Introduction

The new German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is frequently compared with Margaret Thatcher, especially in the English-language press: the “Iron Mädchen”, as Britain's Independent dubbed her (Elkins). There are enough superficial parallels to invite this comparison. Like Thatcher, Merkel is her country's first female head of government. Like the original “Iron Lady” she is the leader of the right with a strong commitment to roll back the welfare state and reassert the principles of free-market economics. Both were scientists before entering politics. Perhaps more significantly, both gained the leadership of their respective parties from a position of outsiders, and not only because of their genders: This is particularly obvious in the case of Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany and only joined the Christian Democrats less than a year before her elevation to the cabinet of reunited Germany. Both also, it should be added, took the final step up the career ladder by turning against those who had first appointed them to government: Edward Heath and Helmut Kohl.

That is, however, where the analogies must end. Thatcher did not lead a coalition government with Labour; on the contrary, her eleven years in office were marked by the deepest polarisation between left and right in British political history. Conversely, Merkel's record shows none of the ideological consistency of Thatcher: While the latter honed her political skills during her student days as the chair of the Oxford Conservative Association, the former was agitation and propaganda secretary of her university's branch of the communist youth organisation and is not known to have shown any active interest in East Germany's democratic reform movement until the Berlin Wall had actually come down. Both came from entirely different backgrounds, rose to power in entirely different circumstances, and headed very different governments. And yet, even if the journalistic clichés of the two “iron ladies” are recognised as superficial and misleading, comparing and contrasting the significance of the first female leaders of Europe's two most powerful states is an instructive exercise.

Thatcherism was several things at once. It was the ideological and political spearhead of the “neoliberal revolution” in Europe at a time when most continental politicians were fond of condescendingly dismissing “that woman” as a symptom of the “British disease”. It promoted uncompromising Cold War anti-communism—the “Iron Lady” tag originated as the Soviet response to one of her tirades—and a closing of ranks with the USA when most other West European leaders pursued détente and more independence from Washington. It pursued relentless opposition to the further political integration of Western Europe towards what it denounced as “federalism”. But above all, Thatcherism was an open declaration of the resumption of class war after the social democratic corporatism, pursued by all major parties, of the post-war era.

The most remarkable thing about Thatcher, however, is not what she stood for or represented but what she achieved. By 1990, the British trade union movement had been emasculated, the Labour Party split and, in the guise of “New Labour”, effectively converted to her basic philosophy. The progress of the European Union towards monetary and political integration had stalled. Soviet communism had been defeated. Even more fundamentally, the intellectual climate in the entire Western world had been transformed, with social democracy, state-interventionist welfarism, and the academic left in disarray. To be sure, not all of these achievements were the direct or indirect making of the Thatcher regime alone but then political outcomes are never that straightforwardly monocausal. Even if one goes for the opposite extreme and reduces Thatcher to the lucky beneficiary of deep structural changes in the world economy and the weaknesses and failures of her opponents, the fact remains that Thatcherism prefigured and articulated the dominant ideology of the 1990s earlier and more determinedly than any other political current, including Reaganism.

It is likely that Angela Merkel would have got on much better with the Iron Lady than her former mentor Helmut Kohl who, as is well known, loathed Thatcher personally and opposed her programme in all its essentials. Merkel's ideological views, insofar as they can be reliably established, are not dissimilar to Thatcher's in her commitment to far-reaching economic deregulation and deference to US leadership. Yet if her government—and there is little doubt about that—will be one that carries the dismantling of the “social” in the “social market economy” further than Kohl would ever have envisaged, this is not principally because of her own strength and determination but because of the quite extraordinary gutlessness and opportunism of her SPD partners in the Grand Coalition government.

