ANALYSIS:Backbenchers made dissent all too apparent in the presidential vote fiasco – now the clock is ticking for Germany's pragmatic chancellor, writes DEREK SCALLY
WHEN COMPUTER support staff run out of ideas to fix a problem PC, they can be relied upon to ask: “Have you tried restarting?”
For the last nine months, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s troubled second government has been crashing repeatedly. Now, on what seems like a weekly basis, someone in the government comes up with the bright idea of putting an end to the incessant squabbling by “restarting” the government.
The rhetorical trend that began in the Obama White House has reached Berlin, but increasingly panicked jabs of the German government’s reset button have failed to halt the crashes. Nowhere was that more obvious than in Wednesday’s marathon presidential vote for Merkel’s party ally, Christian Wulff.
Though her ruling coalition had a comfortable majority to elect him, frustrated government backbenchers refused to back Wulff – and thus Merkel – in two successive rounds of voting.
The dissenters only fell into line on the third vote, which was as much about the future of the government as the new president.
Rather than the show of unity and strength Merkel needed, the vote was a fiasco.
The postmortem was equally discordant: some senior CDU figures urged the government to try and address the dissenters’ grievances. Others made this week’s call for a restart, now called a “fresh start”.
But each attempt to start again is doomed to failure. Not because the reset button isn’t working, but because, to stretch the computer metaphor, Angela Merkel and her government have no operating system.
Everyone is aware that Angela Merkel doesn’t do grand political visions or bang the table to get her way. But, her admirers argue, she moderates and discusses, then finds a solution everyone can live with. Her critics call her a political opportunist who waits for the winning side to emerge before positioning herself.
This strategy has never been tested, critics argue. Merkel has never had to push through politically unpopular measures, like Helmut Kohl did with the euro or Gerhard Schröder did with his reform agenda. Any big achievements emerged from her first administration, a grand coalition, with no real parliamentary opposition.
Her second administration’s to-do list is long, and growing daily, but little is happening.
Merkel drew a red line through radical tax cuts demanded by the liberal coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP). Plans to simplify Germany’s complex tax code are on ice, while Merkel has declined to position herself on demands within the coalition to increase the top tax rate. Healthcare reforms were cancelled as politically unpalatable, without a decision on how to fill an €11 billion hole in insurance funds.
A promise to extend the life of Germany’s nuclear reactors, reversing a decade-old decision to close them all by 2020, has been in limbo since last October. Progress is promised in August, but a date for a final decision is still in the stars. Finally, a radical plan to abolish obligatory military service has been long-fingered and is unlikely to be touched anytime soon.
Is this leading from behind, as Merkel sees it, or just old-fashioned straggling?
In her CDU, the politicians are voting with their feet. Under her leadership, particularly in the last six months, nearly every heavyweight conservative figure in the party has either thrown in the towel or been promoted off the political stage, whether to Brussels or, with Wulff, to Berlin’s presidential palace.
Backbenchers grudgingly accept Merkel’s political strategy of recent years that, to survive, the CDU needs to broaden its appeal to the middle-classes, and become more centrist. But Wednesday’s election was their protest vote that this is being done at the expense of the CDU’s right-wing profile and its conservative political talent.
The directionless drift of the CDU under Merkel has spread into the corridors of power, too, affecting how Germany is presenting itself in the world. Officials in government ministries, particularly the foreign ministry, complain that they have been given no co-ordinates by which to operate.
That’s a feeling shared in non-government organisations and other institutions that watch Berlin closely.
“Germany isn’t being governed under Merkel, it’s being administered,” said one well-connected Merkel-watcher who asked not to be named because of Berlin’s “deteriorating discussion culture”.
“We used to have constructive give-and-take with federal governments, but no more,” said the source. “Now, when you criticise the current state of affairs, senior officials get mad, pull out the live ammo, and start shooting.”
Ask what lies behind this touchiness in the Merkel government, and people fall into two camps.
The first camp sees a new generation of officials at work who, consciously and unconsciously, have broken with the post-war tradition of keeping Germany at the heart of a European consensus.
Former chancellor Helmut Schmidt attacked the “Wilhelmine pompousness” of Berlin’s current approach to Europe and the Franco-German relationship. Former Green Party foreign minister Joschka Fischer personalised the attack, dubbing Angela Merkel “Frau Germania”.
This camp sees Berlin’s pursuing of a new “normality” that has instead led to hubris, and cite as examples the recent rows Berlin had with the rest of the EU over Greece and the euro zone rescue fund.
The second camp agrees that the new generation of Berlin officials, many born after the Berlin Wall was built, have changed the German game. Behind the hubris, however, they see insecurity and panic because of Berlin’s missing operating system.
“Germany has no plan, Merkel has none, and people are realising that pragmatism is no substitute for a plan,” says a close adviser to the government, again preferring not to be named.
So where now for Angela Merkel? After Wednesday, in effect a nine-hour televised vote of no confidence in the German chancellor, political analysts suggest she has little option but to call a confidence motion to prop up her leadership. But that might cause more problems than it would solve.
“What is the reason and goal of Merkel’s politics or of the current coalition?” asked Prof Franz Walter of the University of Göttingen. “There is none, and that is the source of all problems.”
Germany’s coalition parties know now that they sleep-walked into office last year, presuming they could just pick up where they left off with Helmut Kohl in 1998.
But the world has changed radically since then, the CDU under Merkel too. The neo-liberal FDP, meanwhile, still thinks it is in opposition and is woefully ill-equipped to govern, with a political programme from 1997 that pre-dates the meltdown in the globalised financial markets for the last two years.
Compared to the FDP – the party struggled to register in recent opinion polls – the CDU appears a picture of health and is holding steady in polls. But as neither government party wants an election, they are damned to cling together.
The clock is ticking for the German chancellor. She knows she has exactly eight months to turn things around. Next March, millions of voters go to the polls within a week of each other to elect four new state parliaments. A poor showing here would leave her hopelessly compromised and make clear the perils of Angela Merkel’s political pragmatism.
Derek Scally is Berlin Correspondent