Thursday, September 22, 2005
Krautland Votes 2005
So how about them German elections? For those of you who have either been living in a box or not following politics on different continents, here's a brief synopsis (for those of you who have been following the story, you can skip to beneath the asterisks a few paragraphs down):
Germany was being run by a coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Green Party, who collectively held a majority of seats in the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag (in Germany, as in Canada, the lower house is where the action is). The Chancellor (head of government) was Gerhard Schroeder of the SPD. Trailing badly in the polls, the government set about to implement a relatively serious series of economic reforms, of the variety that might be termed "right-wing" if one were into such simplistic analyses which, as you all ought to realize, this space most emphatically is. The Social Democrats are perhaps most analogous to the British Labour Party, in that they've gone over the past few decades from being the German version of the New Democrats to being the German version of the Liberals. These proposed reforms caused a number of the more left-leaning members of the SPD to leave the party in favour of an alliance with a party of former communist East Germans, forming the evocatively-named "Left Party".
Schroeder used these defections as an indication that he required an election to obtain a mandate to go ahead with these reforms. This posed a couple of problems:
1. If polls were any indication, an election wouldn't so much allow him to "obtain a mandate to go ahead with these reforms" as it would "seek alternative employment".
2. There was no readily-apparently method of getting an election since, unlike in Canada, the German head of state (the President) doesn't just dissolve Parliament whenever the head of government asks him to, and the government, which still held a majority, seemed in no danger of losing a confidence vote.
Schroeder decided, in a bold and ethically-questionable move, to hold a vote of confidence and order his own members to abstain, meaning that he lost the vote by a commanding margin. As such, he received his election, which, it was generally agreed, he would definitely lose.
The major opposition party was the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), an alliance of two parties (the former of which ran for office everywhere but in Bavaria, the latter of which ran for office exclusively in Bavaria), whose candidate for Chancellor, Angela Merkel, seemed certain to replace Bush, with the only question being whether the CDU/CSU would win an outright majority (less common in Germany than in Canada, on account of their mixed First Past the Post/Proportional electoral system) or whether it would have to resort to an alliance with the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), also known (confusingly, for Canadians) as the "liberals".
Over the course of the campaign, however, things began to change: Schroeder campaigned like a man possessed, portraying himself as the only candidate willing to make necessary economic reforms without sacrificing Germany's "heart", its generous social welfare policies. Merkel suffered from ill-advised marks insulting to East Germans by some of her allies, as well as from the flat tax advocated by her probable finance minister (but not by the party proper). Any talk of a CDU/CSU majority vanished, and some even began to speculate that the CDU/CSU/FDP total would fall short of a majority, and that Merkel would have to resort to a "grand coalition" with the SPD in order to form government. Such a coalition would be precedented (in fact, several German provinces are currently governed by such coalitions), and seemed eminently plausible: the CDU/CSU, robbed of a majority but still with a decisive plurality, would be the logical governing party, and the much-reduced SPD, minus Schroeder who would leave politics, would be willing to join as a junior partner.
Then the election results came in, with the two major parties having approximately equal support (if, as some Social Democrats, suddenly began arguing, the CDU and CSU should be counted as separate parties, the SPD was actually the largest party by quite a wide margin). The seats in the Bundestag post-election stand as follows:
CDU/CSU: 225
SPD: 222
FDP: 61
Left Party: 54
Green Party: 51
The Chancellor will be elected by the Bundestag later this month, and it's traditional for the result to be a foregone conclusion, thanks to coalition negotiations. This year, that won't be the case, as the following summary of the mathematically possible coalition arrangements demonstrates:
Coalition: CDU/CSU, SPD
Why it won't happen: Schroeder has been adamant that he must continue to be Chancellor (his argument being that the election had shown decisively that Germans didn't want Merkel as Chancellor, a fact which polls had indicated even when her party was in the lead), and his party is unlikely to dump him so immediately after he pulled off such a magnificent comeback. The CDU/CSU, as the largest seat holder, won't consent to be a junior partner in government, and won't accept a coalition arrangement with anybody but Merkel as Chancellor.
