GERMANY
/ OPINION
Germany’s
election result is a warning to Merkel – not a far-right triumph
Mary Dejevsky
Monday 14 March 2016
13.41 GMT
With
no mainstream outlet for discontent over migration, the real problem
facing the chancellor is not AfD gains but the future effects of her
deal with Turkey
How bad is bad? As
the results of Germany’s three regional elections came in, the
losses suffered by the chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right CDU
were described as “dramatic”. In a vote widely seen as tantamount
to a referendum on the welcome Merkel had extended to Syrian
refugees, the verdict was interpreted as an unequivocal thumbs-down,
with electoral momentum passing – almost unthinkable in Germany –
to the xenophobic far right. The CDU was being punished for an
unpopular policy devised and articulated, with uncharacteristic
audacity, by its leader.
How bad the outcome
really was for the CDU and, by extension, for Merkel, however,
depends to a large degree on your expectations. The most extreme
forecast had been that the CDU would be trounced to the point that
Merkel would have to consider her position. That did not happen. The
CDU was not erased. The chancellor has been weakened, but she lives
to fight another day.
At the other
extreme, there had been a hope – albeit faint – that voters would
rally around Merkel almost as an act of defiance and an expression of
confidence in a new, more modern, more diverse and more generous
Germany. That did not happen either. The anti-migrant party
Alternative for Germany (AfD) significantly increased its vote,
reaching double figures in all three states that voted on Sunday and
qualifying for representation in the regional legislatures. So
Germany, for all its history, is not immune to the far right after
all.
In the event,
though, Germans voted more cannily, and more realistically, than
first reactions gave them credit for. And the effects of the
far-right vote were different in each region. In Saxony-Anhalt, a
poor state in the east, the AfD overtook the centre-left Social
Democrats, SPD, to take second place to the CDU. In
Baden-Württemberg, the Greens were the main beneficiaries of
Merkel’s woes, while in Rhineland Palatinate it was the SPD, and
the fortunes of the regional CDU leader, Julia Klöckner, who is seen
as a possible heir to Merkel, suffered a blow.
In the end, neither
the flight from the CDU nor the embrace of AfD was so whole-hearted
that it transformed the complexion of German politics. In each state
the major party remains the same, but the coalitions will have to be
reconfigured. Nor is there the slightest prospect of the AfD entering
government at the regional level. It is still, for the time being at
least, a protest party.
The AfD vote,
however, highlighted two problems – one endemic to German politics,
the other more immediate and of Angela Merkel’s own making.
The voters –
constituting around 12% of Germany’s electorate – sent Merkel a
clear warning in advance of next year’s national elections. By no
means all resorted to the AfD to make their feelings known. Outside
the former East, many chose to support the party – the Greens, or
the SPD – that would most effectively clip the CDU’s wings. That
is the mark of a well-informed and practical electorate, but it also
illustrates a difficulty with the system.
Merkel heads a
“grand coalition” made up of the CDU/CSU and SPD, which
essentially means that there is no official opposition party at
national level, and no “respectable” outlet for voters with
misgivings about Merkel’s policies. Centre right (the CDU/CSU),
centre left (SPD), further left (Die Linke) and the Greens are all,
nominally at least, in favour of a liberal line on migration. This
leaves the Alternative for Germany as the only party representing
another view – and many Germans will think twice before voting for
it.
Even as the polls
closed on Sunday, the liabilities of the deal with Turkey were being
graphically illustrated
Some of the loudest
official misgivings about Merkel’s welcome for refugees have come
from ministers in her own party, notably Wolfgang Schäuble, and from
the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the CSU – because Bavaria bore
the brunt of the early refugee arrivals.
Sunday’s election
results give Merkel and her government some time and some space to
demonstrate that they can get to grips with the considerable task
they have taken on before they face the voters again. They must start
to integrate the million or so newcomers they have already accepted,
improve the processing of those yet to come, and persuade other
European countries to do more.
But the lack of any
formal opposition channel is a handicap. It may mask the true extent
of popular discontent, which is increasingly to be heard in private
conversations – which is where the more immediate problem comes in:
the agreement Merkel struck with Turkey providing for controls on new
refugee arrivals and repatriations.
Merkel surely hoped
that the deal - reached just days before the elections and
underwritten by the European Union as a whole - would buy her time.
Whether it had any electoral effect is unclear. Even as the polls
closed in Germany on Sunday, however, its liabilities were being
graphically illustrated.
With the
practicalities of the EU-Turkey deal still to be finalised –
including the politically unpopular lifting of visa-restrictions –
more than three dozen people were killed by a car bomb in Ankara, the
latest in a wave of attacks. The Turkish government’s response to
these attacks has been to restrict civil liberties, close one of the
most popular newspapers and escalate its campaign against Kurdish
forces on and around its borders.
Is this a country
with which the European Union in general and Germany in particular,
can, or should, be doing business? Is it right to regard Turkey as
safe – for its own citizens, let alone for refugees? Merkel may
have bought her government time, but at what cost? Seen in a wider
perspective, she may have fended off one local crisis, by embroiling
Germany in another that is far wider, and far harder to control. The
political storms that lie ahead for Angela Merkel could make the
weekend’s elections seem like a little local squall.
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