Insight
Make German politics interesting again by Christian Odendahl and Sophia Besch 18 August 2017
Merkel is disarming the SPD, which is too cautious to promise real change, while Die Linke’s radicalism is poisoning the SPD’s only possible route to power. After the political upheavals of Britain’s general election and the excitement around the rise of Emmanuel Macron, the German election on September 24th is bound to be comparatively boring. Mostly centrist parties with similar platforms are on offer. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel is towering over the election – seemingly without having to campaign at all. Polls show Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) leading the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) by 15 percentage points. If Germans got to choose their chancellor in a direct vote, she would defeat her SPD challenger Martin Schulz by a 29 per cent margin. Although the refugee crisis has allowed the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) a short spell of fame, it has not shaken the German political system in a fundamental way. Absent a miracle for the SPD, Merkel will be re-elected chancellor. Why? Merkel has an almost unmatched ability to disarm her opponents and demobilise their supporters. As the CER has previously pointed out, Merkel develops her policies cautiously over time – waiting for a public consensus to form, weighing her political options, and then taking a centrist political course that costs her little. Take the recent legalisation of gay marriage. The Christian Democrats had been officially opposed and had blocked it, even in coalition with the SPD. But Merkel realised her party’s opposition would cost her votes during the 2017 campaign, given the popularity of gay marriage among voters. As a result, she allowed MPs a free vote, refraining from enforcing party discipline – which meant that gay marriage passed by a landslide in the Bundestag. Merkel herself voted against the motion to protect her conservative credentials, but the issue was politically neutralised. This episode is telling of Merkel’s leadership style. She applied the same strategy in the debates over abolishing conscription, introducing a minimum wage, ending nuclear power and introducing modern parental benefits. Instead of insisting on traditionally conservative policies, and vacating the centre
CER INSIGHT: Make German politics interesting again 18 August 2017
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