Coalition: CDU/CSU, FDP, Green Party
Why it won't happen: The Greens have been leery about joining forces with parties with whom they share little in common. The FDP especially has been called the antithesis of the Greens, and Green leadership has been emphatic that it would be much happier returning to the opposition benches than it would be compromising any of its core principles to rejoin the government. Joining a CDU/CSU/FDP government would require the Greens to compromise pretty well all of their core principles.
Coalition: SPD, FDP, Green Party
Why it won't happen: While this initially appeared feasible, since the FDP has acted as kingmaker for both the SPD and CDU/CSU numerous times in German history, FDP leadership as nixed the idea outright, pointing out that it spent the entire campaign criticizing the record of the SPD/Green government.
Coalition: Anything involving the Left Party
Why it won't happen: Every party has said that it won't negotiate with the Left Party, whose views bear even less resemblance to the CDU/CSU/FDP's than do the Greens'. There also remains considerable animosity between the currently-governing parties and the Left Party, many of whose members abandoned that government at a crucial time. The Left Party, for its part, has also indicated that it has no desire to work with any of the other parties in coalition negotiations.
So it's looking like the Germans will be entering minority government territory. Who heads the minority government is still an open question, since the votes of the Left Party representatives in the secret ballot that elects the Chancellor remain in doubt. Several Left Part backbenchers have indicated that they would support Schroeder as the lesser of evils, though party leadership remains adament that it won't. Presumably, this means that they would direct their membership to abstain on a Schroeder-Merkel runoff, which would be enough to give Merkel the Chancellory.
* * * * *
I promised some lessons for Canadian politics, and before I provide the ones I see, I'd like to quote Paul Wells in his identification of a couple of lessons of his own:
1. "Schroeder understands as few politicians do that if you're going to get beat up, you might as well fight."
Paul Martin could learn from this. He's Prime Minister now. He has to make decisions. His days of being all things to all people are long behind him. There is no national consensus on any matter of current political importance - the matters on which there exists national consensus tend to have already been resolved, leaving matters on which there is division in the spotlight - and nobody, least of all a wimp tenuously holding on to a minority government, is in a position to forge one. Leadership means taking sides.
Gerhard Schroeder came up with an explicit set of proposals. Did they go in the wrong direction? Maybe. If they were going in the right direction, did they go far enough? Probably not. But he came up with something, and when some people didn't like what he came up with he forced an election that he couldn't win, because he said he couldn't govern without a renewed mandate to pursue his reforms. And then, on the hustings, he fought. He fought the Left Party, who said that his reforms were completely wrong-headed, and he fought the CDU/CSU, which said that they didn't go far enough. He put the opposition on the defensive, and he came away with what must be considered, in a game where results are measured against expectations rather than any absolute standard, a victory. Paul Martin's never managed anything comparable.
2. "Personality matters. Merkel has her admirers but she's a sourpuss. It made her hard to vote for. Pop quiz: Name a prominent Canadian opposition party led by a sourpuss."
This one needs no elaboration, but my next post will provide it all the same (WitPotS: providing you with unneeded elaboration since 2004).
What else should Canadians learn from this? First, that we either need a politicized head of state, like the Germans have, or a formal vote to determine who gets to attempt to head a government, like the Germans have. In Canada, it's pretty much automatic that the leader of whichever party wins the most seats gets to try to be Prime Minister, even if that leader has no hope of gaining the confidence of Parliament. The last time this rule was broken was 1925, when William Lyon MacKenzie King decided to try to hang on as Prime Minister despite having lost the election (he failed, but one the subsequent election be alleging collusion between Arthur Meighen's Conservatives and the Governor-General, who had impudently asked Meighen to form a government after King's fell). Even during the last election campaign, Paul Martin stated that if the Conservatives won a minority he would resign the Prime Ministership and wouldn't accept a request from the Governor-General to form a new government without another election being held first, this despite the fact that a Conservative minority would have been totally incapable of governing, while a Liberal minority probably could have managed, even absent a plurality. All of this is moot, of course, since a Governor-General who asked anybody but the leader of the largest party to form a government would be a Governor-General who would immediately find herself knee-deep in scandal.
