Berlin
“A VOTE AGAINST MERKEL IS A VOTE AGAINST BUSH!” screamed the underground posters along Unter den Linden, showing the photos of Merkel on one side and Bush on the other, with the word Kriegsverbrecher (war criminal) underneath the president. This made the Green party posters seem rather innocuous. One included a fist squeezing a tomato in protest against genetically modified foods. Another display involved a blurred threesome and a message about the right to privacy. (The Green poster attracting the most attention, however, showed a baby breast-feeding. Inevitably someone always managed to stick bubble gum in just the right location.) Nevertheless, the posters against “Angie” did not bode well.
Meanwhile at the Reichstag, tourists mulled around while the networks ran their election coverage. Everyone is surrounded by walls still bearing the graffiti of Red Army soldiers who stormed the building in 1945. Inside an FDP meeting room (complete with beer, wine, and wurst), supporters gathered anxiously to await the first exit polls at 6:00 P.M. When the moment of truth arrived, you could hear a pin drop:
The Social Democrats have 34 percent (silence). The CDU/CSU have just 35 percent (moans and groans). The Greens are at 8.5 percent (silence again). And the Free Democrats have 10.5 percent (applause, screams, bells, and whistles). The FDP certainly did have cause to rejoice. Their increase of between 2 and 3 percentage points gave them their biggest victory in decades.
As the dust settled a few hours later, the results were decidedly clear: The Social Democrats under Schröder declined to about 34.2 percent. The CDU/CSU declined as well to 35.2 percent. The Greens finished at 8.1 percent and the FDP ended with close to 10 percent. The new Left party surpassed the Greens with 8.6 percent.
So what does this mean? The Christian Democrats and their Christian Social brethren were expected to pull in at a minimum 40 percent of the vote. Not one single polling organization predicted they would dip below 39 percent. Keeping that assumption in mind, it seemed certain that if the FDP held its ground at 7 or 8 percent, a Black-Yellow coalition would have been possible. Now that that is no longer feasible, a number of nightmare scenarios have emerged:
The Grand Coalition. With a dominating majority, the CDU/CSU and the SPD would preside over a government (presumably) under Angela Merkel but with notions of Schröder’s Agenda 2010 still in mind. The result, as many analysts fear, would only be stagnation. On the other hand, with Merkel at the helm, Schröder would have no choice but to retire. After the first poll numbers were released, SPD chairman Franz Müntefering described the results as “a personal defeat for Merkel” and called it “a super success for Gerhard Schröder and social democracy.” Müntefering also noted that his party was still unlikely to join up with the far left in a Red-Green-Red coalition, cooperation was going to be needed, and they were ready to sit down at the table. When Merkel addressed her own supporters, she first emphasized the need for “a stable government”–yet another hint that a Grand Coalition is in the works.
Red-Green-Red. At a roundtable discussion later in the evening, Chancellor Schröder seemed to contradict his party chairman by telling the television hosts he still had a majority–which he would only have in an alliance with the Greens and the far left–and that Germans clearly want him to be their chancellor. Though his party did lose seats and are now trailing the CDU/CSU, he was quick to point out: “Sure we lost and it breaks my heart. But I believe your network predicted 40 percent for the opposition. The SPD came back from 26 percent to 34 percent in just a few weeks and for that I am most proud of my party.” Yet economically, socially, and politically, Red-Green-Red would prove disastrous as the government would lurch even farther left, incorporating the ideas of a socialist partner. At the same time, Schröder will need to keep in mind that all legislation must be approved by the chamber known as the Bundesrat, controlled by the CDU/CSU/FDP alliance for the next two years.
As many supporters of the Black-Yellow coalition asked themselves tonight, How did this happen? Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, an FDP member of the European parliament, partially blamed it on the flat tax idea of Professor Paul Kirchhoff and the CDU. “The Free Democrats are the fiscal conservatives and know how to cut taxes. The Christian Democrats should have just left it to us.” He is right, as the latest polls show the increase in the FDP’s vote came largely at the expense of Christian Democrats who crossed over. In addition, Merkel’s other reforms included raising the national sales tax by 2 percent while attempting to lower payroll taxes by the same amount, a plan that was ultimately viewed as too risky by voters.
The Undecideds: Of the roughly 60 million Germans eligible to vote, some 30 percent were undecided going into the election. “It appears the German professional pollsters simply dropped the undecideds in their preelection surveys and reported results using that reduced base,” says Robert Moran, a vice president at Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, a U.S.-based political consulting firm. “By doing that you are likely eliminating a pool of voters who will in fact turn out to vote. And as it turns out, these undecideds were late-breaking SPD voters, something the pollsters could have found out had they analyzed them more.” Adds Daniel Gurley, another political adviser and president of The Caledonian Group, “Typically undecideds vote for the challenger but because they are already thinking of the CDU as the incumbent, they ended up voting for the Social Democrats instead.”
Merkel’s gender played at best a variable role. Some critics referred to her as “Der” Merkel (“Der” being a masculine modifier). The chancellor’s fourth and so-far current wife said her husband’s opponent couldn’t necessarily be considered a real woman because she never had children. Said one Berlin saleswoman: “[Merkel] studied sciences, she thinks differently. I know these kinds of women. I went to school with them. They are more like men.” Meanwhile some conservatives considered her unelectable precisely because she was a woman (and from the East).
The next German government, regardless of its composition, will have other pressing matters to deal with and little time to waste:
There are currently about 8,000 German soldiers deployed in the Balkans, Africa, and Afghanistan. An alliance with the Left party might lead to reductions in strength. When it comes to the war on terror, one can only hope the new regime will progress even further than under Red-Green, which made strides with interior minister Otto Schily, a former lawyer for terrorists turned staunch supporter of national identity cards, retinal scans, and other biometrics.
The threat of internal terror and growing radicalism also remains a concern. Özcan Mutlu, a Turkish Green member of the Berlin parliament, has been following developments closely. He worries about a nearby mosque backed by fundamentalists and has pushed for stricter controls over Arab broadcasts. “If you are preaching death and destruction and killing innocent people, I am sorry, but that is not protected by free speech . . . . For years radical imams were telling their followers to go out and kill and no one did anything about it. We need to.” Another outrageous instance, Mutlu points out, was a protest march in which a man carried his daughter on his shoulders–and had her wear a fake bomb around her waist.
Within the next few days, party leaders will go beyond tonight’s rhetoric and discuss the possibilities for coalitions, grand or otherwise. Ironically, the one party unlikely to be a part of any government is the one that made the most progress, the Free Democrats. As one FDP member told me, “That is what I call a shit success.”
Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard. His visit to Germany was made by possible by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, an affiliate of the Free Democratic Party.
