Berlin – The lights were going on in the city on election night, when the first end results started appearing on the screens of the venues where German parties entertained the press and their supporters.
Many voters probably played the “strategic vote” game — which the newspaper Die Zeit had explained in detail the day before — but it became soon clear that a majority had just voted for a personality, that is, Angela Merkel.
With 41.5%, the incumbent Chancellor romped to victory and to a third term. The Social democrats (SPD) improved their score to 25.7% from their historic low of 23.7% in 2009. The Left and the Green party lost a couple percentage points to 8.6% and 8.4% respectively. The undisciplined liberals (FDP) are out of the Parliament for the first time in the history of the Bundesrepublik, as is the newcomer anti-euro party AFD. With a 2%, the mood was low in the party venue of the Pirates, a forerunner of Italy’s Grillo M5S.
Merkel, nonetheless, fell five seats short of an absolute majority, and the coalition that will govern is not yet on the horizon.
“Voters don’t think blocks, they think parties,” explained Professor Ronald Sturm, who teaches Political Science at the University of Nurnberg-Erlangen. “From the point of view of a scholar, it was interesting to see how parties campaigned for a block — a conservative black-yellow block and a more socially and internationally oriented red-green block — even if block reasoning does not fit voters’ sentiment anymore. Politicians will have a hard time when it comes to explaining why they put in place a coalition that does not correspond to those two pre-established blocks. This is something they deserve though, because they didn’t try to bring voters to react in a more intelligent way. They let politics boil down to a show. Of course, what is at stake is of utmost importance: the future of German citizens and partly of European citizens too. Germans seem to want black and white explanations.”
Or, one could say, as Bismarck once put it, Germans sleep better when they don’t know how sausages and laws are made. In one of Merkel’s a last public appearances, the crowd cheered when Mrs Merkel spoke about her hair: “I was afraid that the rain would spoil my well-fixed hairstyling”. Still, some issues Germans will need to tackle in the next four years are quite complex: Europe, the debt break to be introduced into the Constitution…
“German voters became more childish, but the same goes for politicians. Politicians have refrained from explaining complex issues in detail. As the debt break is concerned, you need to understand that not all debt is structural. German voters seem already lost when it comes to understanding the reform of the voting system. Can you believe that a representative needs to sing a Pippi Longstocking song in Parliament to call the attention? It happened earlier in September,” commented Professor Sturm. “The first thing that comes to your mind is that these people are all crazy.”
Around 25% of Germans voted per mail this time, against an 8% 10 years ago. “This says something again about the distance between voters and politics, which is considered less important, to the point that a letter will do.”
But still, Merkel’s CDU needs a partner. At Willy-Brandt House, the all-glass SPD building, the atmosphere was upbeat, but fans reacted most when it was clear that a CDU-FDP coalition was no longer feasible, and when Peer Steinbrück, the SPD’s candidate, said speaking on TV that he would advise his party to stay with the opposition, and not to go for a grand coalition. Being SPD more internationally oriented, if a grand coalition were to govern, some austerity policies requested by Merkel in exchange for aid packages would need to be relaxed, but in the matter of social policies and taxes the two parties could reach some compromises.
“If SPD enters a grand coalition, it will be devoured by Mrs Merkel as FDP was,” said Detlef Gürtler, editor in chief of Swiss magazine GDI Impuls.
The same would happen to the Greens if they accepted to be Merkel’s coalition partner.
“Listening to Green leaders Jürgen Trittin and Katrin Göring-Eckardt on election day,” added Gürtler, “I got the idea that they are considering such a coalition, because this would allow them to move their environmental agenda forward .” But, of course, environmentally savvy green voters would be very disappointed.
“That’s the time when people say that politicians just do what they want,” said Professor Sturm. “One of the consequences of the economic bonanza is that Germans forgot the importance of coming to grips with politics. There are many problems confronting them, of which they don’t seem to be aware.”
Among these an aging population…
“Things are changing in this regard. CDU is opening up to immigration. One of the candidates in Ruhrgebiet [the most industrialised region for decades] for Merkel’s CDU was a Turkish woman, who is also a Muslim. Conservatives and Turks share some values, such as life long-lasting marriages or being against homosexuality.”
What happens if the coalition formed is not a traditional one?
“See?”, said Sturm. “You are reasoning in terms of pre-established blocks. Let a coalition govern first, and judge later.”
Berlin – The lights were going on in the city on election night, when the first end results started appearing on the screens of the venues where German parties entertained the press and their supporters.
