Forum Pascala: German Elections: back to the future or into the unknown?

First Published November 10, 2017 Other

Few surprises were expected in Germany's federal elections. On the day, Angela Merkel won a fourth term in power. But the far-right emerged as a powerful force, raising questions about the future of the Germany's post-war political model. Charles Lees reports.

On September 24 2017 Federal was not a great surprise. Merkel's electoral elections were held to elect modus operandi is to position herself the 19th Bundestag since the and the Christian democratic CDU that foundation of the German she leads on political terrain that would Federal Republic in 1949. The overall normally belong to her opponents. At outcome of the election – the effective first glance this strategy, described by the re-election of Angela Merkel for a fourth German political scientist Manfred Schmidt successive term as Federal Chancellor – as 'asymmetric demobilization' (Schmidt, 2014), appeared to have worked again. With 33 per cent of the popular vote, the CDU and their Bavarian sister party the CSU continued to command a plurality of electoral support and their main rival, the social democratic SPD, had been soundly beaten with only just over 20 per cent of the vote – a historic low.
But the reality was more complex and Merkel's victory was qualified by three factors. First, the CDU/CSU suffered an 8.6 per cent drop in support compared with the previous election and its 33 per cent vote share was its worst performance since 1949. This was no ringing endorsement of 'Merkelism'. Second, the SPD had been the junior partner in Merkel's Grand Coalition government and their disastrous performance was seen as a direct consequence of this subservience to Merkel. Given that Merkel's previous coalition partner, the liberal FDP, had ended four years in government with the CDU/CSU by failing to pass the Federal Republic's five per cent electoral hurdle in the 2013 Bundestag elections, there was now a clear narrative in Germany that going into government with Merkel was fraught with political hazard and should be approached with great caution. Third, and most seriously, the unprecedented success of the right wing populist 'Alternative for Germany' (AfD) – with 12.6 per cent of the vote - shocked Germany's political class and opened up viable political space to the right of the CDU/CSU that had not existed in the Bundestag since the 1950s. This represented a failure of the integrative function of the CDU as a Catchall Volkspartei, particularly in the states of the former East Germany where the AfD performed particularly strongly.
The vagaries of Germany's mixed member proportional electoral system mean that the 19th Bundestag is the biggest ever, with 709 members – an increase of 79 over the previous 2013 intake. Despite this increase, the two main catch-all parties both suffered significant reductions in their parliamentary groups. In addition, the AfD's 94 parliamentarians made it the third biggest grouping in the Bundestag. Given Germany's troubled past, the presence of the AfD in the Bundestag is highly significant and worrying for many Germans. As we shall discuss later, it also further complicates Merkel's problems in forming a viable and stable coalition government.

Figure 1. The 2017 German Federal election: % vote share and % change since 2013 Federal election
Source: Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, 2017

Table 1. The 2017 German Federal election: distribution of seats in the Bundestag and change from 2013 Federal election

Source: www.wahlrecht.de/bundestag/

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Back to the future in the German party system

The emergence of a strong competitor to the right of the CDU/CSU is a major disruption of the established patterns of party system development in Germany. From 1949 until the late 1970s, West Germany underwent a 30-year period of party system concentration, in which the two big catch-all parties dominated the party system, with the liberal FDP playing a balancing or 'corrective' role between them. The strong centripetal dynamics at work in the West German party system at this time where described by the late Gordon Smith as the 'politics of centrality', the key features of which were:

First, Germany's mixed member proportional electoral system and the five per cent electoral hurdle, which limited the number of effective parties within the legislature, shut out flanking parties of the right or left and, as a result, encouraged the formation of coalition governments of the moderate centre-right or centre-left
Second, the idea of the Partienstaat, which gave the established parties a stake in the maintenance of state legitimacy, and discouraged the mobilisation of anti-system or populist sentiment
Third, the constraining effects of Germany's Basic Law on party organisation and practices, as well as on the use of plebiscites and referendums.

These features were buttressed and further amplified by a relatively deferential and compliant media that shared the broad values of political elites. Taken together they constituted what Smith regarded as Germany's 'efficient secret', which had encouraged political moderation, policy continuity (particularly economic policy) and institutional stability (Smith, 1986).
Two systemic junctures then took place that began to moderate these centripetal dynamics. These were, first, the entry of the Greens into the Bundestag in 1983 and, second, the entry of the PDS (now the Left Party) in the first all-German Bundestag election of 1990. The traditional cleavages within the German party system were class, in particular when meditated through trade union membership, and religion, both a Protestant/Catholic cleavage and a more recent divide between voters close to the Churches and non-believers. Both of these cleavages faded in importance over the post-war period. Unification in 1990 resulted in the emergence of a distinct territorial cleavage within the party system, which had blurred a little in recent years before the AfD re-activated it. The entry of the AfD into the Bundestag is clearly a third systemic juncture with potential disruptive effects that could far exceed the two that have gone before it.

