German elections: best result for renewables
Germany has voted, and the new Chancellor is the old one. But although there is no change at the helm, the situation has greatly improved for renewables.
Supporters of renewables have reason to rejoice this week, for the FDP has failed to get 5% of the vote, the limit required to enter parliament. It is the first time in the history of the German Republic that the FDP, a libertarian party, has not been represented in the Bundestag.
The FDP does not, however, properly represent citizen liberties, but rather big business. Thus, it was possible for the Pirate Party to get several percentage points of the vote based largely on a platform of internet user rights. Had the FDP correctly understood what liberal politics is, there would have been no need for the Pirates at all.
In the case of renewables, the FDP wanted to put an immediate end to the citizens movement that is the Energiewende – not just a transition to renewables, but a challenge to the oligopoly in the energy sector. The FDP never represented the personal right to make your own energy. Now, community ownership can continue.
The other big news about small parties is the new AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, which just missed the 5% threshold in its first attempt; it took the Greens a decade to reach that level. The AfD brings together EU critics and is a scary development for all existing parties. Germany has long been a pillar of the EU, and now Germany has a party whose entire platform is anti-euro and anti-bailout. And in the upcoming EU elections, the threshold is only 3%, so it is likely that Germany will be sending this anti-EU party to Brüssels.
Merkel could now serve for 12 years
Chancellor Merkel increasingly looks like a political genius. She called on her voters not to switch to the FDP, her coalition partner, in order to protect the coalition – a clear sign that she had had enough of the FDP herself. But in doing so, she ran the risk of allowing the Social Democrats to form a three-party coalition with the Greens and the Left Party.
The outcome was an even clearer victory for Merkel’s party, which nearly managed to get a majority itself. But while my readers in North American and the UK might think Merkel would prefer to govern without a coalition partner, in fact there are good reasons why she might not. First, her party would have only managed a slight majority, requiring an unrealistic level of party coherence; if any politician defected, her government would fall apart. Practically every vote would be a vote of no confidence.
Second, Merkel’s Christian Democrats would have lacked support in the Bundesrat, the chamber of parliament that represents states’ rights. It blocked changes to solar policy several times during the previous coalition and has a veto right on important tax issues. A coalition partner brings the Bundesrat into line by adding that party support there.
Finally, the CDU only exists outside of Bavaria, where the CSU reigns. (For the US, imagine the Republicans being established in every state but Texas, where a state party agrees to partner with the Republicans outside of Texas.) A majority for the CDU/CSU would make the CSU Merkel’s coalition partner, a prospect she might not relish. At the EU level, any other coalition would open doors (for instance, the SPD could help improve communications with socialist French leader Hollande).
For the energy transition, a CDU/CSU majority (i.e. no actual coalition) would not have been an ideal outcome for the energy transition. Although the CSU has good people (such as MP Göppel, a big supporter of energy democracy), the party as a whole is too pro-solar and too anti-wind at a time when wind needs to grow faster than solar.
The Greens conducted an impressively ill-advised campaign. They communicated their platform poorly and lost voters. There were also revelations that the party had, up to the late 1980s, provided a platform for some who would have decriminalized “consensual” sex with minors (now known as pedophilia). Such prominent Green politicians as Volker Beck and Daniel Cohn-Bendit were openly part of the campaign at the time, and current party leader Jürgen Trittin turned out to have at least tacitly allowed such discussions back then. Amazingly, the investigations into the Green Party’s past were contracted by the Greens themselves during the election campaign, not by their opponents. CDU politicians have been especially critical of this aspect of German history, though the FDP also had pro-pedophilia members at the time. But for such reasons, the Greens received less than 9% of the vote.
It’s too early to tell what coalition Merkel will choose, but a grand coalition at least offers the prospect of a new energy policy with wide popular support, which will be important. But the SPD could also form a coalition with the Greens and the Left Party; it simply refuses to do so because it does not wish to form a coalition with the Left, which came out of the former communist East Germany. In a grand coalition, however, the SPD would always be able to block the CDU with votes from the Greens and the Left, a prospect Merkel will want to prevent.
Others wonder whether she might want to join forces with the Greens. It would be a first at the federal level, though such coalitions exist elsewhere. During the TV debate with her challenger, she wore a black-red-gold necklace – the colors of Germany. On the night of the elections, she was seen wearing a black and green necklace – the colors of the CDU and the Greens. Did Merkel tell the Greens that their past tolerance and support of pedophilia would be an obstacle to a coalition with the CDU? (Craig Morris)
James, yes, "libertarian" is an attempt to explain to Americans that the "Liberalen" are not "liberals" in today's sense, but liberal in the meaning of philosophic tradition. But I would not be so sure that Merkel will change the focus on austerity I think it was hers to begin with, not the FDP...
