Who to vote for in the German election?
German voters go to the polls on Sunday
Dear Reader,
On Sunday, I will get to vote in a German election for the very first time. A ‘sleeper citizen’ up until 2019, I never got round to making use of my birth right as the son of generations of good Germans (don’t look to closely, I think we were actually Dutch) until Brexit came along.
Voting in Germany is an altogether different proposition to voting in the UK. There is so much choice!
Perhaps you are voting for the first time, too. Here are a few pointers.
Die Linke
Fact sheet: Founded in 1989 as successor party to East German SED; far-left; last election result - 9.2 percent; last time in government - never.
Key pledges:
National minimum wage of €13/hour
Retirement age down to 65
Wealth tax on assets over one million euros
National rent cap
How has campaigning gone? The party hierarchy are in for a nervous night on Sunday. Polling is showing them on six percent, which would already represent a miserable return. But it could get even worse. A result just a little worse than polls are predicting and they won’t even make it over the so-called five percent hurdle and thus will be booted out of the Bundestag altogether.
What’s gone wrong? On the face of it, it’s surprising that Die Linke are struggling so badly. The central issue that turned so many voters off the Social Democrats - Gerhard Schröder’s de-unionization of parts of the labour market - remains unresolved. Germany might have had record low unemployment over the past decade but it also has one of the largest low-wage sectors in Europe - one in five of all workers, according to the Bertelsmann Institute.
That should be a huge pool of discontented voters for Die Linke, who want to roll back Schröder’s Agenda 2010.
It’s not that simple though. Many of these low-wage workers are in the east and used to vote for Die Linke. But since the refugee crisis many have migrated to the AfD. As for low-wage workers in the west, many of them have no voice in German democracy. Foreigners are more than twice as likely as Germans to be found working in the low-wage sector.
Then there’s the dirty civil war that’s split the party between two camps who represent different voter bases.
At the last election the party were led at the national level by Katja Kipping - the voice of young urban left-wingers - and by Sahra Wagenknecht in the Bundestag, the voice of the traditional working class. Both were highly capable politicians. The only problem was that they loathed each other and made no secret of it.
Both women eventually stepped back from the lime light, exhausted by the fight. The loss of Wagenknecht from the frontline has been most damaging. She repeatedly warned that working class voters were being turned off by a focus on climate change, gender-sensitive language and refugees. These same voters have since moved to the AfD, a party whose tax proposals would do a lot for the rich but not much for the poor.
Have they done anything well? The party are being led into the election by a Spitzenduo of veteran Bundestag speaker Dietmar Bartsch and new party chairwoman Janine Wissler. Bartsch gets dominated too easily on TV debates. Wissler is an unknown quantity.
Summary: Their supporters say that their tax regime would swell the state coffers with tens of billions of euros of extra revenue.
The Mittelstand, the backbone of Germany’s economy, are already coming out in cold sweats at the thought of the Linke joining a left-wing government. Family-run companies say a planned wealth tax would mean they would have to sell off stakes in their businesses in order to survive.
For the other left-wing parties, the main stumbling block is the Linke’s attitude to NATO and Russia. They want an immediate end to sanctions on Moscow, claiming the west is needlessly antagonizing the Kremlin.
The Greens
Fact sheet: founded in 1980 by environmentalists, feminists and anti-nuclear campaigners; centre-left; last election result - 8.9 percent; last time in government - 2002-2005.
Key pledges
Carbon neutrality by 2040
End to coal power production by 2030
Six percent increase in top tax rate (salaries over half a million)
50 percent increase in unemployment benefit
How has campaigning gone? A matter of perspective. Some analysts will tell you that the Greens never really had a chance, despite what early polling suggested. The environmentalists have enjoyed strong support in polls before, but when it comes to people putting a cross on the ballot paper, more prosaic concerns such as job security come to the fore.
They are on course to win 16 percent of the vote, which is close to double their share from last time around. At the same time, the party hierarchy will feel that this is a lost chance. They briefly led in polling in May and were up against a weak CDU leader and an uninspiring SPD candidate, who was widely written off until an unexpected turnaround in August.
What’s gone wrong? As I wrote in my Tuesday newsletter, no party incorporates the zeitgeist of modern Germany better than the Greens. Three summers of drought in a row between 2018 and 2020 propelled their central theme to the top of the news agenda. This year though - a cold and wet one - the weather didn’t really play ball.
