An op-ed guest writer for the New York Times opines:
SIXTY-FIVE years ago, in November 1944, the war in Europe was at a stalemate. A resurgent Wehrmacht had halted the Allied armies along Germany’s borders after its headlong retreat across northern France following D-Day. From Holland to France, the front was static — yet thousands of Allied soldiers continued to die in futile battles to reach the Rhine River.
One Allied army, however, was still on the move.
It’s the 9th of November…so, in total observance of my usual standard operating procedures, let’s think about the European presidency, or as my wonderful, wonderful Soizick puts it, who’s going to get the job of being Tony Blair.
It looks a lot like the lucky girl won’t be Blair; the reason why is more interesting and more telling. Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a string of small states around Germany take quite a daring stand in foreign policy; Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, all progressively came out against Tony Blair. It seems more obvious that this is an interesting or daring stand if you take a Brussels view, in which Blair is still a respected member of the world elite, than if you take a street level view, in which he’s widely despised. Also, if you consider the UK or Norway to be a 10 on the NATO scale, the Netherlands must be about an 8 – the presence of the Joint Forces Command in Brunssum, and the long-standing and very close relationship with the British armed forces over the commitment to the NATO Northern Flank, are the most obvious manifestations of this. Indeed, the Dutch army served in the British zone of Iraq and its Apache helicopters, the first European-owned ones, are still flying in Afghanistan. (That the first AH-64Ds in European ownership are Dutch is a marker of NATO spirit in itself.)
So the fact they came out against Blair is interesting.
Further, it’s incredibly rare that the Austrians would launch a significant foreign policy initiative without first clearing it with Berlin. This has been true since at least 1878, and the most famous example is one that neither party would like to recall – the Blankoscheck of 1914. Dutch policy is not much different. The upshot is that in opposing Blair, this odd block of states was in a sense acting for Angela Merkel. Not long ago, and we’re talking two months here, Nicolas Sarkozy was being tempted to support Blair; relations between Britain and France have rarely been better than during the last three or so years, it being a major priority for both sides to mend fences after the ghastly Alistair Campbell-inspired frogbashing campaign in the run-up to the Iraq war.
The Franco-German alliance is considered untouchable by both allies, and everyone else – we all know only too well the alternatives. Practicality requires both of them to maintain a relationship nearly as close with Britain, as does the value of having other options. So, assuming Merkel doesn’t want Blair, it was necessary to have the opposition to him floated by others.
In terms of foreign policy, this is the Germany that resulted from the 9th of November, when Merkel herself decided to go to the sauna rather than rush to the border. She apparently reasoned that, once open, there would be no closing it again, and therefore there was no hurry; of course, she was right, but when you think of some of the stories from the Wall years about people whose lives were utterly changed by which side of the border chance put them, it demonstrated a lot of confidence in her reasoning.
This is the Berlin republic, then; discreet, hypercompetent, and steeped in that distinctly northern European combination of self-effacing modesty and intense pride. Like 17th century houses in Amsterdam or 18th century ones in Edinburgh or York; ostentatiously modest, excessive in their austerity of design. Or the supposed Yorkshire traits – being both taciturn and opinionated is quite a trick. It’s been said before that in German, there’s no distinction between the words for citizen/civil/civic and for bourgeois, and that the revolution worked in this ambiguity. Merkel is exhibit A.
From the assembled press, someone shouts a question, “Effective immediately?”
“I have been informed that such an announcement was prepared today, you should already have a copy. According to my understanding, that is immediately. Without delay.”
Twenty years ago this evening, Günter Schabowski gave an unrehearsed answer at a press conference, and thousands of East Berliners — and soon, many more thousands of East Germans — did not delay. The Berlin Wall was open.
A Vietnamese immigrant, brought from that war-torn country as a tiny child.
A baron, the grandson of a princess, who lives in his family’s five-hundred year old castle.
A widow who once worked for the patent office.
