Twilight of the Merkel Era

Power and Politics in Germany after the 2017 Bundestag Election

Eric Langenbacher

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789202663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Nationalisme et patriotisme

Elections always have consequences, but the 2017 Bundestag election in Germany proved particularly consequential. With political upheaval across the globe—notably in Britain and the USA—it was vital to European and global order that Germany remain stable. And it did through the re-election of Angela Merkel as chancellor, now in her fourth term. Just under the surface, however, instability is mounting—exemplified by the entry of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) as the largest opposition party, the decline of the Social Democrats, the ever-restive Bavarians, and the growing factionalism within the Christian Democratic Union as the Merkel era comes to an end. Paying special attention to the rise of the AfD, this volume delves into the campaign, leading political figures, the structure of the electorate, the state of the parties, the media environment, coalition negotiations, and policy impacts.

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COALITION POLITICS IN CRISIS?

The German Party System Before and After the 2017 Federal Election

Frank Decker and Philipp Adorf

Shift of the Political Balance of Power to the Right

Following the elections to the nineteenth Bundestag, parties had to cope with a newfound shortage of space. Previously, all four parliamentary party groups were able to claim one of the building’s corner towers as their own. Now six groups were fighting for the best spaces. The refusal of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD) to reform the country’s current electoral law, moreover, meant a few hundred-additional people (both members of parliament and employees) had to be accommodated somewhere as the size of the Bundestag expanded beyond its regular number of seats from 598 to 709. And in the plenary hall itself, the seats on the far right that had previously been filled by the Free Democrats (FDP) before their parliamentary exit in 2013, were now given to the Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) parliamentary group whose members thus sit merely a few feet away from the government bench.¹

The parliamentary entry of the Alternative for Germany does not merely mark another break in the country’s party system, but also constitutes a watershed moment for Germany’s postwar democracy. After the National Democratic Party’s (NPD) narrow failure to enter parliament in 1969 (winning 4.3 percent of the vote that year), right-wing extremist parliamentarians will for the first time since the 1950s take their seats in the federal parliament—in the same building that had served as the stage and backdrop for the rise of the Nazi party between 1925 and 1932. At the same time, the parliamentary emergence of right-wing populism in Germany represents a kind of European “normalization,” as ideologically similar parties have become established actors across virtually all neighboring countries.² Why Germany appeared to be immune to such developments before 2013 continues to pose a difficult question, even with the luxury of hindsight.³

The AfD’s success has once again moved the party system’s center of gravity to the right—in a substantial manner. While the three left-of-center parties (SPD, Greens, and PDS/The Left) enjoyed a comfortable lead in the combined share of the vote in the three elections of 1998, 2002, and 2005 over their opponents of the CDU/CSU and FDP, the balance of power reversed for the very first time in 2009—before the emergence of the AfD. In 2013, the three parties of the right (now including the AfD) already possessed a lead of around 8 points over the left-of-center camp (51.0 to 42.7 percent). The latter’s numerical majority in parliament was owed to the narrow failure of both the FDP and AfD to cross the five-percent-threshold. In 2017, the three rightof-center parties combined to win 56.2 percent of the vote as their counterparts on the left only managed a combined share of 38.6 percent.

Figure 1.1: Combined Vote Shares of the Left-of-Center (SPD, Greens, PDS/The Left) and Right-of-Center Parties (CDU/CSU, FDP, AfD) in Federal Elections since 1994

This asymmetrical distribution of the vote is now, however, met with a newfound structural symmetry. With the left camp having been composed of three parties since reunification, as one of its actors—the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS)/Left—continues to be regarded as a rather problematic if not unacceptable coalition partner,⁴ the AfD’s emergence has created a similar constellation on the right. The SPD’s dubious pleasure of facilitating the rise of new and viable parties within its own ideological camp while governing the country (as was the case with the Greens in the late 1970s and after 2004 with the establishment of an all-German Left Party) has for the very first time also befallen the Christian Democrats. Franz Josef Strauß’s famous dictum that no democratically legitimate party was to be allowed to emerge to the right of the CDU and CSU has been rendered null and void by the AfD’s widespread success. This major transformation will also come to at least partially define future judgments regarding the “Merkel era.”

Both the dramatic losses of the Christian democratic sister parties as well as the ability of the right-wing populists to come in third cannot hide the fact that the CDU/CSU once again comfortably secured first place over the SPD (for the third time since 2009). The conservative lead over its social democratic competitor decreased only marginally from 15.8 percentage points in 2013 to 12.4 points last year (see figure 1.3). This is only more remarkable in light of the fact that the SPD’s nomination of Martin Schulz as its candidate for the office of chancellor in January of 2017 provided the party with an auspicious start to the election year. The subsequent surge in support that catapulted it beyond the 30 percent barrier in the polls for the first time in a decade and allowed it to once again credibly contest first place in the country’s party system was to be short-lived though. Disappointing results in the Saarland state election, where the SPD failed to oust the governing CDU state premier, already put the party back on a losing path in March 2017 before defeats in Schleswig-Holstein and the party’s heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia in particular brought about a collapse in support.

Why did the election eventually unfold the way it did? Without assigning an order of significance, the following factors determined the outcome of the vote:

Crisis: Angela Merkel’s frequently repeated sentence that we were living through “tumultuous times” was also to be interpreted as a hint to the electorate that in such a challenging environment, it was best to leave the government in the hands of a nationally and internationally experienced crisis manager. The chancellor benefitted from her widely perceived role as an “anchor of stability” as Germany’s most important European partners (France, the United Kingdom, and Italy) all saw their governments or heads of government replaced in short succession while Americans opted to select an erratic “anti-politician” in the form of Donald Trump as president.