They were also led into the campaign by the weaker and less experienced member of their leadership duo. Annalena Baerbock’s campaigning woes have been well documented and don’t need repeating here. But just on the level of what US policy advisors would call optics, Robert Habeck would have been the better choice. Or, as said US policy advisor would probably pitch it: “men want to be him and women want to be with him.”
Still, Green policies mean they struggle to break out of their urban fortresses.
Rural communities know that Green governance would mean a rapid expansion of the wind parks that have been encircling their villages. In the countryside they also know that the cost of transport would go up with the Greens. Habeck has said that he wants petrol to become more expensive in order to discourage people from driving.
For the working classes, the subsidies that were brought in under the last SPD-Green government for renewables have made their electricity bills the most expensive in Europe.
The Greens promise tax relief to the poor, but this obviously isn’t cutting through.
Have they done anything well? The CDU clearly wanted the Greens to be their main competitor, concluding that they posed less of a threat than the SPD. They focused most of their attacks on the environmentalists early in the campaign while ignoring the SPD. To the Greens credit, they largely avoided the sort of policy own-goals that the conservatives could use to portray them as a Verbotspartei.
Habeck and Baerbock have also kept their distance from the loony fringe of the party. They give the impression that they have done serious economic analysis of their policy goals.
Summary: the Greens will be in an influential position after the election and are almost guaranteed to be part of the next government. They’ll get their pick of key ministries.
The SPD
Fact sheet: Founded in 1890, Germany’s grand old party; centre-left; last election result - 20.5 percent; currently in government.
Key pledges
Minimum wage raised to €12/hour
Tying care sector to graded pay structure
High-speed broadband in every German home
Reform of welfare system with more generous payments and less sanctions
How has campaigning gone? Amazingly well. Perhaps the big spending packages of the pandemic have given Germans a taste for debt-financed politics. Perhaps the cover photo on the Süddeustche Zeitung magazine of SPD candidate Olaf Scholz doing the Merkel-Raute convinced people he was the natural heir to the great leader. Or perhaps that snappy ad campaign, with a black-and-white Scholz on a red back background under the statement ‘Chancellor for Germany’, did it.
Let’s face it. No one has a clue how the dry-as-dust Finance Minister turned around his party’s polling figures and seems to have set them on course for victory.
What went right? Scholz came into the campaign in third place but was up against two weak and ultimately unpopular candidates. He didn’t do much wrong, but if he’d been up against Merkel there was only ever going to be one winner.
The party might have also got the balance right by pairing a more left-wing manifesto with a centrist candidate. Scholz isn’t actually party leader - he was beaten by a left-wing duo in 2019. The manifesto has their fingerprints on it, largely disowning Schröder’s labour market reforms, which Scholz was instrumental in constructing.
In the TV debates I’ve seen, journalists have been fairly uncritical of this paradox in his candidacy. Does he really plan to overturn the reforms he saw as necessary two decades ago (and which ushered in two decades of jobs growth)? We are still in the dark on that one.
Did they do anything wrong? Scholz’s only misstep was a radio interview in which he called people who’ve been vaccinated “guinea pigs.” This was the dry northerner attempting a joke. He didn’t make that mistake again.
Summary: Scholz is not a man of big vision. Like Merkel, he is a technocrat. Arguably, the EU needs a unifying and charismatic German leader with the drive to take the stalling project beyond the schisms between east and west. Scholz is not that man.
Any government he forms, which will almost certainly include the Greens, will have a parochial feel to it, concerning itself mainly with domestic carbon reduction targets, while fiddling around at the edges of the job market.
The FDP
Fact sheet: Founded in 1948 as a liberal party; centre-right; last election result - 10.7 percent; last in government - 2013.
Key pledges
Reduction of corporate tax level to 25 percent
Tax cuts for low and mid-level salaries
€2.5 billion additional education budget
Legalisation of cannabis
How did campaigning go? After suffering an identity crisis in recent years, the Free Democrats have found their soul again during the pandemic.
The government’s most articulate critics, they called for targeted use of testing in care homes and air filters in schools, while decrying the manner in which individual liberty was trodden under foot. Their criticism slowly hit home with the electorate; they’ve doubled their polling figures to around 12 percent since the start of the year.
What did they get right? The FDP are an easy party to understand. The closest thing Germany has to libertarianism, they essentially oppose most state intervention.
In Christian Lindner they have one of the most talented orators on the front benches.
