BERLIN: Germany’s current parliamentary election campaign looks like a front-running contender for the title of the most boring in the history of the Federal Republic. The predominant response among commentators to the sole television debate between Chancellor Angela Merkel and her challenger, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, held two weeks before the election, was a collective yawn – all the more remarkable considering the historical events that overshadow this election.
Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall came down, triggering a seismic shift that moved the borders of the old Federal Republic and of Western Europe as a whole, hundreds of miles to the east. The vast Soviet empire exited the historical stage without a single shot being fired. This anniversary should have provided ample reason for a heated debate about the successes and failures of German reunification and for offering a vision for Germany and Europe for the next 20 years.
Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt once quipped that politicians who have a vision should go and have their eyes checked. That warning made sense in the 1970’s, when even young parliamentarians in his Social Democratic Party dreamed of revolution. But Schmidt would never have imagined that there would come a day when there would be no politician in search of a vision check.
Likewise, in the fall of 2008, the threat of financial Armageddon brought not just Germany but the whole world to the brink of disaster. The worst has been mitigated and obscured in the wealthy countries by running up unprecedented levels of debt, but any moderately streetwise person knows that the next generation – and even the one after that – will be paying for the excesses of the investment bankers. One cannot help but marvel at how discreetly this topic is being dealt with by Merkel and Steinmeier.
Ask the party strategists and they will tell you that the financial crisis is a topic for losers; voters want to hear something positive. The electorate is experiencing the greatest slump since 1929 like a bad dream that is half over – and politicians don’t want to wake them up. The so-called “autonomous violent left-wing radicals in Berlin-Kreuzberg enjoy themselves by torching luxury cars, but not a single bank window has been smashed in Germany.
Nor has a single criminal financier-gambler, who misled the financial regulators with fudged figures, been brought to justice. On the contrary, these bankrupts are filing lawsuits to get the million-dollar bonuses to which they feel entitled. Quite a few of them are already back at the table gambling away with the taxpayer’s money and peddling their new “financial products ; they know that when the next crash comes, the taxpayer will have no choice but to bail them out again. Only some stalwarts timidly point to the inflammatory question posed by Mack the Knife in Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: “What is a bank robbery compared to the founding of a bank? What is a pick-lock compared to a debenture share? But this slogan is from the 1920’s and seems like a nostalgic reminder of past turmoil that one prefers to see on the stage.
The greatest miracle in the 2009 election campaign is the resurgence of the Liberal Democrats (FDP). In fact, the German political landscape needs nothing more than a truly liberal party, in the US sense of the word “liberal – a champion of the cause of individual freedom. Unfortunately, under the far-too-long leadership of Guido Westerwelle, the FDP has degenerated into a party notable for defending the freedom only of a few privileged individuals: bankers and businessmen.
Just a year ago, the FDP fervently adhered to the religion of the American neo-cons, according to which markets regulate themselves. So it vigorously opposed all of the half-hearted attempts to regulate the financial sector. As late as this past May, the FDP defended the ownership rights of US billionaire Christopher Flowers, a major stockholder in the failed German bank Hypo Real Estate, which was saved from oblivion by state guarantees worth more than ?100 billion of taxpayers’ money.
Nevertheless, at a time when finance is under a cloud, the party that defends the freedom of the financial gamblers over the freedom of the individual is winning favor with the electorate like no other. The FDP can count on about 13-14% of the vote, which means that it may be able to join with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union to form a government.
I cannot explain this dynamic. I do not believe in Karl Marx’s iron laws of history. Yet one historical law does seem to apply: in an immense economic crisis, the voters stick with the people whose economic competence they have traditionally trusted – that is, the very people who led them to ruin.
But there is an exception to every rule. In this case, it is the former PDS, the successor party to the former East Germany’s ruling party, the SED. Dissidents in the GDR translated those three letters as “Practically the Same. This party, now using the presumptuous name “The Left, has gained a foothold in West Germany with its impossible promises of higher pensions, a minimum hourly wage of ?10, huge public investment schemes, and zero unemployment – in short, exactly the kind of socialist paradise that failed in East Germany.
And, of course, The Left, which still counts large numbers of former Stasi personnel among its members, also calls for a reassessment of East Germany itself; many party veterans object to the term “dictatorship for this phase of their lives. So, besides the FDP, this party, too, is profiting from the mainstream political parties’ half-hearted handling of the global economic crisis.
The only “winner when Germans vote on Sept. 27 will most likely be the “party of non-voters. I do not sympathize with this group, but I do understand that non-voters expect only one thing of Germany’s political parties these days: “practically the same
Peter Schneideris an essayist and novelist. His most recent book Rebellion und Wahn (Rebellion and Delusion), is about the protests of 1968. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
