Its inevitability did not make it any less shocking. Just after 8:30pm on Wednesday, after talks to pave a way forward for Germany’s long-unloved three-party governing coalition failed, came the news that the Social Democrat (SPD) Chancellor Olaf Scholz had sacked his finance minister, Christian Lindner of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). Lindner’s forced exit shattered Scholz’s brittle coalition, reducing it to minority government status and the Chancellor to that of lame duck. The moment triggered an extraordinarily dark round of political recrimination, name-calling and blame-gaming. Shortly after dumping Lindner, Scholz strode in front of the media and launched an astonishing tirade on his former colleague’s character (the attentions of not a few observers were aroused by the fact that Scholz’s speech was clearly pre-scripted). For the moment, no doubt, it must have felt cathartic – the embattled Scholz even received a standing ovation from his fellow SPD parliamentarians in a meeting that followed. But the ugliness of the collapse revealed a much more deeply wired pathology at the heart of Germany’s consensus-driven politics. It bodes ominously for the coming national elections, now due to take place early in the new year.
As a new week dawns, Berlin remains mired in the passions of the past few days.
Last week’s events also signalled a dramatic crash back to earth for a government that came to power brimming with promise. Some three years ago, Scholz’s so-called traffic-light coalition – so named after the party colours red (SPD), yellow (FDP) and Green – was born amid an atmosphere of renewal. But within weeks of taking office, the structural fragility of the country’s old strategic consensus was dramatically exposedby Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Scholz captured the spirit of departure by proclaiming a much cited (and little realised) Zeitenwende (“epochal change”) in how Germany engaged with its neighbours and allies. As crisis piled upon crisis, the future horizons of these early days quickly narrowed to a point of almost complete closure.
As a new week dawns, Berlin remains mired in the passions of the past few days. But the narrowness of Germany’s political horizons makes it increasingly difficult to grasp the magnitude of the challenges: the German economy, once the benchmark of Europe’s health, is now a laggard. Inflation has eaten up political trust. In just a few short years, the country’s infrastructure –especially its railways – has deteriorated from a source of national pride to a national joke. “Digitalisation” is still spoken about in the future tense. Strategic dependencies on Russia, China and the United States, built up over so many decades, have been unwound at a dizzying speed. And all of this now in the shadow of Donald Trump’s re-election and the influence this will no doubt exercise over both the war in Europe and Germany’s export-heavy economy.
The principal beneficiary of Germany’s claustrophobic political atmosphere is the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, now teeming with confidence following commanding electoral results in three regional elections in September. It goes without saying that the sight of a far-right party in the ascendency has a particularly menacing resonance when the country in question is Germany. But Germany can hardly avoid the pan-European trend. Over the past two years, each of Europe’s biggest states – Poland, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Netherlands – has witnessed elections in which the far-right spectre has been a critical political matter. The results do not tell one collective story about the future of right-wing populist parties, but one story dominated: each election was marked by a binary drawn between “traditional” democratic parties and far-right populists.
It is difficult to envisage how a new government can marshal the power to propel Germany out of its mood of lapse and regression.
September’s regional elections were Germany’s trial run for this kind of political arrangement. They all took place in Germany’s east, where the far right’s popularity is greatest. And they were invariablymapped onto a “right versus the rest” axis. In a telling statistic, some 75 per cent of Social Democrat supporters in the state of Brandenburg claimed to be driven more by holding the AfD at bay than by any conviction of their party’s program. In one state, the AfD came top; in the two others, a close second. Simply to cobble together a non-AfD majority, the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats have been forced into talks with parties that share very few of their values or policy outlooks (in Saxony, these talks have already broken down). In short, this is politics in panic mode.
The dilemma in Germany’s eastern states offers a glimpse into a potentially loud and tempestuous political future, in which old party loyalties continue to fracture, new pop-up parties smash into the landscape from nowhere, and the pressures from below on the main parties to break their old taboos become ever stronger. And the emergence of multi-coloured, multi-party coalitions pinned together by nothing other than their opposition to the extreme right is not only a hindrance to effective governance, it also provides rich fodder for the AfD’s argument that the other parties are all, in the end, “the same”. The situation self-perpetuates. The political horizons become narrower – and darker.
New elections present the possibility of a re-start. But it is difficult to envisage how a new government can marshal the power to propel Germany out of its mood of lapse and regression. Even before the collapse of Scholz’s coalition, German politics had assumed a recursive quality. Based on current polling, the new elections may well catapult the Free Democrats and the Greens back into irrelevance and return the SPD as the Christian Democratic Union’s junior governing partner, the position the party occupied for twelve of Angela Merkel’s sixteen years in the Chancellery, and not without considerable anguish. Compounding the atmosphere of return, the man who stands best poised to take the Chancellorship is the CDU’s Friedrich Merz, a man who made his name as Merkel’s intra-party nemesis in the early 2000s, before spending the years of her reign in the political wilderness. And indeed, even Merkel herself is back. Astutely timed, her memoirs will appear later this month. In hindsight, the Merkel years may look like a long-lost era of stability and strength. But her memoirs will not arrive surrounded by a warm nimbus of nostalgia. Rather, Germans will likely pore over them asking, “when did everything begin to go so wrong?”
