony from 1990 to 1998 before sweeping to federal power in the 1998 federal elections.  Since 2003, the Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union) has, however, controlled Lower Saxony’s Langtag, its 152-member unicameral state parliament.

And its current minister-president since 2010, David McAllister (pictured above with Merkel), like Kraft, is a rising star who could one day make a leap to federal politics.  Born in West Berlin at the height of the Cold War to a German mother and a Scottish soldier who came to Germany during World War II, at 41, he’s one of the youngest rising CDU leaders, and political observers both within and outside Germany pit him as a credible successor to Merkel as the head of the CDU federally — Merkel even offered him a position as general secretary of the federal party in 2005, though McAllister declined at the time.

There’s some irony that ‘Mac,’ whose English is Scottish-accented due to his half-British roots, found his political base in Hanover, the capital of Lower Saxony, given that the British monarchy traces its 18th century roots to Hanover.  He has retained a British passport and has built ties to UK prime minister David Cameron.  He proposed to his wife at Loch Ness in Scotland, and he married her in 2003 wearing a kilt.  Suffice it to say his elevation in the future as Germany’s chancellor would bring about an interesting chapter in Anglo-German relations, just 68 years after World War II ended.

Nonetheless, a Kraft-McAllister showdown in, say, 2018, isn’t an incredibly unlikely scenario — but first, he’ll have to win the Jan. 20 elections in Lower Saxony.

The CDU currently holds 68 seats and it governs Lower Saxony in alliance with the economically liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democrats), who hold 13 seats.  The SPD holds just 48 seats, their traditional allies, the Greens, hold 13 seats, and the more radical Die Linke (The Left Party) hold 11 seats.

The CDU won 42.5% in the prior January 2008 elections to just 30.3% for the SPD and, while polls show the CDU with a steady, but narrower lead, the election results will invariably be seen through the prism of the parties’ respective strengths — given that the CDU is expected to win the election, it will be seen as a troubling sign for Merkel’s federal party if the race is incredibly tight, or if the SPD pull off an upset win.

Polls generally mirror national polls — with the CDU outpolling the SPD, with the Greens polling in the low double-digits, and the FDP, The Left and the new protest party Pirate Party each poll below 5%, the threshold for parties to win seats to the Landtag.  That’s not a small likelihood — in 1998, the FDP won just 4.9% and was consequently shut out completely, and The Left only won their first seats in Lower Saxony’s parliament in 2008.

Despite the CDU’s steady lead, however, the fear for McAllister is that the FDP could lose all of its seats in the Landtag, thereby forcing him to govern with the Greens or the SPD — or worse for the CDU, allow the SPD to form a governing coalition with the Greens.

Stephan Weil, who is leading the SPD in the regional elections, is the popular mayor of Hanover (since 2006) — his wife, Rosemarie Kerkow-Weil, is the president of the University of Hanover.  A vote that results with Weil as minister-president could boost the SPD’s hopes — and spur doubts about Merkel’s CDU — in advance of federal elections this autumn. Continue reading Lower Saxony state elections also a mild barometer for Merkel’s federal CDU →

Germany

Thoughts on what a Steinbrück government would mean for U.S.-German relations

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I’ve written a short piece today for Deutsche Welle looking at how U.S.-German relations might (slightly) vary if Peer Steinbrück, chancellor candidate for the center-left  Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party), defeats current German chancellor Angela Merkel, of the center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) in elections expected to be held in September 2013.

By and large, the main priority for U.S. policymakers, no matter who wins the Nov. 6 presidential election in the United States, will be that Germany keeps the eurozone from spiraling into crisis.

The key point is that U.S. policymakers should expect continuity, mostly, on the German position vis-a-vis the eurozone and on German economic policy:

Steinbrück, who served as Germany’s finance minister under Merkel in the SPD-CDU grand coalition government from 2005 to 2009, would also mark continuity in German economic policy – in contrast to center-left leaders such as former UK prime minister Gordon Brown and current French president Francois Hollande, Steinbrück derided Keynsian economics in 2008 and, alongside Merkel, refused to consider large amounts of stimulus funding in 2008 and 2009.

Nonetheless, on European policy, as well as on the more narrow focus of German economic policy, Steinbrück would not exactly mark a rupture; that will be especially true if the next German election leads to another grand coalition between the CDU and SPD.

Steinbrück emerged as the SPD candidate last month.

Ultimately, I note, the biggest area for potential disagreement is on foreign policy especially in light of the rift over Iraq between then-U.S. president George W. Bush and then-German chancellor Gerhard Schröder a decade ago:

[N]owhere will the US election matter more than in the area of foreign policy – a Romney administration would be much more likely than the Obama administration to consider military action to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapon capability.  While Merkel’s government has supported the Obama administration’s approach for increasingly tougher economic sanctions on Iran, it seems unlikely that Germany, especially under a SPD chancellor, would have much appetite for military action in Iran.