NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
September 21, 2005
German failure
The German election ended Sunday with the effective defeat of both challengers to the chancellor's office. Angela Merkel, leader of the opposition CDU/CSU, entered the campaign with a huge lead in the polls, which shrank as it continued.Whereas Gerhard Schroeder -- who, by fairly common consensus, has misgoverned Germany for the last seven years -- was once again able to scare up a comeback. In the last election, his crude, demagogic, last-minute appeal was to German anti-Americanism. This time he succeeded a little more subtly in labelling the CDU the "party of social coldness", to panic the beneficiaries of one of the world's most generous welfare states. In the one and only TV debate between the leaders, a fortnight ago, Mr Schroeder jumped up with the charge that Ms Merkel was concealing a "hidden agenda". Now, where have you heard that before? The SPD is to Germany as the Liberals to Canada: the party to manage national decline. The long-term success of each has depended on turning "voters" gradually into "clients". >From the humblest welfare recipients, up to big businessmen whose fortunes depend on sweetheart regulatory arrangements, each party pitches itself, as crassly as necessary, to the beneficiaries of state largesse. Their supporters therefore become quite inured to massive corruption, and revelations of ineptitude -- and remain so, as long as they are guaranteed preferred access to the government trough. The intention of such governments is not to run the economy into the ground, nor even to destroy the moral order through experiments in social engineering. That is simply the natural consequence of their way of doing business. A Social Democrat or Liberal government will do whatever appears immediately necessary to defend its tax base; and since full socialism has been repeatedly shown to lead directly to economic collapse, a kind of "guided capitalism" is favoured. The long-term economic decline becomes a by-product of a political outlook that mechanically ranks national interests below party interests. Almost every west European country, Canada, and Japan, are in the same rut, from the same basic cause. Japan is exceptional, because it is beginning to attempt serious reforms, under the fortuitous leadership of Junichiro Koizumi, who won his own snap election by a landslide last week. The fortuitous quality is his unusual ability to create national enthusiasm for the idea of being "shaken, rattled, and rolled" (Mr Koizumi's own phrase) out of the "salaryman" and "pensioner" mindset at the root of two decades of national stagnation. He has set out, rather as Reagan and Thatcher did, to create a spirit of enterprise, especially among the young -- even more than to achieve specific legislative goals. But on policy, he is currently the world's leading privatizer, promising to sell off even Japan's dysfunctional post office. It is this kind of luck that Germany has not had. Angela Merkel is not an inspiring leader, and her hold on her own party is tenuous. She is beholden to various regional party bosses, who saddled her during the election with an incomprehensible tax policy. And while the consensus of the glib was that she could be a "German Margaret Thatcher", she is, with her instinct for keeping everything as tepid as possible, more like a Canadian Conservative leader. She spent most of the campaign pleading that she would never endanger the Nanny State, instead of laying right into it; and begging the indulgence of people who'd never dream of voting for her, instead of doing what Mrs Thatcher used to do -- looking them in the face and saying, "Bwahaha!" (Stephen Harper seems determined to disappear from Canadian politics down the same plughole.) Nothing is cast in iron -- I keep having to remind myself -- and the ringing endorsement Ms Merkel received from her own party yesterday may put some air back in her deflated sails. Germany might yet emerge from a period of political chaos, as England did from "winters of discontent" in the 1970s. But things could also be worse. The post-election polls show seven Germans in ten unhappy with the election result; and of the many possible coalition combinations, a "grand coalition" of the SPD and CDU is the one most preferred (though by only one-third of respondents). I think they'd be better off enjoying some chaos now, than storing it until it achieves explosive pressure. Grand coalitions are better at creating nations (as Canada's in 1864-67), than in saving them. In the latter case, they channel opposition towards the extreme parties of Left and Right. It was just such a "Grosse Koalition" in 1928 that sent Germany down the road to Hitler; and another in the 1960s that inspired a neo-Nazi revival, and facilitated the student uprisings and Red Brigade antics of 1968. Better to let "that idiot Schroeder" (my own intemperate phrase) continue to make a mess of things, in the hope Germans finally realize that the alternative to reform is disaster. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top