Kaffeeklatsch | The next Bundestag

Germany’s election: a primer

Angela Merkel is on track for another win

By J.C. | BERLIN

POSTERS have gone up around Germany. Angela Merkel is back from her holiday. The chancellor begins her election tour tomorrow, August 12th, with a rally in Dortmund. Next week she travels on to the Rhineland and the north-western city of Bremen. Martin Schulz, her Social Democratic (SPD) challenger, will launch his series of live events there a week later. The two are both doing live election interviews on television next week. Germany’s election campaign is under way. Here is what you need to know about the six major parties.

The CDU/CSU
Mrs Merkel is essentially rerunning her campaign from the last election, in 2013: “you know me”. With refugee arrivals falling and the perception of government control and competence restored, the big wobble in her popularity of late 2015 and early 2016 now feels like ancient history. The disagreements between her Christian Democrats (CDU) and their more conservative Bavarian partners, the Christian Social Union (CSU), have been papered over. The economy is strong and after years of stagnation wages are rising, if modestly. For many voters, this is reason enough to stick with a formula that has broadly served Germany well for the past 12 years: centrism, conflict-aversion and (to quote an old CDU slogan) no experiments.

Abroad Mrs Merkel is often described by critics and admirers as a sphinx, a master chess-player, a Machiavellian. In truth she is not so complicated. She believes in generating prosperity through market forces and distributing it widely. Beyond that she travels light: cleaving to few ideological precepts and avoiding risk, apart from situations where she feels she has little choice and believes she can steer events. She triangulates because it works. Not (as some claim) by obsessively following polls, but by divining long-term shifts in opinion and political conflicts and positioning herself in the middle—often heading off those conflicts altogether. A typical example was her manoeuvring on equal marriage in June (see article).

Critics, including Mr Schulz, accuse her of “asymmetric demobilisation”; that is, of deliberately lowering turnout among supporters of her opponents by being inoffensive. This is true, but hardly a damning indictment. In practice she knows her electorate and gives it what it wants. I saw this a few weeks ago at one of her rallies on the Baltic Sea. Practically every sentence of her speech was a third-way formulation offering something for everyone: “a strong Germany [right] in a strong Europe [left]”, “migrants must speak German [right] and we should be proud of our diversity [left]”, “the state should not prescribe how people live [right] but it must support them [left]”. The audience of holidaymakers cheered her keenly, but she barely even solicited their support: “perhaps you will consider putting your cross in the box for the Christian Democrats,” she mused.

In a country going through economic or social turmoil this would not be enough. But Germany’s prosperity, if imperfectly distributed, makes it sufficient. Voters here do not tend to adore Merkel. But they tend to think they could do worse. And that goes for supporters of other parties as well as Christian Democrats: a poll by Forschungsgruppe Wahlen released on August 11th shows that 29% of SPD voters would prefer her as chancellor to Mr Schulz. Like other recent surveys it has her party winning 40% of the vote. It is safe to assume that Mrs Merkel will lead the next German government.

The SPD
Mr Schulz is in a bind. He hails from the right of the SPD, which puts him close to Mrs Merkel on the CDU’s left. The parties’ two manifestos are similar, with a few modest differences (both back tax cuts and investment increases, for example, but the SPD would raise taxes on the highest earners and invest a bit more).

Mr Schulz only emerged as the SPD’s candidate for chancellor in January, when Sigmar Gabriel, the party’s then-leader, stepped down and took the vacant post of foreign minister. Mr Schulz had been out of Germany since 1994, when as the former mayor of a small town near Aachen he moved to Brussels as an MEP, working his way up the ranks to become president of the European Parliament. At first this background—earthy but with international gravitas, and unburdened by the compromises made during his party’s four years in coalition under Mrs Merkel—seemed to give him a magic touch. The SPD soared into contention, even overtaking the CDU/CSU in a couple of polls, but then the novelty wore off and the party slumped. When in May it lost power in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s largest state and a traditional SPD stronghold, the game seemed up to many in the party.

