The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, once published an autobiographical little book entitled “If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It”. The title might serve as an epigraph for the outcome of this year's German federal elections: the voters have spoken, but government business will continue pretty much as usual. For all the media excitement over the prolonged aftermath of the elections—the public haggling and posturing over the chancellorship and the distribution of ministerial posts—should not be allowed to distract from the fundamental contradiction of the whole affair: a clear verdict against the social and economic policies pursued by the old government will be followed by a government committed to much the same policies, only in a stronger form and with a much larger majority. Welcome to the strange world of parliamentary democracy!
In terms of conventional political analysis, the only possible interpretation of the election result is that it was a resounding defeat of the Right. Only a few months ago, the pundits were unanimous in predicting a landslide victory for a Christian Democrat-Liberal coalition committed to far-reaching neoliberal deregulation of the German economy, the dismantling of key elements of the welfare state, and a closer alliance with the US and Britain. This was not just wishful thinking on the part of those pundits: opinion polls seemed to confirm a huge lead for Angela Merkel's right-wing project. However, as the results came in on 18 September, it soon became evident that exactly the opposite was taking shape: the CDU/CSU and their FDP allies were unable to form a majority government, and the German electorate had clearly swung to the left rather than the right.
Conventional political analysis tells us that parliamentary elections are decisions about the general direction of politics, which in most countries is a question of left versus right. In these terms, the unambiguous winner of the federal elections was the German left. The social democrats, the Greens, and the PDS/Linkspartei could comfortably form a majority coalition. To be sure, there are important differences between them. The remarkable success of the PDS/Linkspartei—the only true winner with a popular vote almost twice as large as it had been three years ago—was largely due to the party tapping into the widespread discontent among rank-and-file social democrats and trade unionists with the economic reforms of the Schröder government. However, the dramatic recovery of the SPD's vote during the final weeks of the campaign was itself due not to a surge of support for those reforms—which remained deeply unpopular among the SPD voters—but the fear that a government of the right would go much further: all the last-minute election rhetoric of Schröder and Müntefering highlighted the threat of Merkel's agenda and their own commitment to maintaining social justice and the welfare state. Taken as a whole then, the election as a referendum on social and economic policy came up with as clear a verdict against the neoliberal agenda as one could expect, with the main polarisation being a classical left–right one.
Conventional political analysis, however, counts for little these days. The basic direction of social and economic policy is no longer a matter that is left to the vagaries of politics and elections. “Responsible” government is no longer responsive government but “good economic governance” in tune with the expert consensus on the need for market competition, privatisation, and deregulation. For the member states of the European Union, and in particular those who have signed up to the Stability Pact and the Euro, many of the key levers of social and economic policy have already been removed from the reach of direct democratic control. Public opinion is massaged with constant media propaganda about the alleged need to cut taxes, slim down welfare budgets, reduce labour costs, and deregulate markets to such a saturation level that the priority of competitiveness over all other public values becomes the unquestionable common sense of our age. Only political parties which fully subscribe to this orthodoxy are considered what the Germans call regierungsfähig—that is, to be trusted with participation in government. The farcical aftermath of the September elections was entirely the result of this narrow dogmatism rather than the voting itself.
The media, of course, blamed the electorate which had “made Germany ungovernable”, “failed to reach a verdict”, and so on. There was even talk of holding another election. Yet there was nothing inherently complicated or difficult about the outcome which boiled down to a simple question: which conclusion would the social democrats draw from the result? The SPD held the key to forming a majority government and could do so either on the left, in an alliance with the Greens and the PDS/Linkspartei, or in a Grand Coalition with the CDU/CSU. The former would require an abandoning of the “economic reform” project of the Schröder government, the latter spell trouble with the unions and the SPD's membership. There was never really any doubt as to which of the two alternatives the SPD leadership would choose: Schröder's posturing on election night and the preposterous claims to the chancellorship were merely a smokescreen for the inevitability of the eventual outcome. Nothing if not regierungsfähig, the SPD knew that “economic reform” had to be continued, and could only be continued in a pact with the defeated Right. They were not going to let democracy interfere with the neoliberal imperative. Or even their own self-interest as a political party: over the last few decades, the SPD has lost a third of its membership and a quarter of its electorate. Joining a Grand Coalition with the Christian Democrats is likely to alienate its remaining activists and voters, and lead to more defections, especially with the Greens and the PDS/Linkspartei in opposition.
Because of the election, this issue of Debatte is very much focused on recent developments in Germany. Ian King gives an overview of the election campaign, the result, and the immediate aftermath. Christian Schweiger examines the survival chances of the German model of the “social market economy” in a world of neoliberal deregulation, suggesting that there are signs of a crisis of the Anglo-Saxon model and that therefore the much maligned Modell Deutschland could yet turn out to be the more successful in the long run. Stephen Lamb gives a very personal but telling account of the cultural undercurrents swirling around today's Germany, while Anna Saunders takes us back to the GDR of the 1980s in her study of the attitude of young East Germans to the Volksarmee and compulsory military service. The issue is rounded off by John Milfull's re-examination of the causes of the sudden collapse of communism and Dieter K. Buse's bibliographical essay on the Weimar Republic.