You’ve just called for the abolition of the public pension system. This is on par with importing children’s corpses for breakfast in German politics. Which lamppost would you like to dangle from?

The need of the people is not equal to the common good. There is a deplorable tendency not to reproduce, use up finite resources and underinvest in research and education.

If not a liberal, then what is Angie?

What is her attitude or point of view towards personal and economic freedom?

From what ideological or philosophical tradition does she derive that point of view?

And I’ll ask the same questions with respect to the FPD and the Greens?

What do these views of the importance of freedom have in common?

Because, when all the complexities are boiled down to their esence, isn’t the fundamental root of the problem: an absence of freedom?

(And I appreciate your using the word liberal in its proper sense.)

I take no position on your position re: nuclear power. But I think you are labouring under a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Union is about.

You keep going on about Angela Merkel’s commitment to unfettered free markets. She has no such commitment. If she did, she’d be in the FDP, not the CDU.

It’s true that Merkel is, by the standards of the Union, quite liberal. But then, by any objective standard, the Union are not liberals. (I am using ‘liberal’ here in its correct, not its US sense.) CDU and CSU are markedly more management-friendly and less labour-friendly than the SPD; but are not, repeat not especially free-market-friendly. And even their management-friendliness is relative. On ‘values’ issues, the Union may (and the FDP may not) fairly be compared with the US Republicans. Economically, though, the Union are Democrats, and not particularly rightwing Democrats either.

And there’s nothing remotely Weimarish about Germany’s current situation. If Köhler’s solution to the impasse is to ask a fascist dictator to run the government, you may come back and ask me to do a rethink.

1. Nuclear Power: >>>You need a lot of state intervention to run that even remotely well. >>Europe needs a connection to the Middle East even if it is only to import Iranian gas.<<

Um, actually, in the case of Germany, I think they get most of their gas from Russia (or plan to in the future). Europe as a whole gets LNG gas from a lot of different places (Algeria, etc.), but LNG, like oil, is a commodity with a world-wide market which does not require a connection with any particular locale and certainly does not require Turkish membership in the EU.

Parenthetically, overdependence on Russia for energy might be one reason CDU/CSU supports nuclear power. Is that true? What do the Greens say about that?

Frankly, I do not understand the politics of Turkish EU membership very well — who supports it and why, who opposes it and why. Maybe you can explain why the Greens would consider this a central part of their ideology and platform such that it cannot be bargained away or at least deferred in the manner I describe above.

5. “Family Values”: It is certainly understandable that CDU/CSU do not see eye to eye on what I will, without really knowing what they are, call the “lifestyle issues.” The Greens have their roots in the ’60′s countr-culture, and the CDU/CSU are Christian/Catholic, conservative, and (historically) the vehicle by which the Church intervenes in politics.

Yet, the same Hayekian principles of freedom and competition apply to all areas of life as they do to economics. In other words, through an evolutionary process of innovation and competition, those lifestyles and forms of social relations which best serve the needs of the people come to be widely adopted and to prevail. The proper role of the state is to create the conditions which foster this innovation and competition and to avoid taking sides.

If Angie has a deep understanding of classical liberal ideology, then she should understand this. If the Greens believe in freedom and why freedom is important from a social utilitarian, as well as personal, perspective, they should agree with it. If those who want to use the state to promote a particular set of (religious or secular) values will step aside (or at least focus their energies at the local level rather than the national level), then this set of common principles could form the basis for agreement. (*If* the Greens believe in freedom, then the same principles might lead them to give some ground to Angie in the economic sphere.)

Here is what Stratfor has to say about the current situation in Germany:

“As improbable as it sounds, a CDU/FDP/Green alliance is probably Merkel’s best — nay, only — bet. Unless Schroeder comes down with a severe case of humility, the only other option would be the Left, which would run screaming from any offer to join the conservative parties. . . .

“The probably insurmountable problem that Merkel faces is that the Greens have been Schroeder’s coalition partner for the past two governments. Merkel will have to promise the Greens something better than what they could expect to gain under a third Schroeder government, but not so much that the FDP — which despises the Greens — leaves the coalition talks in disgust. It could be the most likely successful coalition, but it remains a long shot at best.”

I am an outsider, and certainly am in no position to tell the Germans what to do. But if they want this course of events to take place, rthen the FDP needs to get over it. And all the parties need to take a good hard look at the fundamental bases of their respective ideological beliefs to see where common ground exists.

Otherwise, they may start sliding down the slippery slope towards Weimar.

2. The CDU wants to cut everything and the greens want to cut nothing. Either would mean that the CDU would cut everything.

3.

