by Arneb » Sun Sep 26, 2021 9:02 am
It's today. We generally aren't a "Our Election, Your Problem"-class country, but there is a degree of interest in the outcome internationally: Angela Merkel is the third Chancellor of the Republic to have led governments during four election cycles, and the second (after Helmut Kohl) to survive all four. But she will be the first to leave office of her own accord; she will not be a member of the next Bundestag. There is a slim chance she will outlast Helmut Kohl in sheer days in office. By a stroke of genius in the German Constitution, the office of the Chancellor only ends at the moment a successor is appointed by the Bundestag. Between the first session of the next Bundestag and the election of a successor, she and her cabinet will bear the adjective "caretaker" ("geschäftsführend"), but that will not impede her in her activities a lot. So if the parties after today's election need a long time to bicker it out for the next cabinet and Chancellor, she might make it past Kohl. If I calculated correctly, she must stay until 22 December, which is entirely possible - After the last election, we dragged it into March 2018 until Angela Merkel was sworn in as her own successor.
The election is touted as extremely important: The conservative side of the spectrum is trying to give us nightmares over a "Linksruck" (sharp swivel to the left) in case the Social Democrats and Greens go into a coalition with The Left party - the successor party to the GDR's Socialist Unity Party, and still a big fan of "Overcoming capitalism", kissing up to "Socialist" oppression all over the world (notably, Cuba and Venezuela) and loving the Russian way to run a country. Big on the dissolution of NATO, and of Yankee Go Home politics. Such a coalition will probably be possible mathematically, but is rather unlikely because of The Left's positions.
The red-green end of the spectrum warns us of a No Change to Anything ("Weiter so") government, Germany has severe deficiencies in effective government and administration, general progress in digitization, and we are still far off course for the Paris climate goals.
The outcome of the election is very hard to predict, as we have seen something in the polls that is entirely new: Angela Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union, together with its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union, has seen a drastic drop in support for about three months under a weak candidate, Armin Laschet. CDU/CSU has been Germany's political powerhouse since the Republic's inception, having the Chancellor's office for all but 19 years of its history. They still had 41 percent in 2013, but are now down to about 22 in the polls. Meanwhile, their traditional counterpart, the Social Democratic Party, who suffered severe losses during the years after 2005, have rebounded and could become the strongest party - but only with about 25 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the Greens, who led the poll race in the spring at up to 28 %, have dropped down into the middle teens with their inexperienced and relatively young Chancellor candidate, Annalena Bärbock. The tableau is completed by the aforementioned Left, which is struggling to make it into the next Bundestag at all, the classically liberal Free Democratic Party (for the Merkins: That means, in your terms, fiscally conservative plus socially liberal), and Germany’s modern fascist scum, the Alternative for Germany. FDP and AfD are each at around ten percent.
As the polls stand, neither party is going to govern alone, but that has been the norm for the country (Adenauer's absolute majority in '57 was the lone exception). Neither will we see a two-party coalition, which has been Germany's usual modus operandi. The only thinkable two party-coalition would be CDU/CSU + SPD, the current government, which almost nobody wants. The two most likeliest triple coalition are SPD (Red)/FDP (Yellow)/Greens, the so-called "traffic light coalition", and CDU/CSU (black)/FDP (Yellow)/Greens, the so-called "Jamaica" model. Social Democrats and Greens are overall unlikely to form an SPD/Left/Green coalition (the R2G coalition), but they will use the spectre as a bargaining chip to draw in a hesitant FDP.
So, everyone is going on about how decisive this election will be. But in the end, it will be small-time compromise making to form a triple coalition that spans a wide political spectrum. I can't decide if Traffic Light or Jamaica is more likely (it also depends on how good the respective party leaders are at negotiating), but no, we will not see a drastic deviation in Germany's politics from it's usual boring, compromise-oriented way of doing business.
I'll keep you posted.
Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem