Angela Merkel’s Last Term – An Introduction

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special issue first describes the cumbersome process of forming the fourth and final Merkel government. Both coalition partners experienced severe electoral losses in 2017 and were not particularly close to one another programmatically. This made the formation of a new coalition difficult. Next, the to-do-list is discussed. It turns out that, as a response to the Fridays-for-Future protests, voters considered climate change to be the most important problem in 2019, while the Corona pandemic dominated the agenda from early 2020. Interestingly, none of the coalition parties ‘owned’ either of these issues and this could have made policy-making even more intricate. In the third part, we summarise the policy profile of the fourth Merkel government, based mostly on the contributions to this special issue. It turns out that the policies of the fourth Merkel government mirrored those of its predecessor. In the socio-economic dimension a gentle de-liberalisation continued, while the policies on the social dimension followed a moderately liberal path. In the final section, the plan of the special issue is outlined.

A Difficult Government to Form

On 8 December 2021, Angela Merkel’s tenure as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany ended – after 4 terms and 5,860 days in office. She missed Helmut Kohl’s incumbency record by only ten days, thus becoming the second-longest serving chancellor in post-war German history. Her fourth and final coalition government was also the most cumbersome to form. It took 171 days before the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD) formally concluded the coalition-formation process and elected Merkel yet another time. This is a record for Merkel, as none of her previous governments had taken so long to form, her third government being distant second with 86 days between election day and election of the chancellor (Siefken 2018, 434).

The long government formation process is all the more remarkable as the same parties, CDU/CSU and SPD, participated in both the third and the fourth Merkel governments. Hence, the actors should have known each other, could look back on a common record of policy accomplishments and established routines of coalition management. The fact that it took so long to renew the coalition suggests that there were substantial obstacles to a comeback of what was the smallest ever ‘Grand Coalition’, controlling a mere 56.8 per cent of the 703 Bundestag seats. While the number of Bundestag seats thus was higher than at anytime previously, the vote share of the two largest parties represented a record low in post-war history.

In reality both coalition partners had suffered crushing defeats in the 2017 Bundestag election (Table 1): the Christian Democrats lost 8.5 percentage points, more than at any previous Bundestag election and only slightly surpassing their worst ever (at the time) result (31 per cent in 1949). The SPD lost another 5.2 percentage points, falling to the worst ever Bundestag election result at 20.5 per cent. The opposition parties were unable to benefit from the losses of the governing parties, both Left Party and Greens only increasing their share by half a percentage point each. It was the opposition parties that had just missed entry into the Bundestag in 2013 that turned out to be the winners of the 2017 contest. The FDP returned to parliament after one term of extra-parliamentary opposition with an improvement of close to six percentage points and a result in double digits. The right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) was the main winner of the 2017 election, however, almost tripling its support and coming in at third place with 12.6 per cent. For the first time in post-war Germany, a right-populist party subsequently entered the Bundestag, rising on the back of discontent with the third Merkel government’s immigration policy in particular (Hansen and Olsen 2019).

Table 1. Results of the 2017 Bundestag election.

	CDU/CSU	SPD	AfD	FDP	Left	Greens	Others
Vote share (Zweitstimme)	33.0	20.5	12.6	10.7	9.2	8.9	5.0
Change	−8.5	−5.2	+7.9	+5.9	+0.6	+0.5	−1.2
No. of seats (total 703)	246	153	94	80	69	67	0

Source: Bundeswahlleiter (2022).

None of the mainstream parties wanted to form a coalition with the right-populists. Furthermore, the SPD was also reluctant to cooperate with the Left Party and ultimately failed to command a majority even with Greens and the Left (together controlling only 289 of 703 Bundestag seats; see Table 1). A coalition of Social Democrats, Liberals (FDP) and Greens similarly lacked a Bundestag majority (only 300 seats) and a CDU/CSU minority government that could have tried to govern with support from varying parties was considered unrealistic. Hence, the governing options were essentially narrowed down to only two: either a three-party coalition of Christian Democrats, Liberals and Greens or yet another (not so) Grand coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats (cf. Bräuninger et al. 2019 on government formation after the 2017 Bundestag election).