Besides that, the myriad coalition possibilities receiving serious discussion in Germany ought to remind us that, the Bloc excluded (since they quite explicitly advocate something approximating the destruction of Canada), there's not a single political party out there that would destroy Canada (appreciably more than it's already been destroyed, that is). If the Conservatives should ever get a majority, gay rights would progress more slowly, and the deterioration of the social safety net would proceed slightly more rapidly. That's about it. For their part, the New Democrats would oversee modest tax increases. That's about it. Power, besides corrupting, also moderates.
Finally, instability isn't to be feared (contrary to the expressed concerns of so many opponents of proportional representation), but political parties are to be (contrary to the expressed views of most proponents of PR). Either Germany will get a viable government from this mess - and, if it does, it's a reasonable assumption that the government in question will undertake most of the same reforms that the SPD-Green coalition was set to, since four out of five parties considered those reforms to be at least a step in the right direction - or it won't, in which case there will be new elections, which will almost certainly provide a government. However, the talk of coalitions incorporating major parties of both the right and the left, though ultimately fruitless, demonstrates the extent to which the assumption that parties are only interested in power has taken hold in people. The SPD and CDU/CSU purport to stand for totally different things, but each was quite prepared to accept a coalition, just so long as it got the Chancellory. The Greens and the FDP have, at least nominally, absolutely nothing in common, but they came up as potential partners frequently. Even if, in this case, the relevant parties demonstrated an admirable and unusual devotion to principle, the extent to which the expectation that they wouldn't was widespread indicates the sort of peril we're in.
Next time: Should Stephen Harper be allowed to keep his leadership?
To come (maybe):
Countries where politics are more interesting than they are in Canada Part II: Israel
Stephen Lewis
Predictions on the Oilers' season
Why I want to be in a band, despite my total absence of musical talent
|
So how about them German elections? For those of you who have either been living in a box or not following politics on different continents, here's a brief synopsis (for those of you who have been following the story, you can skip to beneath the asterisks a few paragraphs down):
Germany was being run by a coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Green Party, who collectively held a majority of seats in the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag (in Germany, as in Canada, the lower house is where the action is). The Chancellor (head of government) was Gerhard Schroeder of the SPD. Trailing badly in the polls, the government set about to implement a relatively serious series of economic reforms, of the variety that might be termed "right-wing" if one were into such simplistic analyses which, as you all ought to realize, this space most emphatically is. The Social Democrats are perhaps most analogous to the British Labour Party, in that they've gone over the past few decades from being the German version of the New Democrats to being the German version of the Liberals. These proposed reforms caused a number of the more left-leaning members of the SPD to leave the party in favour of an alliance with a party of former communist East Germans, forming the evocatively-named "Left Party".
Schroeder used these defections as an indication that he required an election to obtain a mandate to go ahead with these reforms. This posed a couple of problems:
1. If polls were any indication, an election wouldn't so much allow him to "obtain a mandate to go ahead with these reforms" as it would "seek alternative employment".
2. There was no readily-apparently method of getting an election since, unlike in Canada, the German head of state (the President) doesn't just dissolve Parliament whenever the head of government asks him to, and the government, which still held a majority, seemed in no danger of losing a confidence vote.
Schroeder decided, in a bold and ethically-questionable move, to hold a vote of confidence and order his own members to abstain, meaning that he lost the vote by a commanding margin. As such, he received his election, which, it was generally agreed, he would definitely lose.
The major opposition party was the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), an alliance of two parties (the former of which ran for office everywhere but in Bavaria, the latter of which ran for office exclusively in Bavaria), whose candidate for Chancellor, Angela Merkel, seemed certain to replace Bush, with the only question being whether the CDU/CSU would win an outright majority (less common in Germany than in Canada, on account of their mixed First Past the Post/Proportional electoral system) or whether it would have to resort to an alliance with the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), also known (confusingly, for Canadians) as the "liberals".
