German Politics Enters Era of Instability
Germany's
big-tent parties have ensured political stability for decades. But they are
rapidly losing power and influence. The Social Democrats are witnessing an open
rebellion against party leadership while many conservatives are beginning to
doubt Merkel's abilities. By DER SPIEGEL Staff
February
16, 2018 06:34 PM
Early
Tuesday afternoon, a small group met for a closed-door meeting at the
headquarters of Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Berlin. The meeting
was supposed to be about a formality, but it was in fact about the very future
of the party.
Martin Schulz,
still the center-left party's chair at the time, was present, as were six of
his deputies, the general secretary, the treasurers, Lower Saxony Governor
Stephan Weil and, of course, Andrea Nahles, the party's parliamentary whip. The
group wanted to commence the previously announced change in party leadership --
former chancellor candidate Schulz was to step down, with Nahles taking over as
the provisional head of the SPD until her planned installation as chair at an
upcoming party conference. The hope was to restore calm in the party.
But it
didn't work. Resistance cropped up everywhere. SPD lawyers argued that it
wasn't legal for Nahles to serve as the party's interim head. Emails from
furious party members began flooding into SPD headquarters. On social media,
members of the party began cursing the stubborn party establishment. And three
state chapters opposed the plan outright.
It set off
a wave of the kind seen often recently, an insurgency from below against those
at the top, the party grassroots against its leadership.
As a
result, the group gathered at SPD headquarters was troubled. But Olaf Scholz,
the mayor of Hamburg and an influential SPD functionary, wanted to push the
plan through nonetheless. Scholz does not like to go on the defensive and he
believed that giving in to the protestations coming from below would be a sign
of weakness. Party leaders, he said, needed to exert leadership. They couldn't
allow their actions to be dictated by the party base.
Power
Struggle
Nahles
agreed. The pair was concerned that withdrawing their plan would merely
encourage critics to take further action. It was, in other words, the birth of
a power struggle between the SPD's party base and its leadership.
But there
was plenty of opposition within the party's national executive committee as
well. And ultimately, Nahles and Scholz backed down, proposing instead to make
Scholz the provisional head the SPD first before later handing the reins to
Nahles. The executive committee supported the move and Nahles was left to spin
the solution to the media as proof that the party was leaving its strife
behind.
In
actuality, though, it was a defeat for Nahles. Yet again, she was caught
entirely by surprise by the sentiment in a party that she believes to know so
well.
The fact is
that the party's grassroots are angry, and their fury is no longer exclusively
focused on plans to join Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives in yet
another grand coalition. The upcoming party vote on that coalition agreement is
in the process of transforming into a vote on the SPD's leadership and
political culture. Party leaders in Berlin are at risk of losing control -- as
though their link with the party base has been broken.
Western
Democracies in Crisis
And this
phenomenon is by no means exclusive to the SPD. The conservative Christian
Democrats are also seeing the authority of their once all-powerful chancellor
being eroded, with discontent and the urge for change growing in the party
base.
Germany
finds itself oscillating between a longing for stability and the desire for
upheaval. Surveys show that support for both the CDU and the SPD has plunged,
to the point that, were elections held today, it isn't even certain that a
grand coalition would have a majority.
Support for
the SPD and the conservatives is falling.
DER SPIEGEL
Support for
the SPD and the conservatives is falling.
Suddenly,
upheaval is everywhere. Within the SPD, everyone seems to be fighting with
everyone else, with a large number taking aim at acting Foreign Minister Sigmar
Gabriel. Above all, the party base is in open revolt against the leadership.
Within the Christian Democrats, meanwhile, Chancellor Merkel's authority is
melting away. The Merkel era is drawing to a close and the upheavals caused by
her efforts to modernize her party are now breaking into the open.
The country
is slipping into a crisis and Germany, the bastion of stability in Europe, is
becoming politically unstable. And every month the country continues to be run
by a provisional government is another month that Germany doesn't have a voice
in Europe or the world.
This is by
no means purely a domestic development. The party system is currently being
turn upside down across Western democracies. Owing to Germany's prosperity and
the sedative power of its chancellor, it long appeared that Merkel had been
spared by the international development. But the torturous wrangling to create
a new government has now dashed that hope.
