We are pleased to welcome back Benjamin Preisler with a post election report on the recent North Rhine Westphalia German regional election:
Elections in Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia) yesterday ended with a a stunning decline for the governing conservative party, the CDU, falling 10.2% to only 34.6% of overall votes. The SPD (the social democrats), while losing a modest 2.6%, just missed out on reclaiming its traditional position as the state’s strongest party winning 34.5%. The biggest winners were the Green party, which more than doubled its share of its 2005 vote going from 5.9% to 12.1%, and the, still relatively new, socialist Left (Die Linke) which for the first time will be represented in North Rhine-Westphalia’s regional parliament. The CDU’s coalition partner, the liberal (in the European, free-market sense) party, the FDP, increased slightly (+0.5%) to 6.7% which in light of the 14.9% it had received in the Land (state) in last year’s national elections constitutes a resounding defeat.
The most important short-term effect for national German politics is the loss for the government of its majority in the Bundesrat (the second chamber) which will put an immediate end to initiatives clamoring for tax reductions and prolonging Germany’s involvement in atomic energy.
International coverage of the elections usually considers this result a reprimand of Angela Merkel’s conservative-liberal governmental coalition in general and her folding in the Greek crisis in particular. This might or might not be true, blunders by the erstwhile Ministerpräsident Jürgen Rüttgers (the regional prime minister) and the regional conservative party definitely played a role as well. Far more interesting for political analysts are the long-run ramifications of the new German parliamentary democracy showcased in these results though.
In the years leading up to Schröder’s election in 1998, German politics had been dominated by the two major all-encompassing parties, the CDU/CSU and the SPD, and the small FDP which served as a junior partner to either. The arrival of the Greens and their stabilization as a parliamentary presence during the 1980s and 1990s in turn created a two-block system with the conservative-liberal model opposing the social democratic-green one. While the latter won twice (in 1998 and 2002) its infamous social reforms (Hartz IV) brought about a fundamental change in German politics; opposition to these policies brought about a merger between the erstwhile communist governing party of the GDR (the PDS) and disappointed social-democrats, unionists, and a wide array of other left-wing splinter groups (the WASG) under the leadership of a former SPD-president, Oskar Lafontaine. The PDS had never succeeded electorally in West Germany even while playing on the same level as the CDU and the SPD in East Germany, since the Left (Die Linke) has become a fixture in German parliaments.
Germany has thus now moved away from its post-war system of a three-party parliamentary democracy allowing for clear majorities towards a five party system posing a variety of coalition building problems. The election results in North Rhine-Westphalia exemplify this problematic. CDU and SPD are even in the Landtag (regional parliament) both having 67 parliamentarians. The Green party boasts of the third-biggest fraction with 23, followed by the FDP and the Left with 13 and 11 parliamentarians respectively.
The erstwhile regional and current national coalition of liberals and conservatives has no majority anymore thus. Neither does the traditional left of centre bloc featuring the SPD and the Greens. The only governmental model of yore possible would be a Grand Coalition. The SPD in this case would most likely not be able to fill the prime minister position as they received – if barely – fewer votes overall. Furthermore, this kind of government has in the past not been popular with either politicians nor the public as it is generally viewed as too consensus-oriented, incapable of making clear-cut discussions.
The Greens have recently been making overtures versus the conservatives and already govern with them in the state of Hamburg. A black-green coalition in a non-city state would be a powerful symbol of a broadening of possible governmental coalitions. Alas, this variety does not hold a majority either and we shall not find out for the time being whether such a coalition truly is an option.
Three possible color combinations remain possible thus, the Jamaican option, red-red-green and a traffic light (die Ampel). The former (black-green-yellow – conservatives-greens-liberals) is currently governing the Saarland but is not particularly popular with either greens or liberals, as both tend to vilify one another – possibly because they compete for a similar – young, educated, successful, urban – electorate. A broad left-wing coalition would be the next feasible option. Yet, the Left, especially in its West German variety, is widely seen as erratic, radical and impossible to govern with. The SPD furthermore holds particular rancor versus the Left as the latter directly eats into the former’s electorate and finally has not given up hope of it disappearing again. Accepting the Left as a coalition partner would in this sense give it unnecessary credence. A traffic light coalition (red-green-yellow) lastly suffers from the same hostility stated for the Jamaican case, while additionally being strongly opposed by most FDP leaders whose deregulation rhetoric permanently clashes with the SPD’s socially protective stance.
Germany thus finds itself in a new phase of its parliamentary democracy with five solidly established parties. New coalition possibles will have to be explored even while the parties and their members still have a hard time accepting the new status quo, insisting on ideologically close-knit two party coalitions that may rarely be possible anymore. It will also be interesting to see whether a system as reliant on compromise-building between the states (whose governments sit in the Bundesrat) and the national government is even viable anymore when an ever wider array of regional government coalitions easily can lead to constant blocking minorities in the Bundesrat.