When the results came in the Social Democratic chancellor-candidate, Martin Schulz, declared that the SPD would not join the new government. That left Merkel with only one option: the formation of a so-called ‘Jamaica’ coalition of CDU/CSU, FDP and Greens.¹ Nonetheless, this constellation would not materialise either. The FDP’s Christian Lindner pulled out of the coalition negotiations after he felt that his party would not win enough policy concessions from Merkel and the Greens, famously uttering it would be better not to govern at all than to govern badly (cf. Siefken 2018, 415).

Looking at the policy positions of the potential coalition partners, it becomes even more evident why the CDU and the Bavarian CSU (a party that must be considered an actor in its own right) as well as the Liberals and Greens were unable to form a government. We illustrate this by using data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (Jolly et al. 2022) for 2014 and 2019. These surveys centre on the period around the negotiations in 2017 and focus on the two dimensions that define the German policy space reasonably well (Hornsteiner and Saalfeld 2014), namely the economic and the libertarian-authoritarian (GAL-TAN) dimensions. Results are displayed in Figures 1 and 2. On the economic dimension (Figure 1), Christian Democrats take a centrist position between the Greens’ distinct left, pro-state positions and the FDP with its pronounced right, pro-market beliefs. The average difference between FDP and the Greens is 4.9 points on a 10-point scale. On the libertarian-authoritarian dimension (Figure 2), it is essentially the positions of the CSU and the Greens that seem incompatible with an average difference between the two parties’ positions of 6.0 points. Accordingly, it is not surprising that diverging policy positions have hampered the formation of a Jamaica coalition and that it was one of the parties with a firm position on one of these issue dimensions that stopped the negotiations. What is more, beyond the partly incompatible policy positions of the potential coalition partners, another factor that contributed to the liberals’ breaking off negotiations was the lack of confidence and trust between the parties (cf. Decker 2019, 218; Saalfeld et al. 2019, 519).

Figure 1. Policy positions of the German parties on the economic dimension, 2014 and 2019. Source: Jolly et al. 2022.

Figure 2. Policy positions of the German parties on the GAL-TAN dimension, 2014 and 2019. Source: Jolly et al. 2022.

At that point, it was unclear if any coalition could be formed. The Federal President, the Social Democrat former foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, made it clear, however, that he was unwilling to dissolve the Bundestag and he convinced his fellow Social Democrats to start negotiations with Merkel’s Christian Democrats. This decision might have been eased for the SPD by the fact that policy-wise it was the Social Democrats that had shaped the previous government’s profile. Examples include policy around the minimum wage, the re-regulation of the labour market, the lowering of the pension age for certain groups, the gender-quota for boards of certain enterprises, a reform of the citizenship law and the introduction of same sex marriage (Saalfeld and Zohlnhöfer 2019; Zohlnhöfer 2019).

At the same time, however, Social Democratic reluctance to form a third Grand Coalition under Angela Merkel since 2005 was not surprising. Both the almost continuous erosion of the SPD’s electoral support from 34.2 per cent in 2005 to 20.5 per cent in 2017 as well as the fate of the FDP after joining the second Merkel government (2009–2013) clearly indicate that no electoral credit was to be gained from being the junior partner in a coalition with the CDU/CSU.

In addition, diverging policy positions between Christian and Social Democrats did not make a forming a Grand Coalition easier. On the economic dimension, the average difference between SPD and CSU is just over 2.5 points on the 10-point-scale. Moreover, the SPD is closer to the Greens and even the Left Party than it is to the Christian Democrats who in turn are slightly closer to the FDP than to their coalition partner. On the GAL-TAN dimension, experts see even larger differences between the CSU and SPD, averaging at 3.84 points on the 10-point-scale. At the same time, the SPD is considered substantially closer to the Liberals and the Left than even to the CDU (let alone the CSU). Hence, according to these data at least, substantial policy differences between the coalition partners existed and these might have made finding agreements on reforms both in economic and welfare state issues and in issues regarding the social and cultural dimension of politics difficult. At the same time, disagreement on the libertarian-authoritarian dimension seems to be more pronounced than on the economic dimension.