In France,
the two parties that once dominated the country now hold only just over a
quarter of the seats in the national parliament. In Italy, the Five Star
Movement, which doesn't seem to stand for much other than the desire for change
and its loathing of the status quo and is led by a former TV comedian, appears
to have strong chances of winning the election there in March.
A Radical
Loss of Support
In Germany,
the old establishment parties are also struggling to maintain political
stability. Combined support for the SPD and the conservatives has dropped from
over 90 percent at the beginning of the 1970s to just 49 percent today. Their
decline, which had previously been a slow and creeping process, has rapidly
accelerated in recent months.
The party
system in Germany is splintering, with seven parties now represented in
national parliament. When it is no longer possible to form governments with two
or three parties, it will necessarily become increasingly difficult to build
stable governments. Italy already provides an example of what that can mean.
The country is constantly swapping out its prime minister and holding snap
elections. Italy has had almost 30 prime ministers and a total of 61 cabinets
since 1946. In the same period, Germany has been governed by eight chancellors.
At this
point, the crisis has become an existential one for the SPD. Even if the party
becomes part of the next government, that won't guarantee that the bleeding
will stop -- that much has been demonstrated by developments in other European
countries. The party leadership has lost its authority and many state chapters
are in chaos -- including the party's most important chapter in North
Rhine-Westphalia.
Party
discipline is also waning, with SPD parliamentarians increasingly defying
leadership. The youth wing of the Social Democrats, the Jusos, have even been
making headlines in the international press with their open rebellion against
the party's plan to join Merkel's government. And three obscure local
politicians have announced that they will fight against Nahles' installation as
party boss.
Manuela
Schwesig, the party's deputy chair, has described the situation as "days
of chaos." A member of the national executive committed said: "It's a
nightmare."
Within the
Christian Democrats, the process began later and has been less radical.
Nevertheless, with the end of Merkel's calming dominance in the party, the
battle over the CDU's future direction is growing ever louder. The sense is
palpable all across the party that it is facing questions about its own future.
Feb. 7, 2018, the day that the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats
reached an agreement to go into government together again, could prove to be a
historical turning point, as the "end of the CDU as a big-tent
party," warns Carsten Linnemann, the head of the party's wing representing
the powerful lobby of small- to mid-sized businesses.
That goes a
long way toward explaining the intensity with which the debate is currently
being carried out within the CDU. When a politician like Paul Ziemiak, the head
of the party's youth wing, calls for the party's renewal, it generally has to
do with the divvying up of political appointments. Really, though, it's the
question of whether the CDU can maintain its status as a big-tent party.
Massive
Distrust
The SPD,
meanwhile, has become a cautionary tale. "There is now considerable
distrust by society against the people at the top," says CDU deputy head
Ralf Stegner. "Ongoing social transformations are being mirrored within
the major national parties," he warns. "That's why we need a new
sensitivity and we need to find the right balance between asserting leadership
and more seriously taking the party base into consideration."
The
distrust and displeasure toward the parties' leadership is massive. The worst, argues
Edgar Franke, a member of parliament with the conservative wing of the SPD, are
all the canned statements coming out of party headquarters. "The people
want politicians with rough edges and flaws. They don't want robots."
Meanwhile, former Munich Mayor Christian Ude asks, "Does the SPD executive
really want to test its members' threshold for pain?"
The party
base is retaliating against the hermetic leadership style at the top of the
party and against the backroom deals. Party members want transparency and a
voice. The membership in the two parties is also more diverse than it was in
the past. Among the tens of thousands of new members the SPD registered in the
last 12 months, there are many, many young people who want to see a totally
different political culture emerge. They grew up in in a world in which the new
media sparks new voices within a matter of hours and in which authorities have
been weakened because fewer people are listening to them.
It's no
longer an issue of political discontent. On the contrary, voter turnout is
increasing again and people are taking an interest in politics in Germany. The
problem is that trust in the parties is shrinking.
Under the
German constitution, the political parties are there to help form political
policies that express the will of the people. That's their job, but it's
obvious that fewer and fewer people have the impression that they are
fulfilling that mandate.