A paraplegic.
A huffy gay man.
A former captain of paratroopers.
A mother of seven.
They are… Continue reading
Something else on German elections. You might not expect it, but there will be more first-time voters this year than ever before – about 3.5 million of them.
A quick rundown of German election news. Handelsblatt says the result is awaited with great tension, which perhaps tells you more about Handelsblatt than anything else. They also have a discussion of the coalition position.
In fact, in a sense, the coalition talks have already begun; the Ministry of the Interior has essentially made its opening bid, by issuing a list of demands for more surveillance and anti-terrorist powers. As the CDU is hoping to go into coalition with the FDP, this is probably best understood as setting a position from which they can bargain down. The FDP is predictably unimpressed.
There’s a row in Nordrhein-Westfalen, where the CDU prime minister is accused of spying on the SPD (he’s the one who was quoted as saying that Romanians couldn’t possibly assemble mobile phones). This is mostly important for his future career in the party; he’s standing for re-election in May and is a possible successor to Angela Merkel, if he doesn’t blow up.
Merkel, meanwhile, finished the election campaign by firing up the CDU activists with a speech about how Germany needs stability before anything else. Did anyone find this campaign a little dull? In fact, it’s not quite as bleak as that – she was referring to Adenauer’s 1957 campaign. The last polls, meanwhile, put the CDU/CSU on 33, the SPD on 25, the FDP on 14, the Left on 12 and the Greens on 10.
Both the “traffic light” and the Left/Left/Green option are level with or ahead of the CDU/FDP option; even if the FDP officially doesn’t want to talk, this may alter their calculations somewhat.
Der Standard has a look at the flashmobs that have been following the chancellor’s campaign, cheering at odd intervals and shouting out randomly selected words. (In the UK, it’s the other way around – the candidates shout nonsense at the public.)
In general, the conservative side is much less certain of success than it was a few weeks ago, rather as we predicted.
Al-Qa’ida’s opinion of the elections has been made known through a video; among other things, they threatened the terrors of the earth if a majority of Germans don’t vote for withdrawal from Afghanistan. A majority of Germans appears, going by the polls, to be unimpressed. Several foreign governments took him more seriously and issued warnings to travellers.
There’s a rundown of alternative options for your vote here; why not vote Violet for a spiritual politics?
Well, I’m going to go way, way, way out on a limb and say that the grand coalition will continue after today’s German election. What do the rest of you think?
The last lot of German polls are out, showing a modest recovery for the SPD but nothing strategically epic. However, some polls have shown enough recovery to put some pressure on the FDP’s calculations. We’re in the realm of statistical noise here.
It’s quite surprising just how dull the campaign has been – the main parties essentially arguing that they won’t drop the ball, although they’d be happy with some more votes for their faintly more radical partners. I’m sticking with my prediction that the SPD will pick up a bit more and that then we’ll go into Klausur with the other parties; whatever happens, don’t bet against Angela Merkel as a committee politician. This is despite the economic crisis, and more recently, the Kunduz air raid, which even induced the chancellor to refer to “war”.
It’s not as if nothing is happening; a senior Green resigns over sensational videos of the party’s co-leader. Sensational videos of Renate Künast fishing, that is. This is a resigning matter, but not for her.
As far as the German engagement in Afghanistan goes, there is a row going on about the idea of paying for the training and deployment of 2,500 extra Afghan soldiers in the German sector. This has resulted in a very unusual outbreak of harmony between the CSU and the Greens, both of whom think it’s a good idea; but the government much less so. This wraps into the row between the US and Germany about the Kunduz incident, which seems to be on hold until after the election, just as any decisions about strategy or tactics are.
In fact, all the decisions are. It feels like the current European way; elections without decisions.
It’s a tall order…but surely writing about German elections with statistics must beat it?
