LONDON, 7 September 2005 — How full of hope the leaders were. How confident they all seemed. And what an imposing panel of political achievement they made: The president of the United States, the prime ministers of Britain, Italy and the Netherlands, and the recently elected German chancellor. The place was Washington, the year 1999, the topic for discussion progressive governance. The 21st century lay stretched out invitingly before the leaders, theirs to command. History was going their way. It seemed as though the era of the center-left had arrived.
Six years on, how distant it all seems. Of the five who met in Washington that day to discuss how the center-left could be the masters of the new century, soon only Tony Blair will remain. Massimo D’Alema was the first to taste defeat. Bill Clinton was next. Wim Kok lasted until 2002. In two weeks’ time, when Germany becomes the 20th of the 25 EU nations with a center-right government, Gerhard Schroeder will be history too.
Schroeder’s likely defeat on Sept. 18 will be a milestone not just for Germany but for social democracy. For half a century, his SPD was the party by which all other parties of the center-left measured themselves. It was the model of how a non-Marxist party of the left could stand for both social justice and the mixed economy — and win elections too. Social democrats came from all over the world, Britain included, to see how the SPD did it. But if the European left once learned from the SPD’s successes, now they must prepare to learn from its defeats too. The collapse of Schroeder’s Red-Green coalition this year was one of the most ignominious events in its history. With a clear parliamentary majority and more than a year of its mandate remaining, Schroeder in effect threw in his hand, calling an election that he seemed certain to lose. More than anything, it was an admission of bankruptcy, a confession that the once-mighty SPD had nothing left to offerEurope’s largest and most important nation.
The SPD’s central failure has been its inability to provide a coherent social-market-based answer to the problems posed for the nation state by globalization. There are many reasons behind this failure, some only too understandable. No country in Europe, after all, has had to absorb so many economic, political and cultural shocks as Germany in the aftermath of its 1990 reunification. The rest of Europe still underestimates the scale of this fantastic effort.
Nevertheless, too much of the SPD remains too comfortable with a vision of Germany, and of Europe, that is too heavily defined by the Cold War. German Social Democrats cling to a social and economic model that made great sense — and was economically sustainable — as long as the Berlin Wall existed. But the collapse of communism did not just make a united Germany possible. It also unleashed the hugely dynamic era of capitalist globalization in which we all now live. Billions of people, mainly in Asia, will be the beneficiaries, as the EU-China spat exemplifies. The European welfare model has had to adapt to this reality or die.
Like all the rest of us, the SPD is still struggling to come to terms with the post-1989 world. It is completely unfair to caricature the SPD — as too many New Labour comments do, for instance — as a political dinosaur addicted to statist solutions. Ignorant remarks of that kind conflate Germany with France (where there is a real problem), underestimate the deep social-market roots of modern Germany, exaggerate the stability of the British model and ignore the very real efforts made by the SPD.
For the SPD has not failed entirely for want of trying. With a German unemployment rate of 11 percent and nearly 5 million Germans out of work, Schroeder’s government had little choice but to reform the labor market and to stimulate growth. But the measures it used the Agenda 2010 economic strategy and the Hartz labor reforms — have been both too weak and too strong: Too weak because the reforms came too late to bear much fruit before the election, and too strong because so many Germans opposed them.
Central to Schroeder’s defeat has been a spectacular personal failure of leadership. If you are going to challenge your party, it is essential to win — as Blair did over clause four — not to lose, as Schroeder has in effect done. The verdict on Schroeder therefore can only be a severe one.
Having been brave enough to confront his party with the need for reform, Schroeder funked the consequences. In the EU, moreover, he has allowed German interests to be increasingly hijacked by Jacques Chirac’s “multipolar” delusions. The abjectness of Schroeder’s capitulations has been shocking. In the end he has been a disaster.
In a proportional representation system such as Germany’s, moreover, the penalties for such a defeat are heavy. Having allowed the Greens to separate in the 1970s, the SPD has now allowed a socialist breakaway, the backward-looking Links-partei (the Left party). There is absolutely no silver lining to this. Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come, the Linkspartei’s election poster asserts. Wrong again, comrades. The truth is that nothing is more useless than an idea whose time has passed.
The upshot is that the German left will emerge from this election weaker and more divided than ever. It is hard not to feel some sentimental regret at the departure from government of the Greens and, in particular, of their pre-eminent figure Joschka Fischer — intolerable to work for, by all accounts, but an emblematic figure of late 20th-century German progressivism all the same. But if the heart says it is sad, the head says it is the end of the story. The Greens are cycling into history.
Six years after embracing Schroeder, British ministers are now rooting for Angela Merkel. In many respects, London misleads itself about the possibilities. If Britain were more seriously engaged it might be different. Nevertheless Labour is right to support her. Not that Merkel is the answer to Germany’s or the EU’s problems. She isn’t. But she is a less bad answer than Schroeder. She offers some prospect, at least until the CDU starts losing Lander elections, of a government that will stick with the reform agenda while remaining true to inclusive social-market principles and spurning France’s desire for anti-American grandstanding. A Merkel government will be good for Europe. It is the ultimate indictment of the German left that one finds oneself saying such things with such confidence.