Identity
Loss
Members of
both the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats are deeply unnerved. The
long journey to the political center made by both parties has robbed them of
their respective leftist and conservative identities. They lack unique traits,
differences in political views and reasons to debate each other. Many members
now want to finally get back to a point where they actually know what it is
their party stands for. They long for clarity and determination.
The leaders
of these parties in Berlin are sapped and exhausted. Many members are craving a
reboot. The parties are on the cusp of a generational shift, with the departure
of older politicians. The problem is that the people who are now slated to take
over the parties don't necessarily embody that fresh start. Andrea Nahles,
although 16 years younger than Merkel, has been politically active for just as
long as the chancellor. At the time Merkel joined the Democratic Awakening
party in then-East Germany in 1989, Nahles was founding a local chapter of the
SPD in Weiler, the village where she grew up.
Discord is
driving a wedge through both parties. For the SPD, regardless how the members
vote on the resolution on whether to join a grand coalition, it will be a
nearly impossible task to reconcile the opponents and proponents of governing
with Merkel. And within the Christian Democrats, the conservatives who have
aligned with rising party star Jens Spahn and the party modernizers surrounding
Merkel are drifting ever further apart.
Part 2: Merkel Tries to Plug the Dike
February
16, 2018 06:34 PM
On
Valentine's Day, Angela Merkel found herself at the indoor tennis courts in the
town of Demmin in northern Germany, standing between a brass band and a sign
advertising construction material recycling. She wasn't there to celebrate
romance, however. It was, after all, Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent and
the day on which Germany's political parties traditionally gather to say the
kinds of things that normally get edited out of their more sober political
speeches.
Merkel,
though, had brought along a poem:
"It
isn't the time to bash your head through the wall, rather it's the time to keep
cool heads for all."
If it was
up to the chancellor, in other words, the CDU would merely continue to stay the
course.
But it's
not just up to the party's chairperson, particularly after Merkel, according to
the widespread interpretation within the CDU, rolled over and played dead in
the just-finished coalition negotiations with the SPD. Despite having received
the most votes in the election last September, the CDU will not get any of the
four most important cabinet portfolios: the Labor Ministry, the Foreign
Ministry, the Interior Ministry and the Finance Ministry. And when Merkel said
on Wednesday, "Many have complained that we will no longer have control of
the Finance Ministry," audible groaning filled the room. "Yes!"
said a delegate from the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. And she was
echoed by those seated at her table: "Yes, yes, yes!" Soon other
tables joined the chorus and before long, delegates throughout the room were
saying "yes, yes, yes!"
Merkel
ignored it. But the grumbling continued even after she had changed the subject
to talk about the war in Syria.
'Back to
What We Actually Are'
"That
wasn't what I had expected," says Johannes Golz, the 19-year-old head of
the CDU's youth chapter on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom, after the
chancellor's speech had ended. "Merkel is stripping away our conservative
profile." He says that during door-to-door campaigning ahead of last
fall's election, he found himself unable to explain what his party stood for,
particularly on issues like refugee policy and gay marriage.
The CDU,
Golz believes, can only be saved by undergoing a significant renewal. "Young
people must finally be given an opportunity so that we can find our way back to
what we really are."
Merkel was
aware of the mood among the party base even before her appearance in Demmin.
She knew that the distribution of ministries, negotiated on the final night of
coalition talks with the SPD and the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU's
Bavarian sister party, would not be popular. But she was surprised by the
intensity of the anger.
Old Merkel
antagonists now believe that the time has come to settle scores from several
years ago. Roland Koch, the former governor of Hesse whose rise to national
influence was slowed and ultimately stopped by Merkel, complained recently that
the CDU showed that it would accept anything just to form a government. Friedrich
Merz, another erstwhile CDU up-and-comer whose political career was shortened
by Merkel, said the party had been humiliated. Volker Rühe, German defense
minister for six years under former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, complained that the
CDU's negotiating strategy was disastrous.
The fact
that those three would rejoin the public debate after having remained silent
for so long shows just how precarious they believe Merkel's current position to
be. More dangerous for Merkel, however, is the fact that many active
politicians on both the federal and state level have added their voices to the
chorus.
