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Governing Germany Is About to Get Messier

Governing Germany Is About to Get Messier

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Recent election results in German states have been dismal for the country’s traditionally powerful centrist parties, but even by that standard, Sunday’s vote in the eastern state of Thuringia is something else. The centrists haven’t just lost big again — for the first time in post-World War II Germany, there’s no reasonable path to a working coalition government. 

Thuringia, with a population of 2.1 million and just two cities of 100,000 people or more, is one of Germany’s smaller states. It’s where Harry’s Inc. makes its razor blades and Daimler AG produces one in three engines, but it’s better known as the state that includes Weimar, where the interwar German republic originated. Sunday’s election has produced a chaotic outcome somewhat like that of the Weimar Republic election of 1930 in which the center sagged, the extremes grew and a majority coalition couldn’t be formed.

In the preceding electoral cycle, Thuringia was run by Germany’s only minister-president from the far left Die Linke party, Bodo Ramelow. He’s not a typical left-wing firebrand, and, despite widespread fears of what he might do when he took the job five years ago, he’s demonstrated pragmatic leadership, managing both to increase public sector employment and cut debt. Though Thuringia was next to last among German states in terms of economic growth last year, voters are generally happy with Ramelow’s down-to-earth management: He’s the nation’s fifth most popular regional leader. On election posters, his name featured prominently while his party’s was nowhere to be seen. 

This worked for Ramelow, who earned Die Linke’s best ever result in a local election, 31%. But his current coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens cannot continue: Those two parties won 8.2% and 5.2% respectively, less than in 2014, and their seats and Die Linke’s in the regional parliament don’t add  up to a majority. On the center-right, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) won 21.8% and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) garnered 5%. It’s all but impossible for them to work with Die Linke, though, and the CDU has publicly pledged never to do it. The nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) overtook the CDU with 23.4% support, but no other party can imagine a coalition with it, especially since the Thuringian AfD is led by one of its most far-right leaders, Bjoern Hoecke.

In other words, it’s next to impossible to build a cohesive majority government for the region without crossing political red lines. The entire center of the political spectrum -- the CDU, the SPD, the Greens and the FDP — has less combined support than the two extreme parties, Die Linke and AfD. That has never happened before, and though Ramelow’s moderate style detracts from the starkness of this picture, it’s still a disaster for German centrists, one of the worst one in a long line.

Governing Germany Is About to Get Messier

Uncharacteristically for 2019, Thuringia hasn’t registered a “green wave”: This is a state where wind farms are highly unpopular with the largely rural population. The Greens can’t pick up the slack for the weakening umbrella parties, the CDU and the SPD. Their increasing inability to hold the center even withe the help of the more reasonable smaller parties creates no end of worry on the federal level.

Friedrich Merz, the pro-business politician who lost a hard-fought CDU leadership battle to current Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer last year, tweeted that after Thuringia, the party can no longer “ignore or just sit out” its poor election results. Indeed, AKK, as she is known, hasn’t done much to convince the party base that she can win elections. In Thuringia, local party leader Mike Mohring tried to battle the AfD on its home turf, campaigning on security and anti-wind farm themes, but ended up beaten by the nationalists who were more believable on both subjects. The question of credibility and firm convictions is emerging as the toughest for the CDU as Merkel, the master architect of compromises, prepares to leave the stage, and AKK appears as adrift on this front as most others in the party leadership.

In the SPD, the crisis is even worse. With a one-digit election result in Thuringia, it’s as close as it’s ever been to the bottom of its freefall, and it’s hard to see how it can bounce back. An increasing number of party members appear to believe salvation lies in dissolving the SPD’s coalition with the CDU, which runs Germany now. In Saturday’s party leadership ballot, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, who is in favor of keeping the coalition alive, just barely won the first round with just under 23% of the vote. This means candidates who are against the coalition won more combined support. The runoff will be held next month, and in December, the SPD will vote on whether to  keep working with Merkel; so far, it looks like the party is in despair, torn between staying in an arrangement that erodes its support and quitting to fight an election it’s all but certain to lose.

German centrists are afflicted by a double curse: Unlike their competitors on the extremes, they’re hard put to explain what they stand for — and they lack charismatic leaders who could overcome that disadvantage with the sheer force of personality. They barely have enough time left before the next national election, scheduled for 2021, to get their act together, and it’s unclear where new leaders might come from. An early election before 2021 could result in even heavier losses — and, conceivably, a Thuringia-style situation that makes it very hard to form a majority government.

That doesn’t have to be a tragedy: Germany’s Nordic neighbors have long traditions of successful minority cabinets, and perhaps Germany is headed that way, too. Besides, political splintering is the current global trend. But the erosion of Germany’s centrist parties, caused by too many years of self-satisfaction, dithering and tempered intellectual ambition, is still a sad, troubling sight to behold. The way things are going, extreme and single-issue parties might eventually look like a more reasonable choice to German voters. 

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Melissa Pozsgay at mpozsgay@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.