Even though the Social Democrats were the much smaller partner, the specific constellation under which the coalition negotiations between CDU, CSU and SPD took place favoured the SPD for several reasons. First, the SPD originally had been unwilling to enter government, so any threat to walk out of the negotiations was credible. Second, such a position was all the more threatening for the Christian Democrats as Steinmeier had made it clear that he was reluctant to dissolve the Bundestag and Merkel was extremely sceptical regarding a Christian Democratic minority government. Hence, there was no alternative left to a further Grand coalition. Third, the Social Democrats’ negotiation position was further strengthened by their commitment to hold an inner-party referendum on the coalition agreement. If the Christian Democrats wanted to form a coalition – and they did – and wanted to form it with the Social Democrats – which they had to in the absence of alternatives – then they had to make enough concessions to convince SPD members of the value of yet another Grand Coalition.

Consequently, the pattern of Social Democrats shaping the government’s policy agenda repeated itself in 2018, as public opinion again saw the SPD as ‘having won’ the coalition negotiations in that year (Saalfeld et al. 2019, 525). This assessment can also be based on a comparison of the coalition agreement with the election manifestos of the coalition partners. While 15 per cent of the pledges in the coalition agreement reflected pledges both parties had made in their manifestos, a further 24 per cent of policy proposals in the coalition agreement reflected pledges exclusively made by the SPD in its manifesto, compared with only 11 per cent for the Christian Democrats (Matthieß and Vehrkamp 2022, 11). Hence, although the CDU/CSU were the much bigger coalition partner in terms of votes and seats, the SPD had a stronger influence on the coalition agreement.

This is also mirrored by important policy concessions that the Social Democrats obtained. This holds especially true with regard to economic and welfare state policies. Particular areas of note there include further re-regulation of the labour market, changes in the funding of health care, the introduction of a basic pension scheme and the continuation of the solidarity tax surcharge for the top 10 per cent of taxpayers. Concerning other policy areas, Social Democrats also often prevailed, for example, with the omission of a target for defence spending, new investment programmes in the field of education and additional regulations promoting gender equality (cf. Jacobs and Jun 2018). Moreover, even in terms of formal parliamentary rules of procedure, the SPD succeeded with its demand for introducing periodic questioning of the Chancellor before the Bundestag.

In addition, the SPD turned its strong bargaining position into offices. Beyond important ministries like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, which the Social Democrats had already filled in the previous Grand Coalition, they now also nominated one of their own to the key position of the Minister of Finance. Considering the substantial policy concessions and the unprecedented portfolio allocation to the disadvantage of the major coalition partner, the Christian Democrats under Chancellor Merkel were – again – willing to provide considerable concessions to the SPD in order to ensure government formation under their leadership.²

The Agenda 2018–2021: Business as Usual or Crisis Management?

Turning to the government agenda between 2018 and 2021 and assessing the overall work of the Grand Coalition, Matthieß and Vehrkamp (2022, 13) report that the fourth Merkel government completely fulfilled 73 per cent of the promises that can be identified in the coalition agreement. Adding the share of promises that have been implemented only in part, almost four in five policy projects have been realised (78 per cent). This evaluation of the Grand Coalition suggests that – regardless of the initial difficulties and several disputes during their term in office – the CDU/CSU and SPD found common ground in the following years of their ‘day-to-day governing’. This allowed them to diligently implement substantial parts of their agenda. Interestingly, the SPD was not only more successful in getting its manifesto pledges into the coalition agreement; the Social Democrats were similarly more successful in getting their pledges onto the statute book. Of the pledges in the coalition agreement that originated exclusively from the SPD manifesto, 83 per cent were adopted, while the comparable figure for the CDU/CSU was only 75 per cent (Matthieß and Vehrkamp 2022, 13).