Focus on the AfD

But who exactly are the AfD? And, given the legacy of Germany's past and German voters' subsequent aversion to strongly right wing politics, who voted for them?
Given Germany's history and its contemporary political significance, it is no surprise that the emergence of a right wing populist party in the Federal Republic has attracted academic attention. The AfD originally emerged from an intellectual milieu in 2012 and narrowly failed to enter the Bundestag in 2013. At this time, the party campaigned on an unorthodox platform containing neo-liberal, ordoliberal, and populist elements, with a focus on the contestation of what were often quite technical aspects of Germany's response to the Euro crisis.
In the subsequent years, however, the party underwent a process of radicalisation that saw the party undergo two major changes of leadership and adopt a more orthodox right wing populist programme, including a stronger focus on immigration and the mobilisation of fears about Islam. This process culminated in the party's decision to use the Texas-based Harris Media agency, which had worked with Ukip in Britain and the Trump campaign in the USA, in its campaign for the 2017 Federal election.
The decision appears to have paid off for the AfD. Figure 2 demonstrates that the AfD took votes off all of the other major political parties, with nearly a quarter of their voters coming from the CDU/CSU and 10 per cent from the SPD. Just as significantly, the AfD also managed to achieve substantial cut-through with Germans who had become disengaged with the political process over previous decades. Thus, 35 per cent of the AfD's vote came from people who had not voted in the previous Federal election (Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, 2017).

Figure 2. The 2017 Federal election: breakdown of electoral support for the AfD by voting status in 2013 Federal Election
Source: Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, 2017

Figure 3 demonstrates that voters between the ages of 30 and 44 (15 per cent) and 45 and 59 (14 per cent) were more likely to vote for the AfD than the youngest cohort or voters over 60 (11 and 9 per cent respectively). In the context of the party's strong performance in the states of the former East Germany, this is an interesting age profile. The AfD's populist message does not seem to appeal particularly strongly to the older generation who might hanker after the certainties of the former Communist regime but rather to voters of working age, most of whom – like their western German compatriots - have lived the majority of their lives in a unified Germany (Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, 2017).

Figure 3. The 2017 Federal election: % electoral support for the AfD by age cohort
Source: Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, 2017

So what is the social profile of these voters, in east and west? Figure 4 breaks down the AfD vote according to a five-fold typology of social milieus devised by a team of German social scientists working with the Bertelsmann Foundation. These data point to a concentration of support for the AfD amongst three distinct social groups: the 'precariat' (people often shut out of the full-time economy, in part time or temporary employment, or unemployed), the 'respectable' middle class (in full time employment, often in the private sector, and more likely than average to own their own homes), and a group described as 'traditionalists' (with a greater than average tendency to value Germany's cultural legacy, to be troubled by the rapid social change of the last 30 years, and to harbour fears about immigration and Islam). Being a member of the precariat was the most reliable indicator of support for the AfD in the 2017 Federal election and this group was also the most likely to find itself in economic competition with immigrants. However, the strong presence of the respectable middle class and traditionalists in the AfD's electoral coalition indicates that the party's electoral insurgency was driven at least as much by cultural discomfort as it was by economic distress. This 'culture wars' dimension of the AfD's appeal may also explain the limited appeal the party holds for other social groups in the Bertelsmann Foundation's classificatory scheme (Vehrkamp and Wegschaider, 2017).

Figure 4. The 2017 Federal election: % electoral support for the AfD by social milieu
Source: Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2017

Who governs in the German Bundestag?

In the long run the AfD's entry into the German party system has the potential to fundamentally alter the underlying dynamics of German party politics. The party's success seems to have re-activated Germany's fading territorial cleavage. Its political and cultural critique of the Federal Republic's political settlement could also in the long run fundamentally change the nature of the issue space in German politics. In the short run, the most obvious impact has been on the distribution of voting power within the Bundestag and the subsequent dynamics of coalition building.
Since 1949 there has been a long-term process of concentration of voting power around the two main catch-all parties, in particular the CDU/CSU. Up until the early 1960s, the distribution of voting power was in flux, with no clear discernible pattern from election to election. From 1961 until 1980, the period of party system concentration and stability described earlier meant that voting power was evenly distributed between the two big catch-all parties and the FDP.
Paradoxically, modern Germany's more fluid party system has led to a greater concentration of voting power around the catch-all parties (Lees, 2006), with one of the two catch-all parties effectively enjoying a veto-playing position in all but two of the ten elections that have taken place since 1982. This means that none of the smaller parties (the FDP, Greens, and Left Party) have been able to take up the 'kingmaker' function played by the FDP in the 1960s and 1970s.
The AfD's successful entry into the Bundestag in 2017 has redistributed voting power across the Bundestag but the CDU/CSU continues to enjoy a plurality of voting power. The disruption that the AfD has brought about is focused more on the availability of other parties within the coalition game. The AfD does not enjoy enough voting power to assume the kingmaker role but its success has made it even harder for other small parties to assume that role. In addition, the SPD's current leadership has concluded that its best interests are to be served by going into opposition in order to rebuild its support and refresh its political offer to voters. So it is not currently available for coalition building.
All of this had led to an impasse in Berlin and, by October, there was little sign of new coalition government forming. Given the ostracising of the AfD by the other political parties and the self-imposed exclusion of the SPD, the only majority coalition that is in any way ideologically connected is the so-called 'Jamaica coalition' option, between the CDU/ CSU, the liberal FDP, and the Greens. As a result, it is accepted that such a coalition is practically an inevitability; despite the programmatic and coalition management difficulties that political scientists recognise are associated with it. In many ways such a troublesome coalition might play to Merkel's strengths and it is easy to picture her holding the ring in her familiar serene fashion whilst her junior coalition partners struggle for dominance in the background. However, Merkel's tried and tested modus operandi may no longer be fit for purpose in the new and far less benign political and economic circumstances Germany and Europe now face. Politics have become interesting again.

Selected References

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