4. Europe needs a connection to the Middle East even if it is only to import Iranian gas.

Second, I would like to throw out some comments about the issues on which you say the Greens would have to do a 180 in order to join a Jamaica coalition. Please feel free to blow my ideas and thoughts to pieces; that’s what they are there for.

1. The Nuclear Power Question

Yes, I remember one of the biggest parts of the Green platform in the beginning was opposition to nuclear power. And CDU/CSU are supposedly strongly in favor.

Why not let the market decide? Take away all the government subsidies and limited liability laws and tell the nuclear power industry that, if they think they can build an environmentally safe nuclear power plant that complies with all applicable government regulations and is able to obtain adequate insurance in the private insurance market, they are welcome to try.

2. Renewable Power

Cut whatever subsidies either side wants to cut and, again, let the market decide.

As a parenthetical, how do the respective sides, Greens and CDU/CSU, feel about natural gas and the international dependencies that heavy use of natural gas are likely to create?

3. Pacifism

On a fundamental, ideological level, there is no conflict between classical liberalism and pacifism. In fact, classical liberalism opposes war on principle. If you don’t believe me, read what Ludwig Von Mises has to say on the subject. If CDU/CSU is anti-pacifist, that position is coming from somewhere other than a desire to move the country in a more capitalist direction.

In addition, although I would love to see a pro-U.S. Germany, the reality probably is that Germany needs to follow a more idependent foreign policy. Opposition to Pershings is irrelevant as is the ability to field a 500,000 man army in central Europe on behalf of NATO. (In fact, NATO is obsolete and potentially dangerous, but that is the subject for another post.)

4. EU Enlargement

Here the Greens need to face reality: Enlargement ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, if ever, given rising anti-immigrant and anti-muslim attitudes in much of Europe. The harder they try for enlargement, the stronger the backlash becomes. If the CDU/CSU were to do nothing to advance enlargement and let someone else do the actual dirty work of blocking enlargement, there could be room for a modus vivendi here.

5. Feminism/the entire Green social/family agenda

I don’t know what “the entire Green social/family agenda” is, so I can’t comment, but I thought the whole point of Angie was to get the good ol’ boys out of power.

>>>There is, though, an even bigger obstacle to the Jamaican solution – identity. The Greens exist in opposition to the CDU/CSU and everything it stands for. They were created by the post-68 generation positively dripping with Theodor Adorno and positively drunk on Herbert Marcuse, seeking a Critical Politics and a Critical Gender Politics to go with the Critical Theory they imbibed. To your average CDU MP, and ten times more for the CSU, your daughter being a Green was until very recently barely distinguishable from her dating Ulrike Meinhof’s ghost. Ashen-faced commiserations…and chilly silences in the Fraktionsklub.<<

A lot of this is cultural, and I can’t comment. Personally, those Greens I’ve run across I happen to like on a personal and cultural level, and I am no socialist. What I could never figure out is how to reconcile the fundamentally authoritarian nature of socialism with the fundamental anti-authoritarianism of the Greens.

Anyway, I see the possibility of common grounds here, notwithstanding differences which, at the end of the day, I find to be objectively superficial.

So, fire away, and let me know why this uninformed and ignorant American is wrong.

The idea is to combine the advantages and reduce the drawbacks of the two common ways to elect a parliament: district representatives and proportional representation.

As our British and American friends no doubt will know, first-past-the-post systems can leave a large part of the votes irrelevant and a party can win a large parliamentary majority with only a small advantage in votes. On the other hand, it leads to close ties between representatives and their local constituencies, which can be seen as an advantage.

Proportional representations, on the other hand, ensure that parliament reflect the spectrum of public opinion. But in its pure form, parliamentarians are very dependent on their party support, but have no links to a home base.

The German system tries to take the best of both systems.

In fact, I think it is quite successful at that, in spite of the occasional quirk.

For a good, classical democratic purpose: Divion of powers and limited government.

Remember that from 1933 to 1945, the Germans had some rather unfortunate experiences with a party that was not penalized in the way they could govern. And a substantial part of the country had similarly unfortunate experiences (OK, not quite so bad) until 1989.

From the last journal post, Alex states in his entry that the CDU is opposed to wind power. The US uses 70 % more oil to produce a $ of GDP than Germany.
Being a fiscal conservative and energy conservative, I expect Germans to support existing and future nuclear power plants. Also, give matching funds(in proportional terms) to wind power. Germany’s military should be strengthened. And lastly, like the CDU, I am not in favour of bringing Turkey at all into the EU. The SPD and Green Party need to rethink their policy towards Turkey. Turkiens needs to ferment and boil where they are until they burn off all traces of Erdogan’s government. Having a muslim country WITH a muslim government in power is not my idea of a EU country, either in 2005 or in 2017.

Sanjay
Bangalore, India