At the same time, however, governing is not always ‘routine politics’. It is not simply about the adoption of policies from the coalition agreement. Rather, in many instances governments have to respond to challenges that were not anticipated at the time of the coalition negotiations, but that may come to dominate the agenda during the term and may absorb the government’s resources to an extent that makes the pursuit of the original policy projects impossible. The previous Merkel governments are all cases in point with the financial crisis of 2008/9 during the first term, the Euro Crisis during the second Merkel government and migration issues in the Merkel III government all dominating the agenda for substantial periods of time. What issues were high on the public agenda of the fourth Merkel government?

Forschungsgruppe Wahlen’s (2022a, 2022b) Politbarometer regularly asks respondents which issues they deem to be the most important problems facing Germany. We use these data to describe the public agenda of the fourth Merkel government. While in the first year of the government, the migration issue still was considered important by a third or more of the respondents, its salience clearly dropped from the summer of 2018 onwards. In the spring of 2019, climate change and environmental policies became the most important issues in Germany, which evidently reflected the effect of the Fridays-for-Future movement on agenda-setting (see Raisch and Zohlnhöfer 2020). The salience of that issue peaked in September 2019 when 59 per cent of respondents said that climate change was one of the two most important problems in Germany. At the beginning of 2020, the agenda again changed massively and rapidly. While in January 2020 still 45 per cent thought of climate change as a very important problem, that figure had dropped to a mere 9 per cent by the end of March. Instead, the spread of the Corona virus had conquered public attention. By the end of March, more than 80 per cent of respondents considered COVID-19 as one of the most important problems. While there were some fluctuations in the share of respondents who thought of Corona as one of the most important problems, the pandemic dominated the German policy agenda until the summer of 2021. It was only shortly before the 2021 Bundestag election that climate change returned to the top of the list of most important problems facing the country. Interestingly, economic and welfare state policy items received little public attention throughout this legislative term.

In sum, the policy agenda of the fourth Merkel government was again mostly set by external events – the Fridays-for-Future demonstrations that led to increasing attention on the climate change issue and the Corona pandemic that became so acute that for a period it dominated the agenda. Hence, the salience of these issues reduced the scope to which the governing parties could shape policies. Moreover, none of the issues were ‘owned’ by either of the governing parties, i.e. voters did not consider either government party particularly competent in dealing with these issues. This is, of course, not surprising with regard to the new issue of the pandemic. Moreover, in this issue area, the Christian Democrats were able to develop an image as a competent crisis manager during the first year of the pandemic with 60 per cent of respondents of a DeutschlandTrend survey in September 2020 considering the CDU/CSU the party most competent to deal with the crisis (Infratest dimap 2020). Nonetheless, eight months later that figure had been cut in half (Infratest dimap 2021). From the point of view of the coalition parties, things were even worse with regard to the climate change issue, which was clearly owned by the Greens with usually more than half of the respondents thinking that the Greens were the most competent party with regard to environmental and climate change policy (Infratest dimap 2020, 2021). Thus, from an electoral point of view, dealing with the two most salient issues of her fourth government was particularly challenging for the Chancellor and her Grand Coalition.

The Policies of the Fourth Merkel Government

What the above paragraphs have shown is that the government parties had to deal with an agenda that was dominated by issues neither of these parties owned. At the same time, the coalition partners themselves were not particularly close programmatically, neither regarding the economic nor regarding the libertarian-authoritarian dimension of electoral competition. But how did the fourth Merkel government actually deal with these issues? How did electoral competition play out under these unfavourable conditions? Did these conditions lead to conflict within the coalition, for example in terms of many dissenting votes among the coalition’s MPs, or did the heads of the coalition manage to keep conflict low? How did the incorporation of the Länder in policy-making work, something that was of genuine importance during the pandemic? Which policies were actually pursued? And – most of all – (in what ways) does the fourth Merkel government differ from its three predecessors? This special issue seeks to address and answer these questions. Before we describe the individual contributions in a little more detail, however, we take stock of the fourth Merkel government and try to sketch the answers to at least some of these questions, based on the contributions to this special issue.

