ANGELA Merkel’s rise to the German chancellorship has been anything but inevitable. She has had everything against her. She is a woman in a country which is very conservative when it comes to women in positions of power; she is an East German in a country where the majority of the population are, to put it mildly, less than enthusiastic about East Germans; she has enemies in her own party who find her reform agenda too right wing; and despite her CDU/CSU party emerging as the largest force in Parliament after last month’s elections, it was the shallowest of victories over the Social Democrats. Indeed, when looked at in historic terms, the CDU/CSU actually took its lowest number of votes ever. Fortunately, with the SPD faring even worse, no one is looking at it that way.
The fact is that, despite winning the thinnest of leads compared to what had been predicted, despite the SPD’s attempt to use this in the coalition negotiations, implying that in a sense she had somehow lost the election and therefore did not deserve the chancellorship, there was never any doubt that she would be the new chancellor. The election may have delivered confused massages, but one message was clear — a rejection of outgoing Chancellor Schroeder’s economic policies. Merkel may not have won but Schroeder certainly lost.
There was the other reason why there was no chance of him remaining in office. He called the election early because the SPD had lost its majority in the upper house, the Bundesrat, to the CDU and could not get policies approved there. That situation did not change with the election. If a coalition was the only workable government that the inconclusive election results would permit, it has to include the CDU if government bills are to be passed; it did not necessarily have to include the SPD.
That gave Merkel and the CDU the edge in their negotiations. She wanted the chancellorship — and so she got it. But for those other reasons — the odds stacked against her as an easterner and a woman — she deserves the post; not least also because she took a tired, discredited and visionless party, and remolded it, gave it appeal and sold it to an electorate that had been suspicious of it.
However, if Germany now has a workable government, does that government have any workable policies? That is the worry. Germany desperately needs economic and fiscal reform. The economy is not yet in major crisis, but it is drifting dangerously; stagnation is looming. Growth is required — growth that delivers jobs.
Merkel’s liberalizing policies would do that, but at the expense of social spending — and that the Social Democrats are unlikely to tolerate; they have the power to block her if they wish. Whether or not she can browbeat them into submission and prove herself a German Margaret Thatcher remains to be seen. Maybe she can; she has already managed to sideline the opponents within her own party.