You guys are political wonks! No wonder you don't understand the math.
Thanx for this-much more informative than the CBC -'don't offend banks or oil atom and arms mafias for fear of losing ad revenue to pay for hockeybation broadcasts' approach to political or buisness report. I wouldn't worry about the appearence and election of an anti EU/bailout block-on the face of it.The EU is entirely under the sway of bioweenies,and banksters who would be best dealt with by trial and garrot.So IF there are no(forgive me)-'reightag fires' resulting,it mayhap be a sign of hope. gods speed.
You are I think wrong in describing the FDP as ¨libertarian¨, a term I associate with semiliterate cranks who idolize Ayn Rand or literate ones who swear by Robert Nozick. Libertarians take an extreme view of individual property rights and are are usually hostile to big business. I suggest the FDP used to be a liberal party in the 19th-century Gladstonian sense and morphed into a neoliberal, Thatcherite one, basically apologists for plutocracy. Either way, good riddance.
Doesn´t Merkel have the option of governing as a minority party on the basis of a centrist legislative programme previously negotiated with the SPD?
It´s not the area of this blog, but the unemployed in the Club Med countries will be relieved too. The new government will be slightly less committed to destructive Germany-first austerity policies in the Eurozone.
The GDR was a socialist nation, not a communist one. There is a major difference - in a socialist state, the means of prouction (arable land, factories) are owned communally / by the state but citizens' right to own private property outside of that is still protected in a communist system (which has never actually existed on a state level) EVERYTHING would be communally owned and there would be no private property. Small groups like Jesus and his diciples or a hippie commune can be communist (i.e. pooling all their money and labour for the survival of the community), but groups as big as nation states can't. Communism was just the ideological ideal, not the economic/political reality in the Eastern Bloc. Why do Americans always get this mixed up?
Also, the SPD doesn't refuse to work with The Left because of the East German part of the party (they worked and still work together in a number of East German state governments just fine), but because of the West German part of the party. After Chancellor Schröder cut social spending and created Hartz IV, a large part of the SPD lead by a Oskar Lafontaine split off in disgust at this betrayal of their political base. A couple of years later, this part of the SPD formed their own left-wing party in the West, the WASG, which shortly later joined with the Eastern PDS (the reformed former GDR state party) to form The Left and, by joining their votes, have a decent chance at getting into parliament. The rest of the SPD never forgave that exodus, so they're still not willing to talk to the western part of The Left on the federal level.
And about the pedophilia allegations... This all happened before I was born, and I was born in the GDR, so I can't know for sure. But I've had a look at the articles of Western law that a gay activist group wanted to reform and whose demands Trittin's Greens included in their platform 32 years ago during a local municipal election, which is what most of this seems to be about. According to those laws, a 14-year-old having any sexual contact with a 13-year-old would technically be committing a crime (you can be criminally prosecuted if you're 14). I can imagine that a group of young, overzealous activists in the middle of the social movement to recognise the sexuality of young teenagers would want to change that. The other law for example makes it illegal for a 17-year-old to have sex with their teacher or supervisor at work. While this law is clearly necessary to avoid power abuse and grooming, I can see why the teenagers in question might see it as unfair and patronizing. After all, the general age of sexual consent was 14 even back then, and "hot for teacher" is apparently a quite common thing. (I wouldn't know, because I'm asexual, but my best friend in high school had a massive crush on one of our teachers and briefly had a 25-year-old teaching-student boyfriend when she was 16.) Plus, high school includes 18- or 19-year-old teens in Germany, who aren't any more mature than the 17-year-olds, so why do they get treated as knowing what they are doing in this regard, and the students one year below them don't? Both groups would be out of puberty already, both are still under the power of their teachers and live with their parents (this law is specifically about teachers, supervisors, legal guardians and other people with direct power over the minors), and you're allowed to drink alcohol at 16 and have sex with most people at 14, so the protection-from-sexual-grooming distinction between 17 and 18 is pretty much arbitrary. So I can see why a party made up largely of students and other people in their 20s back then would see this more from the perspective of the young people, not from the perspective of more experienced (and cynical) adults trying to protect even post-pubescent teenagers from predatory middle-aged ephebophiles.