Tag Archives: Germany

Flattened By The Flat Tax?

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Following Alex, more opinion polls seem to be showing that Merkel will struggle to get a majority in partnerhip with the FDP. At the same time voices are being raised within the CDU suggesting that the principal responsibility for this debacle lies with the Professor from Heidelberg.

Some indication of why flat tax ideas might impact so negatively on German voters is offered by the Financial Times this morning in a leader commenting on similar proposals from within the UK Conservative Party:
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A modest proposal for CAP reform

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I’ve been in Canada for the last month, getting in my last family visit before settling in to the serious business of either going back to school or collecting unemployment checks. My family is large – Great-Grandpa had 25 children, and Grandpa had 9 – so it takes a while if you go to see my family. Ours is a large, disorganised, occasionally frightening clan who, depending on pure whim, identifies itself as either German-Canadian, Dutch-Canadian, Russian-Canadian or Ukrainian-Canadian. Our tribal language is an obscure dialect of Low Saxon (Platt for the actual Germans out there) spoken primarily in Paraguay, Mexico, Central America and Saskatchewan, and whose most famous speaker is, arguably, Homer Simpson. It’s a long story, don’t ask. It not being much of a literary language, we all just say our ancestors spoke German – the liturgical language of my clan’s particular sect.

In contrast to Europe and the US, Canadians are a lot less disturbed about asking people about their ethnic identities or expressing some loyalty to them. I guess the main reason is that Canada has never really pretended to be a nation built atop an identity, but rather a place where an identity of sorts has slowly built up from the existence of a nation. There is no Canadian myth of the melting pot, and as our soon-to-be new Governor General has demonstrated, no serious demand for nativism in public office. Michaëlle Jean, who is slated to be the powerless and unelected Canadian head-of-state when the Queen is out of the country – e.g., practically always – when she is sworn in on the 27th, is no doubt the most attractive candidate we’ve ever had for the office. And, like her predecessor, she is a former CBC/SRC reporter and talking head.

Ms Jean and I share an endemically Canadian charateristic: We both can and do identify ourselves shamelessly as several different kinds of hyphenated Canadians. She is French Canadian, but that’s hardly strange. She is also Franco-Canadian – Ms Jean has dual citizenship with France, making her the first EU citizen to be Governor General of Canada and the first French citizen to be acting head of state of Canada since 1763. But more unprecedentedly, she is Haitian-Canadian and – as logically follows – African-Canadian.

Yes, Ms Jean is black, and furthermore in an interracial marriage. Well, that’s Canada for you. America puts black folk in squalid emergency shelters, we put ours in Rideau Hall.
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The Imagination Attempts to..Relax

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Another set of polls, this time taken for ARD TV and reported here, seem to bear out the surprising recovery of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the imagination-buggering prospect of a Red-Red-Green coalition. The CDU was down 2% at 41% and the SPD up 2% at 34%, with the Greens solid at 7%, the Linkspartei down 0.5% at 8.5%, and (curiously) the Homeopathic Parachute Club FDP up 0.5% at 6.5%.

Surely the 0.5% can’t be the same people? Anyway, that would put the Coalition of the Desperate at 49.5% against 47.5% for the Festival of Stern..if, of course, the imagination can be persuaded to “take it”. In these increasingly odd political waters, the first signs of people positioning themselves for post-election coalition talks are now visible. Coalition negotiations are the hard-core porn of politics, and this looks like it’s going to be absolutely filthy, especially if the death of the NPD candidate in Dresden prolongs things.

Schröder has publicly refused to talk coalitions, saying it would be wrong (ha! he wants it really!), and that his aim is to make the SPD the largest party and continue the coalition with the Greens. Angela Merkel has called him out and accused him of, ah, flirting with the Linkspartei, whilst Joschka Fischer has claimed that he will never, no, nay, never no more deal with Oskar Lafontaine. Nuh. Lafontaine further claims he has “not the slightest fear” of a grand coalition, although it would be worse than a rightwing government..and he is also busy rowing back on his remarks about foreign workers.

And for their sad little part, the neo-Nazis have selected their replacement candidate for Dresden. In an astonishingly original move, it’s Franz Schönhuber, the ancient founder, leader, general secretary and dogcatcher of the outlawed Republican Party, an octogenarian fascist who I thought was dead. Yawn!