It's a
discussion that began with the refugee crisis and has refused to die down, in
part because of the rise of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany
(AfD) party to the right of the CDU. And there are two sides to the debate.
Merkel is convinced that the party must continue down the path of modernization
that she embarked on so as to make it attractive to as broad a swath of voters
as possible. She is opposed to polarization because she is convinced it isn't
beneficial to the CDU.
A Wave of
Outrage
On the
other side, though, is a strong faction within the party that would like to see
less consensus and more conflict in the political debate. They believe the AfD
managed to secure seats in German parliament in part because the CDU no longer
has anything to offer its core voters on the conservative wing.
One of the
most prominent adherents to this point of view is Jens Spahn, 37, and Merkel
would like to prevent him from gaining traction. Now that it has come time to
begin divvying up positions in the next government, the chancellor would like
to prevent him from landing in a post from which he can lob criticism at her.
It's not likely, in other words, that Merkel will hand him a cabinet portfolio.
But the
question has now become whether Merkel can afford to skip over Spahn. After the
coalition negotiations with the SPD had concluded, a list of potential CDU
cabinet appointees, apparently from the Chancellery, began circulating -- and
the omission of Spahn's name on the list triggered a wave of outrage within the
party. It has become clear that any Merkel attempt to promote other prominent
CDU conservatives to the cabinet, such as Rhineland-Palatinate CDU leader Julia
Klöckner, won't be sufficient. Spahn has become symbolic of the conflict within
Germany's conservatives.
"Jens
Spahn is a name that binds important constituencies to the CDU," says
Volker Bouffier, the current governor of Hesse and a supporter of Merkel. He
too thinks Merkel would be well advised to include her adversaries in the next
government. And Spahn even seemed to have provided the chancellor some guidance
on where he might fit in. In his own Ash Wednesday speech, delivered in
far-away Fellbach on the outskirts of Stuttgart, Spahn spoke passionately and
at length about schools and education.
Still, it seems
unlikely that Merkel will be able to quiet the grumbling within the CDU with
just a couple of political appointments. Her authority has eroded far beyond
that. "We have to realize that some people don't feel represented,"
says Thomas Strobl, head of the CDU state chapter in Baden-Württemberg.
"That is evidenced by the rise of the AfD." The CDU, he says, needs a
new platform "to clearly define our positions and the direction in which
we want to go." Normally, such debates are irrelevant for day-to-day political
operations. But for the CDU, they could be decisive in determining how long it
remains a big-tent party.
The SPD has
survived numerous crises, but this time, the recipes usually used to get things
back under control aren't working. The accusation that SPD leaders determine
their party's future in smoky backrooms likewise isn't new. But instead of
quiet frustration, which has been the traditional response, open rebellion has
broken out this time around. The political behavior displayed by party leaders,
says Keven Kühnert, head of the party's youth wing, "is appalling."
'Clumsy
Behavior'
SPD leaders
have nobody to blame but themselves: The policy reversals of the past few
months have come back to haunt them. First, SPD leadership insisted the party
would never join another coalition with Merkel, a position reiterated after the
chancellor's first attempt to form a government failed -- only to reverse
course and agree to form another coalition with Merkel. That has caused trust
in senior party officials to evaporate. Worse than that, however, is the fact
that their primary concern ultimately seemed to be what post they would get
once the government was constituted.
"When
I try to explain the results of the coalition negotiations, which are very good,
fewer and fewer people listen because the debate over appointments overshadows
everything," says Bernd Westphal, the SPD fraction's economic spokesman in
the German parliament. "Party leaders have demanded that the personnel
debate come to an end, but they keep retriggering it with their own clumsy
behavior."
Such as the
announcement that Andrea Nahles would be taking over from Martin Schulz as
party chair. The news arrived just as SPD negotiators were gathering a week ago
Wednesday to grant their final approval of the coalition agreement negotiated
with the CDU and CSU: Nahles was to become party leader, the message on their
mobile phones read, and Schulz would take over the Foreign Ministry. Most of
the SPD negotiators present were "stunned," says one of those
present. Very few knew the announcement was coming.
"What
the heck?" deputy SPD leader Ralf Stegner said to the other negotiators.
"That's going to be a problem."
