George Bush Sr. learned the hard way that winning a war is not enough to win an election. Bill Clinton defeated him in 1992 because he understood what Bush Sr. did not, that the economy is first and foremost where politics happen in the US. Political issues, unless they are of the gravest importance, are not the prime concern for Americans.
“It’s the economy, stupid!” is a lesson that German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is now learning the equally hard way. He had hoped that his high-profile opposition to US policy on Iraq which saved him from defeat in last September federal elections would again give victory his Social Democrat Party (SPD) in Sunday’s state elections in Lower Saxony and Hesse. Instead, his party has been administered one of its most crushing blows and a personal one for him too. Lower Saxony is his own home territory; he won the elections there in 1998 before going on to become federal chancellor.
People voted in their droves against the SPD for one overriding reason: they do not trust him to deliver on the economy. For them, like the Americans, that is the big issue, not foreign politics. He will no doubt take comfort from fact that for some three years prior to last September’s vote, the SPD saw its support plummet in state election after state election yet still managed to win the federal contest, if only just. His barbed comment when casting his own vote on Sunday that this was, after all, not an election to the federal parliament suggests that he may do just that. But it would be an act of the grossest self-delusion. The big difference between last September and now is that the scale of Germany’s economic malaise can no longer be avoided. With spiraling unemployment, rising taxes, budget deficits publicly condemned by the EU and threatened strikes by nurses, fire-fighters and other public sector workers, Germans see themselves heading for unrelenting hard times — and as far as they are concerned, it is all Schroeder’s fault.
Ironically, with the opposition Christian Democrats now firmly in control of the upper house of the German Parliament, it will be easier for him to force through the package of austerity measures and tax hikes which are needed if the deficit is to be reduced but which the German public and members of his own party so firmly dislike. As business-friendly policies, the Christian Democrats cannot afford not to support them. That may help the economy, although it will not help his popularity.
The fact that Germans were unmoved by his anti-war message begs the question whether he will now start to tone it down. It is possible; there are plenty of Germans worried about the long-term effects, particularly the economic and commercial effects, of antagonizing the US. But the more likely scenario is that he will beat the Iraqi drum even louder. It is the only drum he has. Even if they were insufficiently motivated by it, it is genuinely popular with most Germans.
But however much he beats it, it will not help him at home. International issues do not win elections. What electors want, be they American, German or anyone else, is economic competence. Schroeder is going to have to perform miracles if he is to convince Germans that he has that ability.
