Did Hessen teach a lesson?
BERLIN (via Washington) — My colleague Constanze Stelzemueller wrote this piece in the Financial Times about Germany’s recent state elections in Hesse and Lower Saxony before they happened. It was a critical test for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and the results were, well, critical. (Apologies to the Economist for riffing on their headline.)
February 21st, 2008 at 11:26 am
State elections in Hamburg this coming Sunday look like reducing the Christian Demcrats’ (CDU) margin in the city state; and they may well produce a Grand Coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) similar to that at the federal level under Chancellor Angela Merkel. If so, it will confirm a governing pattern favorable to Merkel.. Even so, German pundits will no doubt continue to underestimate the chancellor or at best praise her only faintly.
January’s two’s state elections brought her CDU victories in Hesse, a squeaker, and in Lower Saxony, a comfortable one. These results not only strengthened Merkel’s position within her party; they also affirmed both the slightly leftward direction which she has moved it.
In Hesse, the CDU rightwinger Roland Koch, hitherto Merkel’s only credible challenger for the party’s leadership, waged a confrontational, law-and-order campaign tinged with xenophobia. Voters dealt him a stinging rebuff, reducing his party to a slim-margin plurality. That blow to Koch means Merkel now has one heir apparent less to worry about. In Lower Saxony, on the other hand, the CDU centrist Christian Wulff ran an integrative, consensus-oriented campaign, similar to Merkel’s own political approach at the federal level. He racked up a solid victory. It looks now as if the CDU will continue to run 10 or 11 of Germany’s 16 states.
What best explains Merkel’s strong position? And strong it is: she has been scoring approval ratings in the 70s for months now, the highest of any postwar chancellor ever.
It is tempting to answer simply: It’s the economy, Dummkopf ! Merkel has had the good fortune to preside over an economy that grew a respectable 2.7 percent last year. Germany’s high-value exports continued to boom in 2007 ( up over eight percent), despite the dramatic appreciation of the Euro. . The country’s trade surplus at $289 billion during the year was the largest in the world, exceeding that of export-obsessed China. Most important at home, unemployment has dropped dramatically during her tenure, from five to 3.4 million, which she terms her “greatest success.” Her government is underway to a budgetary surplus, the first since unification in 1990. Top government finance officials think a recession unlikely, no matter what happens in the United States. As a Financial Times (London) editorialist put it: “ Germany is arguably the biggest winner of the globalization stakes among the rich countries.”
Her coalition partner, the SPD, is weak. Since the defeat of Merkel’s predecessor as chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, two and a half years ago, the Social Democratic leadership has been beset by instability. Its current boss, the bearded, corpulent Kurt Beck, is less than inspiring. The SPD has been suffering from an existential vulnerability for three decades: an inability to prevent parties from arising to its left, first the Greens in the 1970s and 1980s and now, for the last five years, also the Left Party, which last month made it into the Hesse and Lower Saxony state legislatures and already governs in tandem with the SPD in the Berlin state administration. The CDU, on the other hand, has always managed to hinder the rise of a party to its right.
Merkel began by profiling herself unexpectedly but brilliantly in foreign policy. She has traveled to more countries abroad than any chancellor before her. As president of the European Union she played the key role in salvaging the EU Treaty. Presiding over the G-8 summit last year, she gently bullied through an agreement on global warming. She has stalwartly stood for human rights, chiding Russia’s Putin on the issue and challenging China’s leadership by receiving the Dalai Lama. She has repaired relations with the United States, which Schröder had badly damaged, earning an invitation to George Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch. Her positions on Syria, Iran, and Israel align with those of Bush’s administration, but she has demonstrated her independence from Washngton too by refusing to be drawn into the Iraq war or to send the 3,300 Bundeswehr soldiers now in relatively peaceful northern Afghanistan down to fight in the country’s south, as the Pentagon would dearly like.
Her foreign policy reflects that post-national, consensus-minded, pacific approach that is characteristic of most EU countries. But with her championing of policies to combat climate change and to promote human rights, she has brought Germany to stand for something more in the world than economic prowess and readiness to atone for the Nazis’ crimes.
On domestic side, as the pundits point out, her record is much more mixed. But it is hardly insignificant. Her cabinet includes two outstanding ministers: Peer Steinbrück for finance, who has steered the government toward a balanced budget, and Ursula von der Leyen, who has radically changed family policy to provide more parental leave and nursery places to help working mothers. Merkel has had the courage to get her Grand Coalition to take fiscally necessary but politically unpopular steps, such as increasing the value added tax and raising retirement age from 65 to 67, both of which help bolster revenues and preserve Germany’s 120-year-old welfare state.
Rising politically after 1998, Merkel proved herself a canny operator. As has happened again with Koch last month, she has by good tactics or good instinct or by sheer good luck managed to sideline all her male rivals, the heads of the CDU state party organizations in the west. She does not make much of her gender; and she is no feminist battler for women’s rights. But pending a possible Hillary Clinton presidency in the U.S., Angela Merkel is surely the most powerful woman politician in the world.
The best explanation though for Merkel’s success is to be found in her governing style. It meshes well with Germans’ political proclivities. Unlike the flashy and unpredictable Nicolas Sarkozy or the impatient and often dithering Gordon Brown, Merkel is calm, predictable, self-confident, patient and, at the right moment, decisive. From her mentor Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in whose government she held ministerial posts in the 1990’s, Merkel learned how to “sit things out” until that moment arrives.
Trained as a natural scientist, she carefully calculates the pros and cons, the odds for and against any political move, and the likelihood of CDU-SPD consensus.. That approach has served her well in maintaining the delicate balance of her Grand Coalition..
Merkel’s high approval ratings, it is true, are not coupled with any particularly great enthusiasm for her among voters. Her style is down to earth. She ventures only sensible, doable “small steps” in modernizing her party, introducing reform, and damping down confrontation. She practices no populism.
This style suits the risk-adverse, stability-loving German electorate, who abhor populism. Merkel has put her mark on Germany’s politics during her first two years. That will become much harder within the Grand Coalition as the 2009 federal elections draw near, with CDU and SPD both maneuvering for electoral advantage and Merkel positing reelection as her chief goal. If recession does not hit, her foreign policy achievements and courage, her modest but fiscally sound domestic reforms, and above all her integrative style, so congenial to post-World War II Germans, make it likely that she will achieve her goal.
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:16 pm
consensus politics…
How does the rss feed work so I can get updated on your blog?…