The reform output of the fourth Merkel government is not too dissimilar from that of its predecessor. In terms of economic and social policy, the Merkel government continued to pursue policies that can be classified as de-liberalising (Fill 2019) in the sense that they take back previous liberalising reforms or increase the generosity or scope of welfare benefits. A case in point is the minimum pension (Grundrente) that tops up pensions for low-wage-earners who have contributed to the pension system for extended periods of time (see Bandau 2022 for details). Health policy prior to the start of the pandemic can serve as another example: as Hornung, Bandelow and Iskander show in their contribution to this SI, health care reforms were characterised by a number of distributive reforms, and the responsible minister, Jens Spahn, did not hesitate to expand on the spending increases agreed upon in the coalition agreement. Similarly, Voigt, in her paper on labour market policies, argues that even before the Covid-crisis hit Germany, active labour market policy was expanding and access to unemployment benefits slightly relaxed. These policies became possible due to good economic performance with comparatively low unemployment and buoyant tax revenues (Murswieck 2021, 126). Hence, while the government kept the budget balanced before 2020, it was still possible to raise expenditure and slightly increase the progressiveness of the tax system, as Seelkopf and Haffert show in their contribution to this special issue.

The sound budgetary position prior to the beginning of the pandemic also made a resolute response to the economic consequences of the Covid-crisis and the measures to contain it possible. Indeed, the responses of fiscal and labour market policy were significant, including financial help to businesses, an extension of the short-term work scheme, relaxations in terms of who could receive social security payments and numerous other policies (see Seelkopf and Haffert in this SI; Voigt in this SI; see also Rüb, Heinemann, and Zohlnhöfer 2021 for many of the details). The willingness to intervene in the economy on such a massive scale should also be considered evidence for the argument about a remarkable tendency of de-liberalisation in recent German economic and social policy, as Seelkopf and Haffert emphasise in their contribution.

During the Covid-crisis the willingness to stabilise the economy also took on a European dimension. In contrast to the previous Merkel governments that had refused debt pooling at the European level, the fourth Merkel government accepted the Next Generation EU package. This package of grants and loans for EU members worth over 800 billion Euros can be considered a substantial break with past positions of German governments in general and Merkel and the Christian Democrats in particular (Seelkopf and Haffert as well as Oppermann and Brummer in this SI). That is true even though it was claimed to be a one-off instrument and not a lasting change in the financial architecture of the EU. On closer inspection, however, there is more continuity with previous policies than might appear at first glance, as Heermann, Leuffen and Tigges show in this SI. They argue that Next Generation EU is simply a different instrument to reach the overarching aim of stabilising the EU in troublesome times. A similar intention of strengthening the EU during the crisis could also explain the joint European procurement of Covid vaccines (as Oppermann and Brummer argue in the SI).

The pandemic was also the most important issue in terms of the libertarian-authoritarian dimension as attempts to contain the Corona virus led to the most important restrictions of fundamental rights in Germany since World War II (Blum 2022; Rüb, Heinemann, and Zohlnhöfer 2021) - although measures differed slightly between the Länder (see Person, Behnke and Jürgens in this SI). With the exception of the AfD (see Zohlnhöfer and Engler in this SI), these restrictions were not considered as a policy change towards a more authoritarian stance of the government on civil rights but as a temporary necessity to contain the pandemic.³

Other relevant issues on the GALTAN dimension concerned migration, which was still the most salient issue in German politics at the beginning of the term. Strong pressure from the AfD led to the government initially continuing to seek to lower the number of refugees (further) in 2018, while more liberal positions prevailed later on with a comparatively permissive regulation of the immigration of skilled labour (Bauer-Blaschkowski 2022). Overall, there is remarkable continuity regarding the Merkel IV government’s policy stance on migration. The same is true in terms of law-and-order policies (Wenzelburger 2022).