Nazi sabotage from beyond the grave

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Far be it from me to poach on Alex’s turf, but here is a bit of German election madness that you won’t want to miss.

As you all know by now, the Left Party — which is basically the eastern PDS, the mutated ruling party of ancien régime East Germany, plus some hard-left western renegades from the SPD — has emerged as a strong potential spoiler. Now an easterner from the other extreme of the spectrum is doing her best to throw sand in the electoral gears.

She had to die to do this, so full marks for effort if nothing else.

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Swings Back For Schr�der/Fischer

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It seems that in the aftermath of the debate, Gerhard Schröder’s possible coalition partners have unexpectedly regained some inner poise as the German election campaign goes pirouetting into its last ten days of not-quite-frenzied democracy. The CDU and FDP both lost one point in polls taken for Stern and RTL, with the SPD three points up, the Left one point down and the Greens unchanged. Even though the SPD is still six points down on the CDU, this may be a key moment – as the potential rightwing coalition is now no longer a majority.

It was a good day for the Chancellor, as he put on 4 percentage points of personal approval – which takes him to 17 points up on Angela Merkel, at 48 to 31. This may perhaps explain why, as Jörg Lau blogs here, Germany is being covered in SPD posters featuring little else than big pictures of yer man. As a further reminder never to write off lumbering and traditionalistic German institutions, the FAZ reports today that German industry beat everybody’s production forecasts for July. For the two-month period June-July, output in manufacturing, construction and energy was up as much as 2% over the preceding two months.

Mind you, though, the Schröder recovery story does contain one socking great if – the suggestion that, if the election was today, he could form a government relies entirely on forming a coalition between the SPD, Greens and the Linkspartei. The idea of a Schröder-Lafontaine reconciliation buggers the imagination, gentle reader – although desperation is always a great motivator. And, were the LP to go back into government, you can assume that much of the Schröder agenda would go out of the window.

On Un-Common Ground

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Now just remember, you read about it first on Afoe. Bertrand Benoit and David Pilling have an excellent article in the FT today:

Question: Which of the world’s biggest economies is holding an early election this month dominated by debate over radical economic reforms?

Two clues: The economy, long in the doldrums, is showing signs of life, thanks to improving exports and a restructured private sector. An ageing population is making structural reform an urgent priority.

The answer: Not one, but two countries – Japan and Germany.

Just my point in my earlier post, and the more this connection is recognised the sooner we’ll enter the zone of framing meaningful solutions. As the FT writers suggest, there are many intriguing parallels between next Sunday’s Japanese election and the German ballot one week later.
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The Nuclear Option

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Don’t blame me, blame Alex for this, since he’s the one who started me thinking about all those other issues associated with the German elections – apart that is from the economic ones. Like this in today’s FT:

“It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. ….Last week, she (Angela Merkel) named Heinrich von Pierer, a former Siemens chief executive, her chief economic advisor. The fresh faces, it was thought, would add energy and credibility to her bid for the top job….(but)…Mr von Pierer sparked his own media firestorm when he called for an extension of the life of nuclear power stations by 60 years.”

I may be slow, but the implications of this didn’t really sink-in till I read in the EU observer that:

“Brussels predicts that oil prices will stay high in the foreseeable future and that the EU will need to build more nuclear reactors..”I expect investments in the nuclear sector in Europe, and in the rest of the world, will grow”, the commissioner (Andris Piebalgs) said.

Well, no wonder the greens are fuming.

…And The German Election Posts Just Keep Coming

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Naturally enough, following the US model, the really important thing in the (quasi-)presidential debate isn’t what happens during the debate, but the post-debate exploitation of whatever happens then. So no surprise to find that the SPD and the Greens are jumping all over a claim that Angela Merkel, as well as quoting Reagan, was being a little economical with the truth regarding her own past position on childcare and abortion.

The story is thin, but the meat seems to be that Merkel allegedly claimed that as Minister for Women she introduced a right to childcare from the age of three onwards – in fact she abstained when the legislation went through the Bundestag, because the provision was included in the same bill that established a unified law on abortion for united Germany. It’s not much, but you’ve got to try…

(In the light of the post below, isn’t it strange that squeezing completely unconnected provisions into bills is itself a rather Capitol Hill practice?)

