None of the Above

Sunday was election day in Germany, and voters chose "none of the above." Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his center-left "SDP" government -- in office since 1998 -- started the campaign trailing the center-right CDU's Angela Merkel. A new-comer -- a quantum chemist researcher (with a physics PhD) in East Berlin, who entered politics only 15 years ago, six weeks after the Wall fell -- Merkel was untested. Still, given Germany's decade-old economic stagnation, observers widely forecast a CDU landslide. Yet as election day approached, polls narrowed, fueled by post-war anxiety about radical change, particularly the CDU's mooted flat-tax.

In the end, the election was a virtual tie, with smaller parties the beneficiaries. Preliminary results give the CDU 35.2 percent, one point better than the SDP's 34.2 percent:



(source: Der Spiegel)

In the Bundestag (lower house), the two larger parties shed seats--the CDU's 225 barely tops SDP's 223:



(source: Der Spiegel)

Though both Merkel and Schröder claimed victory, neither the SDP nor the CDU won a majority, meaning that the new government will be some Frankensteinian coalition. Merkel's preferred partner, the libertarian FDP, was a clear winner having gained more than a dozen seats, but a CDU-FDP alliance is "far from the 50 percent they would need to form a governing coalition." And although the three leftist parties (SDP, Greens and the ex-Communist Left/PDS) together would have a majority plus about 20 seats, Mr Schröder long ago ruled out governing with the latter. The FDP also refused to join the SDP-Green grouping.

Three predictions amidst the chaos:

1. It may be days before what David at MedienKritik calls the current "high degree of uncertainty" resolves into a governing majority. Tacitus rounds up the possibilities. In a word, Germany's gridlocked--possibly for several weeks. Interviewed by the Financial Times, a BMW executive said: “This is exactly what the country didn't need a long period of uncertainty and negotiations. We will all be losers.”



2. Germany's reluctance to embrace even Merkel's modest reforms make a so-called "grand coalition" between the CSU and SPD much more likely. That would produce gridlock squared, Altana CEO Nikolaus Schweickart told Financial Times:

   This election result is a disaster for German business, in the short term and in the long term. A grand coalition seems to be very likely because there is no other realistic alternative. But a grand coalition means deadlock.

3. Even should SDP join a governing coalition, Schröder won't be Chancellor, or if he is, only for a brief transition period. Both Schröder and SPD party head Franz Müntefering vowed to quit any government without Schröder as Chancellor. In any event, the German left detests his relatively centrist economic policies, and blame Schröder for the surprising swell of defections to the Left/PDS.

None of this should surprise: "nothing" is what post-war German governments do best. Their parliamentary system aimed to block the threat of future dictatorships, says Michael Greve in the September 19th Weekly Standard (subscription only):

The architects of the German constitution sought to learn the "lessons of Weimar," where a fractious multi-party parliament, unwilling or unable to form a government, prompted increasingly frequent general elections, government by presidential emergency decree, and eventually, with President Paul von Hindenburg's help, the Nazis' power grab. The "lesson" was to protect the legislature's authority and stability--fatefully, to the exclusion of the quasi-plebiscitary mechanisms through which other parliamentary systems ensure effective government.

So the German constitution strengthens the legislature--possibly at the expense of the electorate, says MedienKritik's David:

The voter primarily determines the distribution of seats among the individual parties in the German Parliament (Bundestag). In the Anglo-Saxon model, on the other hand, candidates are elected whose party affiliation then defines the balance of power in the parliament. The political leadership in Germany - the Chancellor - is elected by the parliament, not directly by the people.

The unintended consequence, says Greve, is weak governance:

By constitutional design, the country cannot have a governing executive. . .

Just as the constitution guards against executive-led dissolution, so it guards against the formation of a resolute government. Under Germany's system of (modified) proportional representation, parties can gain power and govern only by attracting a very broad spectrum of voters or in a coalition government--through Volksparteien [populism] and consensus. This once-heralded Modell Deutschland tends to take choice, ideology, and decision--in a word, politics--out of politics. It works for a country that needs no serious foreign policy (and in truth does not want one). And it works so long as the economy can support political competition that is constricted by the welfare state consensus.

In the 15 years following unification, Greve's two prerequisites vanished. Germany's GDP has flat-lined for five years. The current unemployment rate is about 11.5 percent, having been in double digits for almost four years, and joblessness is particularly prevalent among the young and in the former DDR (East). The numbers, says GatewayPundit, would make even Jimmy Carter blush. As for foreign policy, Chancellor Schröder's juvenile anti-Americanism "poisoned Germany's relationship with America," and -- after tying his government to France's Jacques Chirac -- died with the rejected EU Constitution.

Contrary to various love notes in the American press, a Merkel majority government wouldn't have sparked a Thatcher-style revolution:

The Christian Democrats propose to reform the German welfare state by making it more like . . . the Scandinavian welfare state, which is financed mostly through general rather than payroll taxes. Prominently, the party proposes an increased value-added tax to finance unemployment benefits, a project which the SPD opposes. Transfer-dependent voters demand to be provided for, and no politician can afford to deny them.

Ray at MedienKritik and PeakTalk observe that a mandate-less Merkel government will be still more timid.

Germany's Constitution was supposed to prevent a divided, minority government parliament, thus baring a Weimar re-run of a democracy committing suicide. On Sunday, Germans elected a divided parliament that may well bless a coalition falling short of a majority. Regardless of which parties form Germany's next government, the muddled tie again postpones economic reform and freezes already frosty German-American relations. In short, Germany gave an election and nobody came.

More:

Today's Wall Street Journal: "German voters get a chance for reform but choose gridlock instead."

Still More:

Kosmoblog's Ulrich Speck analyses the results at AICGS.

More x 3:

Sigmund, Carl & Alfred:

When it is all said and done, Germans voted for a free lunch. They didn't want the jobs and they didn't want to work. They just wanted the free lunch. They are about to find out just how expensive that free lunch really is.

(via Instapundit, MedienKritik, Democracy Project and MaxedOutMama, twice)