Since then Mr Schulz has been trying to find subjects with which to prise open Mrs Merkel’s apolitical armour. He has tried social justice: distancing his party from the liberalising labour-market reforms conducted by its former chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. He has tried Europe: travelling to Paris to signal his support for Emmanuel Macron. He has tried refugees: visiting Italy to discuss how well prepared Europe is for the next crisis. He has tried defence: rebranding the CDU/CSU commitment to NATO’s 2% of GDP target for defence spending as an “arms race”, despite the fact that his party in government supported the measure. He has called out the chancellor for her “asymmetric demobilisation”. All to no avail.

Another weight on Mr Schulz is his refusal to rule out a “red-red-green” coalition with the Greens and, controversially, The Left. But in practice he would prefer a “traffic light” coalition with the Greens and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), following in the steps of his political hero, Willy Brandt.

FDP
The free-market FDP obtained its best-ever result in 2009, joined a government with Mrs Merkel, seemingly achieved little then crashed out of the Bundestag altogether in 2013. So extensive was the wipeout at both federal and state levels that the party today is still something of a one-man band—centred on its leader, Christian Lindner—and has few heavyweights beyond him.

But Mr Lindner has presided over a comeback of sorts by rebranding his party as an outfit for radical modernisers. He has concentrated on digitisation—a field where Germany lags many of its competitors—and pragmatic infrastructure improvements. This, combined with his youthful pitch (evocative of Mr Macron or Justin Trudeau) has allowed him to reach new voters in metropolitan Germany. But he has balanced this with an appeal to traditional FDP voters, who are to the right of liberals in most European countries (Liberal Democrats in Britain, say, or Mr Macron in France). For example, he wants Greece booted out of the euro and recently suggested that Germany should tolerate Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

This last gambit—which Mr Lindner seems to regret—points to his biggest priority. Most of all, the FDP leader wants to get his party back in the headlines. Insofar as he seems to be succeeding, his party will return to the Bundestag this autumn.

The Greens
A party that grew out of the pro-migration, anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s has a tough time under a pro-migration and anti-nuclear chancellor. So the Greens have been struggling recently: some polls putting them close to the 5% hurdle needed to stay in the Bundestag. Moreover, it is not fully clear where they stand: a pragmatically pro-business leadership contrasting awkwardly with its more left-wing base.

Yet the Greens matter. They are in 10 of Germany’s 16 state governments so have extensive power over things like education and infrastructure, as well as in the Bundesrat (the federal upper house, made up of state representatives). This experience has given the party a long bench of prospective legislators and even ministers. The party is also a bastion for a tough foreign policy: pro-European and robust on the likes of Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Left
Germany’s most left-wing major party is a fusion of the successor party to the East German communists and a party that broke from the SPD under Mr Schröder’s pro-market welfare reforms. It is divided between moderates (mostly based in its eastern strongholds, where it is the de facto party of social democracy) and hardliners (mostly based in the west, where it is less mainstream). Under Sahra Wagenknecht, who is Putin-friendly and anti-NATO, the hardliners currently have an upper hand in the party. This makes the ideal of many on the German left—a grand reunion of SPD, Left and Greens—hard to imagine, to the frustration of some Ms Wagenknecht's more moderate party colleagues. For the time being it will remain a marginal force, truly significant only in the eastern states.

Alternative for Germany (AfD)
The country’s youngest major party emerged in 2013 as a free-market, Eurosceptic force and took 4.7% of votes at the federal election of that year. Since then it has been taken over by forces to the right, has styled itself for a while as the voice of opposition to Mrs Merkel’s refugee policies and now seems rather lost. It is also mired in personality battles, many involving Frauke Petry, the party’s dominant figure who was sidelined at its conference in April. Infighting continues to mire the AfD, which will probably clear the 5% hurdle and make lots of noise in the next Bundestag. Less clear is whether it will achieve much.

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