Germany’s American Campaign

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Well, it seems my guest stint is going to be along the lines of “All German Election, All The Time”, but some more things have come up! In last night’s TV debate between Schröder and Merkel, it seems, the CDU leader used some words that weren’t entirely her own. According to Der Standard (or should that be “the Austrian newspaper whose website could be better organised”?), her peroration was very similar to another peroration delivered in the same sort of circumstances. Not Bismarck this time…but Ronald Reagan, in his debate with Jimmy Carter on the 28th of October 1980. (You can compare the texts at the link above.) Now, that is of minor interest in itself, but it does point up a curious feature of modern German politics.

It’s all so American.

As I pointed out in my last AFOE contribution, Germany has a curious combination of a parliamentary constitution and a presidential political culture, which gives rise to the notion of a Spitzenkandidat separate from the party leader. Not only that, but yesterday saw all national TV networks cleared for a one-to-one debate between the top two candidates…something that doesn’t happen even in supposedly presidential Britain. Slogans have something oddly transatlantic about them, too – Edmund Stoiber ran last time under the line “Kantig. Echt. Erfolgreich.”, which reminded me at least far more of “A Reformer With Results” than anything European.

It’s always said that TV is crucial in Britain, but there is so little political coverage that I’ve always doubted its importance relative to the press, which covers elections exhaustively and addresses a readership more likely than the average to vote. But German elections seem far more televisual…

Just as in last year’s US presidential election, the whole debate was accompanied by a spin storm whipped up by both sides’ pet bloggers (the CDU cunningly grabbed the domain name wahlfakten.de for theirs whilst the SPD had to content themselves with roteblogs). However, wahlblog05.de seems to be channelling the spirit of our dear departed generalelection05, scrupulously balanced and perhaps even a tad too serious.

WB05 informs us that another US political tradition has even taken hold, too – destroying your opponents’ campaign materials. What on earth is going on?

Where Will It Lead Us From Here?

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The German election campaign is cranking up to as close to a throbbing wave of intensity as you are likely to find in modern Germany. Very soon, Chancellor Gerhard Schr�der is going to take on the CDU’s Angela Merkel in a televised debate. Merkel has always had to do it tough in the CDU, as I’ve remarked on before, because she isn’t really the kind of person who fits the traditional shape of the post-war German conservative movement. Last time around, she was party leader but was ditched as Spitzenkandidat (a German term which compromises between a quasi-US presidential candidacy and the reality of a Westminster-style constitution) in favour of the hard-right Bavarian, Edmund Stoiber. This time, though, the polls are running heavily in her favour, after she spent the intervening period selectively eliminating the men (and they were) who did her in the first time around.

This is where it gets interesting. Last week, she was moved to give a speech in which she said a very remarkable thing. Apparently, Germany needs to retrieve the spirit of the Gr�nderzeit. This word is usually translated into English as the Founders’ Generation, which doesn’t sound terribly interesting or controversial. The point is, though, which generation, and what did they found? When you speak of the Gr�nderzeit in Germany, or Austria, you mean the 1870s and the foundation of united Germany. For some reason the Austrians use it too, perhaps stretching the definition to include the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise or Ausgleich. It’s not an especially controversial word, but then, that is in part because it’s most often used to describe architecture.

Outside Germany, though, you might be forgiven for thinking this pretty eyebrow-raising. In the Anglosphere, it is fairly conventional wisdom to hold that the Wilhelmine empire was a fatal aberration in Germany’s historic development, the point at which the Germans swung off the Whiggish tracks into the future onto that infamous Sonderweg that in the end led to world war, Weimar, Hitler, more war, Auschwitz, and partition. And that foundation, after all, took place by means of conquering northern France. The proclamation of the empire took place at Versailles.

(So far, so clich�d.)

The Left would never in a million years have said such a thing. Gr�nderzeit? The time of Bismarck’s Antisocialist Laws? The foundation of the three-class voting system? Surely the injustices that began the SPD’s historic struggle. Why she did, though, is part of a very important point about identity, history and German politics.
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