While questions of life and death were highly salient in many decisions about the containment of the pandemic (see Zohlnhöfer forthcoming), traditional questions of morality policy played a less important role in Merkel’s fourth term compared with her previous government, where the introduction of same-sex marriage in particular was a salient and controversial issue. The issue of organ donation was the only pertinent item and the change was modest (see Mai, Link and Engler in this SI). Finally, Henninger and von Wahl (2022) find that the German gender equality regime remained on its course towards a ‘social democratisation’. Examples include the more determined attempts to increase the number of women in managing boards of large companies (2. Führungspositionengesetz) or the legal claim to childcare for children in primary school from 2026 onwards.

Environmental policy is a final issue of the GALTAN dimension that needs to be considered here. Despite the issue’s substantial salience in 2019 in particular due to the Fridays-for-Future movement, again, according to the account of Annette Töller (in this SI), the policy output of the fourth Merkel government was similar to that of its predecessor: business as usual there. Nonetheless, some major reforms were passed, including a new climate protection law and the phasing-out of coal power generation by 2038 (see also Zohlnhöfer and Engler in this SI).

The individual papers in this Special Issue discuss the reasons for the different decisions and for continuity and change in the Merkel government’s policy output in detail. One driving force of policy change clearly was pressure stemming from societal problems or the lack thereof. The measures to contain the pandemic and to stabilise the economy in response to the Covid crisis are particularly telling examples: If it were not for that crisis, none of these measures would have made it on the agenda of the fourth Merkel government. Similarly, the strong economic and budgetary situation at the beginning of the term allowed the government to pursue a number of de-liberalising reforms that the coalition would have most likely not adopted under worse economic circumstances. At the same time, institutional veto players like the Bundesrat or the Federal Constitutional Court only played a marginal role in terms of policy-making during the fourth Merkel government (Murswieck 2021, 127–128), with the notable exception of the ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court regarding the climate protection law that led to a substantially stricter regulation (Töller in this SI). Both the high relevance of crises and problems and the relative minor importance of veto players mirror findings for the previous Merkel governments.

As we are analysing a government coalition, the explanatory factor most contributions to this SI focus on is partisan effects and the consequences of electoral competition. And indeed, parties seem to have mattered for policy-making in the fourth Merkel government. That is even true for compliance at the Länder level with the decisions of the meetings of the 16 prime ministers of the Länder with the chancellor (Ministerpräsidentenkonferenz) regarding Corona restrictions, as shown by Person, Behnke and Jürgens in this SI. Similarly, even in free votes in the Bundestag, party affiliation played a highly important role (Mai, Link and Engler in this SI). Different party positions could also be discerned in many decisions in the various issue areas analysed in this SI. Quite remarkably, that is even true for foreign policy where the coalition partners differed quite substantially in their willingness to attain the goal of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence (Oppermann and Brummer in this SI). Similarly, the de-liberalisation in fiscal and social policy including labour market policy was somewhat controversial between the governing parties, although agreement grew (at least with regard to the labour market) once the crisis hit (Voigt in this special issue). The de-liberalisation part likely reflects the SPD’s disproportionate influence on government policy that we already found for the coalition agreement. That is clearly true in terms of the minimum pension bill (Bandau 2022), the way the solidarity surcharge was reduced and the suspension of the debt brake (Seelkopf and Haffert in this SI).⁴ Moreover, the Next Generation EU programme was closer to ideas originally put forward by the SPD than the positions of the Christian Democrats (Heermann, Leuffen and Tigges in this SI). Nonetheless, also the SPD was unable to get its way entirely due to resistance of the CDU/CSU. That is particularly evident for environmental policy, where the Christian Democrats sought to block more far-reaching changes, for example with regard to the climate protection law (Töller as well as Zohlnhöfer and Engler in this SI).

