Pessimism and optimism on Germany after its election

Its tumultuous vote might just do the country more good than harm

WONDERING what to make of the German election? Really, it is simple. You just need to decide if you are a pessimist or an optimist.

Germany for pessimists

The far-right Alternative for Germany, a party with real neo-Nazis in, is on track for 93 seats. It might even come first in the state of Saxony, where its lead candidate is a man who rails against "mixed peoples" and Germany’s "cult of guilt" about the Holocaust. In the Bundestag the party will enjoy resources and prominence: hundreds of staff members, allocated speaking time under the glass dome of the Reichstag building and seats on prime-time political talk shows from where it can spread its messages and thus advance further. It is only a matter of time until it joins a coalition at state level. The shouty "Elephant Round" (a post-election TV discussion between the party leaders, pictured above) was the overture to a new period of political discord in a once-harmonious country.

Meanwhile the two main parties that have underpinned Germany’s reputation for centrist sensibleness—the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD)—are on their lowest combined vote share since the war. The SPD having ruled out a new "grand coalition" with her, a weakened Angela Merkel must now form a highly wobbly and possibly dysfunctional "Jamaica" coalition with the right-liberal FDP and the environmentalist Greens, who have spent much of the past few weeks at each other’s throats.

The Christian Social Union, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, seems to have ended its pre-election ceasefire and is now grumpier then ever, having lost about a quarter of its support ahead of a crucial state election in Bavaria next year. It is demanding that Mrs Merkel secure her right flank. Meanwhile with the somewhat Eurosceptic FDP in the finance ministry, optimistic talk of a new Franco-German axis can go out the window.

Germany is launched into a period of new political instability and just at the point when other problems are starting to grow. The mighty car industry is in crisis. The baby boomer bulge is about to retire. The infrastructure is deteriorating. Demands on Germany to do more for international security are growing. The work of integrating the over 1m people who arrived since Mrs Merkel conspicuously kept the country's doors open two years ago is still young. Dark clouds are gathering over the country. 

Germany for optimists

Germany has generously taken in over 1m people in two years. There was bound to be a reaction, not least given the way Mrs Merkel handled the decision: taking it at the last minute, without much consultation and without "rolling the pitch" of public opinion first. Meanwhile she made basic, corrigible mistakes during her election campaign. This was intellectually lazy, offering platitudes (for a Germany in which we live well and gladly) rather than engaging in difficult debates. She underestimated voters’ discernment and paid a fair price, nonetheless doing just fractionally worse than in her first two successful bids for the chancellory, in 2005 and 2009.

In any case, the AfD’s performance—high at 13% but short of private pre-election predictions of 15% or more—was part of a broader story: the rise of smaller parties tapping into voter restlessness after 12 years of Mrs Merkel, during eight of which she has helmed flabby grand-coalitions with the SPD. In many respects this fragmentation is a fair response to a tired and platitudinous political establishment summed up by the dismal TV debate between Mrs Merkel and Martin Schulz, her SPD rival—which compared unfavourably with a more substantive debate at the small parties’ encounter two days later.

The result could even reinvigorate German democracy. The SPD is returning to opposition, where Mr Schulz’s natural pugilism will come into its own and, together with the modernising energies of figures like Manuela Schwesig, could enable the party to go into the post-Merkel election in 2021 revived and newly competitive. In the meantime it may well outshine the chaotic and infighting-ridden AfD, which will be forced by the rigours of the legislature to alienate parts of its sprawling and disjointed electoral coalition ("the relationship between the AfD and its voters is weak", notes Cas Mudde, an authority on populism). New powers and resources might give the AfD's high command more things to fight about. And there is such a thing as bad publicity.

Meanwhile the Jamaica coalition Mrs Merkel must now build could constructively shake up Germany’s sleepy consensus: the Greens pushing drastic and welcome progress towards electric cars and renewable energy and the FDP driving advances on long-neglected subjects like red-tape reduction and digitalisation. Many of the differences between the Greens and FDP were exaggerated for the election (the leading figures of the two parties, Cem Özdemir and Christian Lindner, address each other with "du", or the informal pronoun; they get on, in other words). And anyway, a bit of conflict in the next government may do the country more good than harm, blowing away the cobwebs.

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The truth, of course, lies somewhere between pessimism and optimism. But to which is it closer? That will take some digestion. But my instinct is that the "Germany for optimists" is the more accurate. The election result is unsettling on several fronts, deeply so where the AfD is concerned. But much of Germany’s pre-election tranquility was illusory anyway. The anger had been building for years; the AfD’s success has just brought it to the surface, where perhaps it can even be understood and addressed. Questions that were going unanswered, tensions that were going unconfronted, now brook no oversight.