Good economic growth: Merkel’s aura as Europe’s most powerful head of government not the least rested on Germany’s continued strong economic growth, a factor that her party was also able to contrast with the economic “malaise” present in other countries. According to exit polls from Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, 62 percent of voters considered the state of the economy to be good (compared to 46 percent in 2013). The CDU/CSU was furthermore once again able to improve upon its position as the most trusted party on economic matters, widening the gap between itself and the SPD, whose own criticism of a severe lack in public investments largely went unnoticed.

Perceptions of competence: Concerning policy areas that represent the SPD’s core brand of “social justice” and were put at the center of its campaign, voters either placed lower (pensions and education) or just marginally higher levels of trust (family policy and taxes) in the Social Democrats than they did in their conservative counterparts. Even more damaging was the continued dominance of the topic of migration and refugees where the SPD trailed the CDU/CSU by a significant margin. This also applied to the issues of crime and domestic security.

Candidate: Contrary to Peer Steinbrück, the SPD’s 2013 candidate for the chancellery who never really embodied the party’s program, Schulz appeared to be a—at the very least potentially—good candidate. After the initial honeymoon, Schulz revealed two decisive weaknesses, however. On the one hand, he lacked an apparent hunger for power, both within his own party as well as towards Chancellor Angela Merkel, while also failing to exhibit the necessary leadership capabilities for the job. On the other hand, he was neither willing and/or capable of freeing the SPD from its responsibilities as the junior coalition partner and cast the party as a genuine alternative to the CDU/CSU. The issue of social justice was, for example, addressed in a far too tepid manner while proposals related to Europe were more or less buried deep within the party manifesto. Schulz’s experience as a leading EU politician would have made him the perfect spokesperson for precisely this topic.

Campaign: Schulz’s weaknesses as a candidate ultimately came to the fore because of a poorly planned out campaign that was rife with a number of inexcusable technical mistakes. Schulz’s predecessor as party leader, Sigmar Gabriel, bears a significant part of the blame for this. Instead of waiting until January to forgo his own candidacy, Gabriel should have settled on Schulz at a much earlier date, in the process allowing the entire party to prepare in a more thorough manner for the election. A lack of coordination between the two carried over into the election campaign itself. In what would prove to be a fatal mistake, the party decided to remove Schulz from the media spotlight for two months in the wake of his initial meteoric rise rather than keeping the general public occupied with a steady stream of information related to both Schulz and the SPD. The explanations provided for this decision—a desire to neither pre-empt the formulation of a party manifesto nor “disrupt” the state election campaign in North Rhine-Westphalia—illustrate a complete lack of a strategic plan on the part of the SPD.

New Competition: A closer look at the movement of voters reveals virtually no vote transfer between the CDU/CSU and the SPD. The number of electoral districts won by both parties also remained largely unchanged compared to 2013: 231 for the CDU/CSU and fifty-nine for the SPD, whereas four years earlier the respective numbers stood at 236 and fifty-eight. The Christian Democrats primarily lost voters to both the FDP and AfD—in other words, parties within their own camp—while the SPD’s losses were equally distributed among the other parties (Left, Greens, FDP, and AfD). Rightwing populist competitors, therefore, also drive down the social democratic vote. In eastern Germany in particular, these changing voting patterns have hurt the Left Party which has as a result been relegated to third place behind the CDU and AfD in the region.

No viable coalition of the left or prospect of obtaining power: Immediately following the 2013 election, the SPD already announced it would no longer categorically rule out any form of cooperation with the Left Party. A subsequent rapprochement between the two failed to materialize, however. The outcome of the 2017 Saarland state elections—in which both the SPD and Left Party combined to lose 4.3 points—once again illustrated the general public’s lack of support for a red-red-green coalition. The SPD could therefore only achieve its electoral goal of regaining the chancellery by becoming the strongest party, an objective that became little more than a fantasy following the poor showing in North Rhine-Westphalia. Subsequent discussions concerning the future federal government therefore revolved around the question whether the SPD would join another grand coalition as junior partner or if a black-green-yellow “Jamaica” coalition of the CDU/CSU, Greens, and FDP would be formed at the federal level for the very first time. This may have encouraged potential social democratic voters in west Germany in particular to throw their support behind the Greens or the Left in the final days of the campaign. While the latter suffered massive losses in the east, it managed to increase its share of the vote in the western part of the country by 1.8 points to 7.4 percent.

The fact that poll after poll indicated a comfortable CDU/CSU lead over their Social Democratic opponents undoubtedly contributed to voters abandoning both catch-all parties as the election drew closer. A strategy of “asymmetrical demobilization” that had been employed to great success by the CDU in both 2009 and 2013 would this time around come back to haunt the Christian Democrats themselves. The inability to deemphasize the issue of migration played a significant role as well. While the rise of the SPD’s numbers in the wake of their nomination of Schulz boosted hopes that a close race between the top two parties would perhaps even push the AfD below the 5 percent threshold, the SPD’s inability or reluctance to provide a credible and clear political alternative to their conservative opponents ultimately played into the hands of the right-wing populists, particularly in the waning weeks of the campaign.⁵ The question (also related to the media’s role) remains, however, to what extent a sounder strategy could have shifted attention away from the refugee topic towards socioeconomic questions.

The Successful Establishment of the Right-wing Populist Alternative for Germany

Until the emergence of the AfD, both right-wing populist and extremist actors were only able to celebrate sporadic success at the ballot box in the Federal Republic. After both the first and second waves of right-wing extremism in the early 1950s and late 1960s quickly faded away, a third wave began to surface at the beginning of the 1980s, constituting a constant feature o...