The latter finding is particularly interesting given the high salience of environmental policy and the climate issue in particular during parts of Merkel’s fourth term and the Merkel governments’ track records of responding to electoral competition (for example, Engler, Bauer-Blaschkowski, and Zohlnhöfer 2019). Against this background, one could have expected that the mobilisation of the Fridays-for-Future movement that resonated strongly with the public and policy-makers (see Raisch and Zohlnhöfer 2020) would lead to more far-reaching reforms in this issue area.⁵ Moreover, environmental policy is not the only issue area that remained surprisingly unaffected by electoral competition. Various authors in this special issue report similar findings for labour market policy (Voigt in this SI), Corona policy-making (Zohlnhöfer and Engler in this SI) and even foreign policy (Oppermann and Brummer in this SI). Even more remarkable maybe, Wenzelburger (2022) does not find any outbidding in the field of law and order policies, which the literature would lead one to expect given the presence of a right-populist party in the Bundestag for the first time.

The reasons for the limited relevance of electoral competition in the fourth Merkel government are manifold. While foreign policy does not necessarily lend itself to making one’s mark to begin with, the Christian Democrats in particular were confronted with some counter-pressure in climate mitigation policy. On the one hand, they might have wished to accommodate the demands of the Fridays-for-Future movement in order to avoid vote losses. On the other hand, however, they had to take into account the economic interests of their core voters as well as the strong position of the AfD, particularly in East Germany, that essentially neglected the need for climate protection regulations all together (Zohlnhöfer and Engler in this SI). Finally, the Corona crisis was initially characterised by a rally-around-the-flag sentiment and a high perceived competence of the government to solve the crisis. Both made an adjustment of the policies seem unnecessary, at least until the last half year prior to the 2021 election.

While the muted impact of interparty competition is a major discontinuity during the fourth Merkel government, in a number of issue areas the relevance of intraparty competition, mostly within the Christian Democrats, is remarkable. Given Merkel’s early announcement not to stand for a fifth term and the lack of a ‘natural successor’, policy-making was substantially affected by the competition between potential candidates for the chancellery from the Christian Democrats (for details see Jun 2022). This is particularly evident for the policies dealing with the Corona crisis where the two major contestants, Markus Söder and Armin Laschet, regularly differed (in public as well as in private) in terms of policy preferences (see Alexander 2021; Person, Behnke and Jürgens in the SI; Hornung, Bandelow and Iskander in this SI). A similar pattern also emerged in other issue areas, for example in labour market policy (Voigt in this SI). It is quite plausible that these conflicts also played a substantial part in the spectacular defeat of the CDU/CSU in the 2021 Bundestag election, which meant that the end of the Merkel years coincided with the end of government participation of the Christian Democrats.

Outline of the Special Issue

Not surprisingly, different aspects of the two most important problems are discussed in various contributions to this special issue. Above all that is true for the pandemic, which dominated all aspects of policy-making from spring 2020 to the late summer of 2021. Hence, the management of the pandemic is studied from two politics-related perspectives: one contribution assesses the role of intergovernmental relations in attempting to mitigate the crisis and a second paper examines the relevance of electoral competition for the crisis. Many of the policy-related articles deal with the different aspects of the pandemic, from health to the labour market and fiscal policy and even relations with the EU. Environmental policy and climate change mitigation, in contrast, were handled less in a crisis mode of governance and more as business as usual and the issue failed to affect many other issue areas. Alongside the chapter on environmental policy, the heightened attention for this issue is also investigated in the contribution on electoral competition. At the same time, other important issue areas were dealt with between 2018 and 2021 and the individual policy-related contributions take stock of these developments.

Turning to the structure of the special issue, the first part deals with politics, the organisation of government and decision-making processes. That is done so over three contributions. In their contribution, Zohlnhöfer and Engler take stock of electoral competition and its impact on policy-making. They present data on public opinion, review the policy positions of opposition parties and study the role of party competition in the two most salient issue areas – climate and environmental policy and COVID-19 management. The second contribution focuses on the organisation of Corona management in German cooperative federalism. Person, Behnke and Jürgens reflect on the intergovernmental coordination between the federal government and Länder governments by studying new data on the implementation of the coordinated agreements in the individual Länder. The third article assesses MPs’ voting behaviour in the German Bundestag. Mai, Link and Engler examine the determinants of dissenting voting behaviour in whipped votes for all four terms of Merkel’s chancellorship and, in addition, provide insights on the determinants of voting behaviour on the most prominent free vote in her final legislative term, the organ donation reform 2020.