Over the course of the campaign, however, things began to change: Schroeder campaigned like a man possessed, portraying himself as the only candidate willing to make necessary economic reforms without sacrificing Germany's "heart", its generous social welfare policies. Merkel suffered from ill-advised marks insulting to East Germans by some of her allies, as well as from the flat tax advocated by her probable finance minister (but not by the party proper). Any talk of a CDU/CSU majority vanished, and some even began to speculate that the CDU/CSU/FDP total would fall short of a majority, and that Merkel would have to resort to a "grand coalition" with the SPD in order to form government. Such a coalition would be precedented (in fact, several German provinces are currently governed by such coalitions), and seemed eminently plausible: the CDU/CSU, robbed of a majority but still with a decisive plurality, would be the logical governing party, and the much-reduced SPD, minus Schroeder who would leave politics, would be willing to join as a junior partner.
Then the election results came in, with the two major parties having approximately equal support (if, as some Social Democrats, suddenly began arguing, the CDU and CSU should be counted as separate parties, the SPD was actually the largest party by quite a wide margin). The seats in the Bundestag post-election stand as follows:
CDU/CSU: 225
SPD: 222
FDP: 61
Left Party: 54
Green Party: 51
The Chancellor will be elected by the Bundestag later this month, and it's traditional for the result to be a foregone conclusion, thanks to coalition negotiations. This year, that won't be the case, as the following summary of the mathematically possible coalition arrangements demonstrates:
Coalition: CDU/CSU, SPD
Why it won't happen: Schroeder has been adamant that he must continue to be Chancellor (his argument being that the election had shown decisively that Germans didn't want Merkel as Chancellor, a fact which polls had indicated even when her party was in the lead), and his party is unlikely to dump him so immediately after he pulled off such a magnificent comeback. The CDU/CSU, as the largest seat holder, won't consent to be a junior partner in government, and won't accept a coalition arrangement with anybody but Merkel as Chancellor.
Coalition: CDU/CSU, FDP, Green Party
Why it won't happen: The Greens have been leery about joining forces with parties with whom they share little in common. The FDP especially has been called the antithesis of the Greens, and Green leadership has been emphatic that it would be much happier returning to the opposition benches than it would be compromising any of its core principles to rejoin the government. Joining a CDU/CSU/FDP government would require the Greens to compromise pretty well all of their core principles.
Coalition: SPD, FDP, Green Party
Why it won't happen: While this initially appeared feasible, since the FDP has acted as kingmaker for both the SPD and CDU/CSU numerous times in German history, FDP leadership as nixed the idea outright, pointing out that it spent the entire campaign criticizing the record of the SPD/Green government.
Coalition: Anything involving the Left Party
Why it won't happen: Every party has said that it won't negotiate with the Left Party, whose views bear even less resemblance to the CDU/CSU/FDP's than do the Greens'. There also remains considerable animosity between the currently-governing parties and the Left Party, many of whose members abandoned that government at a crucial time. The Left Party, for its part, has also indicated that it has no desire to work with any of the other parties in coalition negotiations.
So it's looking like the Germans will be entering minority government territory. Who heads the minority government is still an open question, since the votes of the Left Party representatives in the secret ballot that elects the Chancellor remain in doubt. Several Left Part backbenchers have indicated that they would support Schroeder as the lesser of evils, though party leadership remains adament that it won't. Presumably, this means that they would direct their membership to abstain on a Schroeder-Merkel runoff, which would be enough to give Merkel the Chancellory.
* * * * *
I promised some lessons for Canadian politics, and before I provide the ones I see, I'd like to quote Paul Wells in his identification of a couple of lessons of his own:
1. "Schroeder understands as few politicians do that if you're going to get beat up, you might as well fight."