But there’s a German election coming up, although, as Der Spiegel points out, you might not have noticed, as both major parties are secretly quite pleased with the current situation. Polling data is here. Angela Merkel has spent the period since her triumph of 2005 governing well to the left of her party and being a quietly effective foreign-policy chancellor, just as we predicted; the Social Democrats have been struggling, as a result, to retain an independent profile, but (from their point of view) at least they’re in government, and paradoxically the main gainers from the economic crisis have been the FDP, the spokesmen for classical liberalism.
Their leader – still Guido Westerwelle after all these years – is behaving a little strangely in public, saying very frequently that he doesn’t believe there is any chance of the so-called traffic light coalition with the Social Democrats and Greens, but not saying that he rules it out. If the polls stay as they are, this would be the only chance of the Left taking power; but, of course, this is a huge assumption, especially in the light of their surge during the 2005 campaign. With the CDU on 37%, it’s essentially assumed that they are running up against demographic limits – a typically AFOE point, but a good one.
The all-time record conservative share of the vote is 39.7%, achieved in 1957, but more to the point, even another point-and-a-half would be more than one standard deviation from the long-run average, that is to say about a 3 in 10 chance. Theoretically, there is a 5% chance of getting to 42%, but if Konrad Adenauer couldn’t get over 40% in booming 1957 it’s probably even more unlikely that Merkel will in 2009. In fact, one thing that this little statistical exercise shows is that German party vote shares are very stable indeed – the SPD’s share of the vote has greater variance, but not that much.
So there is not much space for the rightwing vote to grow; and the Left Party is apparently stuck just under 10%. The strong Liberal showing – 15% in the current polls – suggests that the right could hope to form a new coalition without the Social Democrats, which would hold 50% of the vote. At the moment the only way the Social Democrats could checkmate this would be to get the Liberals and Greens into a coalition – the Left Party and the Greens wouldn’t be enough. This all assumes that nothing else changes, however; if the Left-Left-Green option was possible, all the coalition calculations would be altered, as the Liberals would face a serious risk of being left out in the cold. So what would it take to make it happen?
At the moment, the LLG coalition adds up to 46%, the “bourgeois” (i.e. CDU/FDP) option to 50%; so they need four percentage points to cross this strategic threshold. In fact, in so far as they are fighting a zero sum game, they might need fewer. The SPD’s share of vote in the current polls is on 23% – a shockingly low figure. In fact, based on the SPD’s historical vote shares, this would in itself be approaching a 1 in 100 event. Even taking account of the Left Party breakaway, the party polled just under the historical average last time out; and the 95% probability level corresponds to a vote share of 27.3%, which would put them back in the game. Actually, there doesn’t appear to be much covariance at all between the Left Party and SPD shares; this fits the explanation that the Left is still mostly the ex-PDS.
So I’m going to forecast that, even if the SPD looks down and out now, there’s an excellent chance of them being in with a chance on the night.
“This is a book about Germans and Jews, about power and money. It is a book focused on Bismarck and Bleichröder, Junker and Jew, statesman and banker, collaborators for over thirty years. The setting is that of a Germany where two worlds clashed: the new world of capitalism and an earlier world with its ancient feudal ethos; gradually a new and broadened elite emerged, and Bismarck’s tie with Bleichröder epitomized that regrouping. It is the story of the founding of the new German Empire, in whose midst a Jewish minority rose to embattled prominence. It is a record of events and of the interests and sentiments that shaped these events; it is a record of events and of the interests and sentiments that shaped these events; it is a record largely told by contemporaries, in thousands of hitherto unused letters and documents. It is also the story of the fragility of that Empire and its ruler, of its hidden conflicts, and of the hypocrisy which allowed a glittering façade to cover the harsh and brutal facts below. The ambiguity of wealth — its threat to tradition and its promise of mobility — is part of this record, and so is the anguished ambiguity of Jewish success, so striking, so visible, so delusive. It is a study of a society in motion, and mobility was its essence and its trauma. …”
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