The
announcement made it clear that Nahles and Schulz had been talking about a leadership
reshuffle since the party conference in Bonn on Jan. 21. Publicly, Schulz,
Scholz and Nahles had been insisting for weeks that political positions would
only be divvied up at the very end of the process. In truth, though, a small
handful of senior SPD leaders had long since been discussing exactly that. Only
at the very end of the coalition negotiations were a few other SPD leaders
notified of the secret leadership discussions.
Only very
few realized that the personnel change might become a problem. SPD General
Secretary Lars Klingbeil warned Schulz to be careful, saying that if he joined
Merkel's cabinet, his credibility might take a hit. Schulz, after all, had
pledged that he would never become a part of a Merkel-led government.
But by
then, the decision had become more or less public. And in the SPD executive
committee meeting a short time later, there was no resistance to speak of.
Everyone was completely exhausted from the overnight negotiations and suffering
from sleep deprivation. Many had also fallen ill. At this point, Nahles and
Schulz hadn't yet realized the hornets' nest they had kicked. Nahles also threw
her support behind Schulz publicly, saying he would become foreign minister
"because that is what he represents in our party with heart and
soul."
It didn't
take long, though, for the first insurrection to appear. In many state
chapters, led by North Rhine-Westphalia, Schulz's plans triggered anger and
indignation and the mood was even worse in regional chapters. Irritation was
likewise widespread within the party's parliamentary group in Berlin. Thousands
of emails began pouring into SPD headquarters.
Adamently
Opposed
It soon
became clear that the debate threatened to overshadow the upcoming vote among
all SPD members as to whether to approve the coalition deal. As a result, just
48 hours after the announcement, Nahles and Schulz agreed in a telephone
conversation that Schulz would not take a cabinet position after all.
Despite the
anger, nobody really harbors any doubts that Nahles has the ability to lead the
SPD. But she soon found herself faced with the next controversy. Would SPD
members learn prior to the coalition approval vote who party leadership
intended to appoint to cabinet positions?
Nahles and
the entire SPD leadership committee are adamantly opposed to making the names
of potential cabinet ministers public before the party base votes on the
coalition deal. They argue that doing so would distract voters from the details
of the deal and once again put personnel questions in the foreground.
In fact,
though, Nahles and Scholz are likely interested in avoiding a discussion over
the most delicate question of all: What to do with Sigmar Gabriel? Neither want
him to remain German foreign minister, a position he has leveraged into his
current status as the most popular SPD politician in the country. Many normal
SPD members, though, are happy with the job he has done and want him to stay in
the position, as do many Social Democratic parliamentarians.
"He
has proven that he can do it," says parliamentarian Bernd Westphal.
"I would like to see Sigmar Gabriel continue as foreign minister."
Furthermore, Westphal says, he has years of experience in the cabinet. "We
shouldn't dispense with someone like that."
The End of
the SPD as a Big Tent Party
If
designated SPD head Nahles continues to remain silent on the issue, it will
begin to look like she has learned nothing. As though she still hasn't
understood that the party would like a different style of leadership and that
members are tired of being informed of decisions after they have already been
made.
It seems
likely that pressure on the party leadership will continue to increase -- to
the point that they might have to buckle yet again. For Nahles, that would
represent yet another loss of authority. "It would be the worst thing that
could happen to us," says a member of the leadership committee.
The fate of
the republic, it would seem, is now dependent on the results of a vote among
the 463,000 SPD members. It is possible that the party will manage to get its
act together. After all, with public opinion polls indicating that support for
the party has fallen to a paltry 16 percent, new elections could end in
disaster. It would mark their end as a big-tent party.
But even if
the coalition with Merkel's conservatives does come about, Germany's political
party system will not return to the certainties that once defined it. And that
means that the country is entering a phase of uncertainty.
The stability
of the country's big-tent parties was a guarantee of a stable political
landscape. Their ability to integrate a wide variety of political opinions
prevented the radical fringes from growing too strong. That reality, though,
has now come to an end. Cool heads, to borrow Merkel's plea in Demmin, are few
and far between.
By Nicola
Abé, Christiane Hoffmann, Veit Medick, Ralf Neukirch and Christoph Schult
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