The second part of our special issue covers a selection of six policy fields, taking stock and aiming at a first analysis of the developments in these areas. In the first article, Seelkopf and Haffert deal with fiscal policies under the fourth Merkel government. They pay particular attention to the policy reactions to the economic crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the relevant mitigation measures and identify an (at least short-term) abandonment of the conservative doctrine that characterised German fiscal policy at the national and European level in the decade before. The second policy-related contribution by Voigt studies labour market policies. Again, the onset of the pandemic and the resulting economic challenges turned out to be a cut-off point in policy-making concerning this issue area with emphasis shifting from active labour market policy elements to passive and regulatory elements. Then, Hornung, Bandelow and Iskander take stock of health policy. This field is not only important because it is at the core of policies addressing the pandemic. Moreover, the first half of the fourth Merkel cabinet was marked by a number of substantial reforms relating to health or nursing care. Töller studies policy-making concerning environmental issues, particularly those addressing climate change. Induced by the Fridays-for-future movement, this field was one of the most salient ones in both public and political debates, especially in 2019. Still, despite a new law on climate protection and the decision to phase-out coal-based energy production in 2038, the article evaluates the Grand coalition’s reform activities as being mixed. The two final contributions address the international level. The contribution by Oppermann and Brummer studies the fourth Merkel government’s foreign policies. Focusing on transatlantic relations, multilateralism and Germany’s relation to autocratic regimes, it assesses the role of inter- and intra-party contestation and highlights the key role of the main executive actors in foreign policy-making. The article by Heermann, Leuffen and Tigges deals with the European level and studies the ‘Next Generation EU’ programme, which is essentially financed by joint bonds. They examine the Merkel government’s motives for this – prima facie – ‘breach of taboo’ and conclude that regarding higher-level principles, Germany’s position is still driven by continuity and the objective to prevent the EU from disintegration.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Reimut Zohlnhöfer

Reimut Zohlnhöfer is professor of political science at the Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University, Germany. His research interests include comparative political economy, policy processes and German politics. He has published in journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, European Political Science Review, Journal of European Public Policy, Socio-Economic Review and West European Politics.

Fabian Engler

Fabian Engler is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University, Germany. His research interests include comparative political economy, political parties and MPs’ legislative behaviour. He has published in journals such as the British Journal of Industrial Relations, British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of European Public Policy, Parliamentary Affairs and Policy Studies Journal.

Notes

1 This coalition constellation is colloquially called ‘Jamaica coalition’ in Germany because the colours of the CDU/CSU (black), FDP (yellow) and Greens (green) mirror the colours of the flag of Jamaica.

2 This comes along with substantial inner-party concessions between CDU and CSU. Not only did the CDU back the CSU’s demand for (some kind of) a ceiling of the number of refugees per year. Christian democrats did also cede the right to nominate the Minister of the Interior, Construction and Homeland to their Bavarian sister party.

3 This is true although it was controversial between the mainstream parties how necessary the individual measures were, with the FDP taking the most liberal position (see Zohlnhöfer and Engler in this SI).

4 At this point, it would be premature to claim that the debt brake had been given up. Rather, the regulation (article 115 basic law) explicitly allows higher deficits in cases of natural disasters or unusual emergency situations beyond governmental control.

5 Töller (in this SI) argues that without the Fridays for Future movement and the good results of the Greens in the 2019 European elections, the Climate Protection Package would have been less far-reaching. At the same time, however, the Christian democrats substantially delayed and diluted the Climate Package even after the European elections (Zohlnhöfer and Engler in this SI) and were quite dismissive regarding the Fridays for Future demonstrations (Raisch and Zohlnhöfer 2020). Hence, the effect of party competition was probably only quite muted even in environmental policy.