Germany’s political failure

All the electoral attention for the last week has been on the United States, making it a great time for anyone else to release bad news without people noticing. Whether that was the thinking or whether it was just coincidence, German prime minister Olaf Scholz chose last Wednesday to announce the collapse of his coalition government, leading to an early election next year, most probably in March.

For those still wondering how something like Donald Trump’s victory could possibly happen, Germany is well worth a look. Not just the early 1930s, when the democratic parties chronically failed to work together to resist the advent of barbarism, but also more recent years, where a milder (so far) version of the same thing has been happening.

Things started out positively for Scholz. Shortly after the 2021 election, he put together a coalition government consisting of his own Social Democrats (SPD), the pro-business Liberals (FDP) and the Greens. This was the same combination that had failed to work together back in 2005, when they had a majority but the FDP refused to play ball. Greens and Liberals had also failed to join in coalition, this time with the centre-right (CDU), following the 2017 election.

So third time lucky, at least for a while. But as the skies darkened, with the invasion of Ukraine, with grim economic times in Germany and with the rise of the far right both there and on the other side of the Atlantic, the three parties, instead of drawing together to fight common foes, fell more and more to bickering among themselves. Last week it fell apart completely, with Scholz sacking his finance minister – Christian Lindner, the leader of the FDP – and announcing that he would seek a vote of confidence in the new year.

It’s not impossible that the parties will patch up their differences before then and agree to carry on together, but it doesn’t seem likely. And even if they do, it will probably just delay the inevitable: the election is due by next September anyway, and the three governing parties all look set to be punished for their disunity.

Last time around, the coalition parties won 51.9% of the vote between them and 415 of the 735 seats – 206 SPD, 118 Greens and 91 Liberals. According to recent polls, they are now tracking around 30% in total: SPD and Greens each face the loss of about a third of their seats, and the FDP is struggling to reach the 5% threshold and could be eliminated from the parliament entirely.

Unless there’s a substantial shift in the meantime, the next parliament looks like containing three equally-matched blocs: the CDU, the SPD/Greens combination, and the extremists (the far-right AfD and the left-Putinist BSW) will have something like a third of the seats each. (Probably somewhat more with the CDU, but not enough to outbalance the others.) Ideological enemies of one sort or another will have to work together in order to produce a majority.

That’s not the end of the world. This is not yet 1932, when the Nazis and the Communists (which AfD and the BSW, respectively, somewhat feebly echo) won a majority between them and made the country ungovernable. The CDU and SPD have governed together before, and they could probably also rely on the support of the Greens.

While the CDU and AfD between them will probably have a majority – thus ruling out, incidentally, the chance of a cantankerous broad left coalition of SPD, Greens and BSW – there is as yet no prospect of them co-operating. The CDU under opposition leader Friedrich Merz has moved towards the right (giving credibility to AfD’s policies in the process), but is not prepared to break the taboo against working with the far right.

That puts Germany in a class above some of its neighbors, but in other respects the performance of its politicians has been woeful. In the first Trump administration, Germany’s prime minister took on the mantle of leader of the free world; this time there is little sign of anyone willing and able to step up.