Deputy leader Wolfgang Kubicki is also a high-profile figure. A veteran of north German politics, he candidly admits to having broken lowdown rules by drinking in illegal speakeasies. Something of an incorrigible old dog, he once said he would never run for the Bundestag because Berlin would turn him into “a boozer and a philanderer.”
Summary: The party sees their tax-cut pledges as securing the future of Germany’s famed Mittelstand, which they say faces losing its competitive advantage on global markets if a left-wing coalition implements a new wealth tax.
Several economic institutes have calculated that the FDP’s plans for tax relief would leave a shortfall of tens of billions of euros in the federal budget. As they also plan costly investment in digital infrastructure, it is not exactly clear where that money would come from.
Recent comments hint at the fact that Lindner could be ready to trick his way around the Schuldenbremse - the constitutional brake on debt levels - in a traffic light coalition with the SPD and Greens.
They are the only party prepared to propose a change to the age of retirement. They want to create a flexible retirement model between the ages of 60 and 70, based on the Swedish system.
The CDU
Fact sheet: Founded 1949; conservative; last election result - 32.9 percent; currently in government.
Key pledges:
A return to a balanced budget after the Covid crisis
No tax increases; abolishment of solidarity tax for east Germany
More police and more CCTV surveillance in public spaces
Sticking to tax benefits for married couples
How has campaigning gone? It was a mess even before the starter pistol was fired. The party barely survived a hostile take over attempt by the Bavarian CSU and their ambitious leader Markus Söder. The CDU are now on course to suffer their worst ever result, although polls are still close enough that Sunday could throw up a surprise.
What went wrong? Armin Laschet was a wounded man coming into the campaign after a series of inner-party power struggles. Open season was declared on social media channels after an unfortunate picture of him cracking a joke during a ceremony for flood victims went viral. (As he and Scholz now know, jokes are fehl am Platz in German politics.)
But it wasn’t just a personality issue. The CDU campaign has felt stale, which is perhaps an inevitable consequence of so many years in power.
The conservatives were the last party to publish their manifesto, which probably wasn’t a coincidence.
Throughout the Merkel years the CDU followed a strategy of “asymmetric demobilisation” which basically involved pinching the best ideas from their opponents' manifestos in the hope that their core voters wouldn’t bother to turn out to vote.
Voter participation dropped, but the strategy worked.
Their latest manifesto reads like a smorgasbord of watered-down ideas they found in other manifestos. It is vague on detail and mainly just relies on platitudes about securing Wohlstand while getting ready for the challenges of the coming decades.
Laschet’s ace in the hole was introducing a Zukunftsteam in the last weeks of campaigning. But no one had every heard of any of them nor knew what they stood for. One photo shoot later and they were soon forgotten.
According to a profile in Spiegel, Laschet is also often late for campaign appointments because he makes regular roadside stops to smoke a cigarillo.
Summary: The CDU, long a vehicle for Merkel’s ill-defined centrists reign, are facing four years in the opposition. Perhaps they can use it to rediscover what they stand for.
The AfD
Fact sheet: Founded in 2013; far-right; last election result - 12.6 percent; last in government - never.
Key pledges:
German exit from EU
Strict limits set on refugee arrivals and tight border controls
Simplification of tax system and reduction of VAT level
Reintroduction of the Deutschmark
How has campaigning gone? The AfD have been largely absent from the public debate besides a few obligatory invites from (the hated) public broadcasters. Their campaign posters have focused on law and order and migration: they’re likely to score a par with eleven percent of the vote representing a slight drop on their vote count last time around.
What went right? Hard to say as they’ve been so invisible. Their focus on culture war issues clearly goes down well in the east of the country, particularly.
What went wrong? Like the Linke on the left, the AfD are riven by internal strife. Reizfigur in their party is Björn Höcke, party leader in Thuringia and allegedly a man with neo-Nazi leanings. More moderate voices in the party have tried to sideline him but with little success. It is unclear the extent to which these arguments affect support for the populist group.
Unless something dramatic happens, like an orchestrated series of terror attacks, or a new wave of refugee arrivals, it would seem unlikely that the party can grown much beyond their current support. Even a financial crisis within the EU is unlikely to leave them as winners as their brand has become so toxic.
Summary: The AfD have no chance of entering government and a vote for them is at best a protest for people angry about the direction of travel of political power to Brussels and recent immigration policies.