For if the recent record of the SPD leadership shows anything at all, it is their grim determination to stay in government at literally any cost. It does not matter much who the coalition partner is: The Greens, the liberal FDP, the Christian Democrats and even, at least at Land level, the ex-communist PDS will do equally fine as long as they offer the parliamentary votes required for SPD politicians to retain their ministerial salaries and enhance their ministerial pensions. Even the most celebrated political achievement of the Schröder government—keeping Germany out of the Iraq war—should be credited to this opportunism rather than any (nonexistent) political principle: risking a conflict with Washington in order to boost its flagging re-election prospects was preferable to the looming disaster of a return to the opposition benches.1 In Schröder's much-admired attempt last year to repeat his political Houdini act of 2002 with a punishing schedule of campaign rallies, the fighting words and hoarse voice could not disguise that this was entirely a desperate effort to retain the chancellorship, as was confirmed by his bizarre behaviour once the election result was known. He has fitting successors in Franz Müntefering, the new vice-chancellor and welfare and labour minister who resigned the party chairmanship to free himself from any accountability to the party organisation in his new role, and the new SPD chairman Matthias Platzeck, hitherto prime minister of the Brandenburg grand coalition government and an East German scientist in the Merkel mould, albeit of different gender and carrying a different party card.

This is not to say that the present generation of SPD leaders are personally corrupt to any greater or lesser extent than politicians of other parties or of previous generations. We do not know if this is the case and it does not matter in any case, for their opportunism has its roots in the intellectual void at the heart of what was once, long ago, the European showcase of a mass socialist party. This present generation are not even in any significant sense more “right-wing” than the previous generations. But those previous generations—those of Fritz Erler, Carlo Schmid, Herbert Wehner, and Willy Brandt—had had to fight for their convictions against a still firmly entrenched trade-union and parliamentary left deploying the rhetoric of “democratic socialism”, and were acutely aware of the dangers of pushing any break with the labour movement traditions of the party too far. By contrast, the Schröders, Münteferings, Platzecks, Becks, and Gabriels of today are mere technocrats of power, the only skills they have ever honed are those of manipulating the media and balancing out the claims of rival interest groups, and the breadth of their intellectual horizons (as a group at least) is entirely defined by newspaper gossip and ministerial memos. Entirely beholden to the mainstream world view of economic market liberalism, they have in their contempt for the traditions of the party managed to lose, since returning to power in 1998, a third of the SPD's membership, hundreds of thousands of voters, a sizeable layer of activists, and the once so close and secure link with the trade unions. Today's SPD leadership no longer perceives an organic, historically-grown link with its core working-class constituency, which only figures in their calculations as yet another interest group among many. One of chancellor Schröder's favourite maxims was that “there is no left or right economic policy, there's only competent and incompetent economists”. Inside the party, left–right divisions and internal debates have almost ceased: The last two chairmen were elected with near-Soviet sized majorities (95 per cent and 99 per cent respectively), and although the Grand Coalition of the mid-1960s was highly controversial among the membership, with sizeable minorities of party conferences voting against, participation in the Merkel government went through more or less on the nod.

The SPD is the main reason why the project of neoliberal “reform” in Germany today does not need an “Iron Lady”. Thatcher had to break significant resistance to her project in 1970s and 1980s Britain; today's neoliberal “reformers” in Germany do not. The year-long miners’ strike and the split in the Labour Party were only the most dramatic symptoms of the convulsions caused by the Thatcher offensive against social democracy, and without these today's Blairite “New Labour” would not have been possible. By contrast, the SPD has become a “New SPD” almost imperceptibly, with an Oskar Lafontaine, for example, being shed quietly without anything resembling the “Bennite” rebellion of the “old” British Labour left. What in Britain a quarter century ago could only be imposed by means of deep political polarisation and confrontation can today be implemented in Germany by a Grand Coalition of “national unity”,2 with leading social democrats often taking more radically neoliberal positions than their Christian-democrat partners.

How was this possible? An entire book could, and certainly should, be written about the almost silent death of social-democratic Germany. Some important differences with Britain immediately spring to mind: in contrast to the Labour Party, for example, which remained the focus of political activity for most of the 1960s generation of radicals who then linked up with trade union activists to constitute the Bennite Left of the 1970s and 1980s, the same radicals in Germany largely bypassed the SPD—then as now the junior partner in a Grand Coalition government—and went from “extra-parliamentary opposition” to parliamentary competition with the SPD in the shape of the Greens. German social democracy thus lost an entire generation of those entering politics for more than personal self-advancement, a loss dramatically reflected in the quality of the SPD cadre today. It is a loss that has been repeated after reunification when, contrary to initial expectations, the social democrats proved unable to regain their historic hegemony in their former east German heartlands where they continue to be outflanked on the left by the PDS.