Paul Martin could learn from this. He's Prime Minister now. He has to make decisions. His days of being all things to all people are long behind him. There is no national consensus on any matter of current political importance - the matters on which there exists national consensus tend to have already been resolved, leaving matters on which there is division in the spotlight - and nobody, least of all a wimp tenuously holding on to a minority government, is in a position to forge one. Leadership means taking sides.
Gerhard Schroeder came up with an explicit set of proposals. Did they go in the wrong direction? Maybe. If they were going in the right direction, did they go far enough? Probably not. But he came up with something, and when some people didn't like what he came up with he forced an election that he couldn't win, because he said he couldn't govern without a renewed mandate to pursue his reforms. And then, on the hustings, he fought. He fought the Left Party, who said that his reforms were completely wrong-headed, and he fought the CDU/CSU, which said that they didn't go far enough. He put the opposition on the defensive, and he came away with what must be considered, in a game where results are measured against expectations rather than any absolute standard, a victory. Paul Martin's never managed anything comparable.
2. "Personality matters. Merkel has her admirers but she's a sourpuss. It made her hard to vote for. Pop quiz: Name a prominent Canadian opposition party led by a sourpuss."
This one needs no elaboration, but my next post will provide it all the same (WitPotS: providing you with unneeded elaboration since 2004).
What else should Canadians learn from this? First, that we either need a politicized head of state, like the Germans have, or a formal vote to determine who gets to attempt to head a government, like the Germans have. In Canada, it's pretty much automatic that the leader of whichever party wins the most seats gets to try to be Prime Minister, even if that leader has no hope of gaining the confidence of Parliament. The last time this rule was broken was 1925, when William Lyon MacKenzie King decided to try to hang on as Prime Minister despite having lost the election (he failed, but one the subsequent election be alleging collusion between Arthur Meighen's Conservatives and the Governor-General, who had impudently asked Meighen to form a government after King's fell). Even during the last election campaign, Paul Martin stated that if the Conservatives won a minority he would resign the Prime Ministership and wouldn't accept a request from the Governor-General to form a new government without another election being held first, this despite the fact that a Conservative minority would have been totally incapable of governing, while a Liberal minority probably could have managed, even absent a plurality. All of this is moot, of course, since a Governor-General who asked anybody but the leader of the largest party to form a government would be a Governor-General who would immediately find herself knee-deep in scandal.
Besides that, the myriad coalition possibilities receiving serious discussion in Germany ought to remind us that, the Bloc excluded (since they quite explicitly advocate something approximating the destruction of Canada), there's not a single political party out there that would destroy Canada (appreciably more than it's already been destroyed, that is). If the Conservatives should ever get a majority, gay rights would progress more slowly, and the deterioration of the social safety net would proceed slightly more rapidly. That's about it. For their part, the New Democrats would oversee modest tax increases. That's about it. Power, besides corrupting, also moderates.
Finally, instability isn't to be feared (contrary to the expressed concerns of so many opponents of proportional representation), but political parties are to be (contrary to the expressed views of most proponents of PR). Either Germany will get a viable government from this mess - and, if it does, it's a reasonable assumption that the government in question will undertake most of the same reforms that the SPD-Green coalition was set to, since four out of five parties considered those reforms to be at least a step in the right direction - or it won't, in which case there will be new elections, which will almost certainly provide a government. However, the talk of coalitions incorporating major parties of both the right and the left, though ultimately fruitless, demonstrates the extent to which the assumption that parties are only interested in power has taken hold in people. The SPD and CDU/CSU purport to stand for totally different things, but each was quite prepared to accept a coalition, just so long as it got the Chancellory. The Greens and the FDP have, at least nominally, absolutely nothing in common, but they came up as potential partners frequently. Even if, in this case, the relevant parties demonstrated an admirable and unusual devotion to principle, the extent to which the expectation that they wouldn't was widespread indicates the sort of peril we're in.
Next time: Should Stephen Harper be allowed to keep his leadership?
To come (maybe):
Countries where politics are more interesting than they are in Canada Part II: Israel
Stephen Lewis
Predictions on the Oilers' season
Why I want to be in a band, despite my total absence of musical talent
