Merkel wins...and loses
27/09/2013 - 9:42am
The German elections last Sunday have shown a resounding victory for Chancellor Angela Merkel. But have they shown a same resounding victory for her policies? That is doubtful. First of all no one knows what the chancellor actually stands for. She has been in power or quite a while, and stood once more for re-election, but her slogan was for 'more of the same', rather than an actual political commitment. And believe it or not, this got her a convincing victory in German parliamentary elections on 22 September. Without committing herself to any policy, without stating any red line that she would be committed to, without stating that there were limits which she could not be incited to join any government, she won it outright.
Actually, she did make a few commitments, such as the old George Bush one, "no new taxes". Fine; except that her party later decided that this was one election promise that it wouldn't keep. So Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble made it known that if need be, he could live with an increased levy in income tax for the rich. And who could not? OK the CDU/CSU said until lunch time on election day that this would kill German economy, but they have grown wiser since. At least that is what they say now, and this even before coalition-talks take place between the CDU and any of its potential coalition partners, the SPD or the Greens.
And this leads to the strangely logical conclusion (although it seems to deny whatever German voters did); Merkel and the right won, but Germany has shifted to the left.
She will have to form a government with parties of the left as all parties of the right failed to take the 5% hurdle that Germany has in its election law. This 5% threshold would do a world of good in many other EU countries; Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and others. True, in those countries every village idiot is represented in parliament, and every village idiot therefore has a say in parliament. And more likely than not the village idiot speaks the vox populi.
Many will say, this is good, this is democracy. To prevent anyone becoming chancellor having received a minority vote (as notoriously happened in 1933), there is a 5% threshold build in in the German constitution. The Dutch and the Belgians could only dream of this. Because what it does, it enhances the chance to come to a workable majority in parliament. Of course, there are other ways around this, such as what happens in France and the UK. These countries are not concerned about majority rule, and yet are pre-occupied with majority rule. They do not care what the majority of their people thinks as long as it translates into working majorities in their parliaments. And it does. Margaret Thatcher never had more than 43% of the popular vote in the UK, and the Front National - roughly 20% of the French electorate - does not have 1 seat in the French Parliament. This is seen as OK and democratic.
In Germany now Angela Merkel won big time, but her coalition party the Liberals (FDP) lost so much that it just, but only just, failed the 5% threshold to make it into parliament. And the Eurosceptic anti-euro party AfD was also just short of the threshold to be voted into parliament. As a result the Bundestag is left-leaning whereas the electorate was right-leaning, be it only with a slight majority to the right. And the result is that Merkel will probably have to agree to a minimum wage (nothing wrong with that, of course, but her manifesto was against it) and agree to tax increases, at least for the better off, (there again nothing wrong, but the CDU promised the electorate not to do so).
In short, as the man said, “democracy is alight, but why give it to the people?” dw de
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