Above all, however, there has been the impact of 1989 on the political and intellectual climate. This has not been exclusive to Germany, of course, with the leftist intelligentsia almost everywhere rushing to distance themselves from a “failed socialist experiment” into the arms of a triumphant liberalism and its postmodernist or poststructuralist stalking-horse, but it has been particularly devastating in postunification Germany. Here, the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War produced not only an identity crisis for the left but also a crisis of national identity. Anxious to dispel fears of renewed German hegemonic ambitions, the intellectual establishment—including the intellectual left, which, with Jürgen Habermas, had long celebrated the Westernisation of the Federal Republic as “the great intellectual achievement of the post-war era” (Habermas 1983)—enthusiastically embraced globalisation and a European Union increasingly dedicated to neoliberal deregulation.

As one leading former SPD politician writes:

The critical intelligentsia now tends to define the concept of “reforms” in the same way as big business and the conservatives: less social security, more private provision; less public intervention, more privatisation and deregulation. “Abandoning old concepts” is the order of the day. The critical intellectuals, including those on the left, increasingly conforms to right-wing economic philosophy. (Müller)3

From the Spiegel to the Zeit, from the Frankfurter Rundschau to the TAZ, the complaint that the German Reformstau (reform backlog) is due to special interest groups such as—above all, of course—the trade unions, the churches (deregulation of shopping hours), local government, and so on has become the received wisdom of the editorials. Breaking this resistance is the real purpose of Merkel's Grand Coalition, the hope being that, with both major parties represented in government, hot potatoes such as “health reform” will not become the object of political polarisation and be able to be pushed through the complex federal legislation procedures. It is her very blandness, her lack of ideological baggage, her origins from outside the traditional power elites of the Bonn Republic that make Angela Merkel much better suited to head such a government than an ideology-driven “Iron Lady” from the Thatcher mould. And in this role, Merkel is ideally complemented by the new SPD chairman.

Much has been written recently about the rise of Merkel and Platzeck. “Now we are governed by Ossis”, headlined Die Zeit (“Jetzt regieren uns die Ossis”), and quotes him as saying that “we always argue over how the little we have can be distributed differently rather than how about how more can be produced”. A loyal apologist for Schröder's controversial labour market and welfare reforms, Platzeck shares with Merkel the Ossi's ability to present himself as an outsider able to transcend traditional political and ideological divisions. As leaders of the two major German political parties, their roles will be to “keep politics out of politics”, to sell neoliberalism as the commonsense of our times, to prevent traditional left–right divisions from erupting within the Grand Coalition and endangering the “reform” project.

Much of this issue is taken up by Gareth Dale's discussion of attempts to theorise the transition process in the former GDR in a comparative perspective. He argues that the “collapse” of SED rule was less of a collapse than widely believed, and more of an “orderly retreat” which enabled many individual members of the old communist elite to find new roles in postunification Germany. The Merkels and the Platzecks, of course, were not members of that elite any more than they were dissidents opposing the SED from principled political positions, certainly not before 1989. They represent those who managed to build for themselves good careers in the GDR while keeping their distance from the ruling politics, functioning effectively within ideological parameters set by others, not questioning but implementing—precisely the kind of skills demanded in their present, elevated positions in the new Germany.

Notes

¹ We now know, of course, that behind the scenes the Schröder government reassured the US by supporting its attack on Baghdad in many other ways. (See “BND-Verstrickungen im Irak-Krieg”.)

² The coalition treaty between the CDU/CSU is entitled “Together for Germany” (Gemeinsam für Deutschland).

³ Müller's website at http://www.nachdenkseiten.de is an excellent source for critical material on the neoliberal manipulation of German public debate.