If anyone wanted evidence that we are not in the mental and political world of the interwar Great Depression, the German election result and its outcome — a stable government of the center-right — should be a clincher. In interwar Germany, the Depression destroyed German democracy and led to the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists; in today’s Germany, the most severe economic crisis since World War II produced the re-election of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Conventional wisdom claims that incumbent parties and politicians are punished by voters in times of economic distress. Throughout the campaign there was never any doubt about the position or popularity of Merkel.
The interwar Depression led to the disintegration of liberal economic and political values. In Germany this year, not only was there was no swing to political extremism of the right, there was no sign of any support for a radical right.
In the elections for regional parliaments, the small radical right parties (which have never been a feature of national politics) simply disappeared.
The real victor of the campaign, with a vote that jumped up to 14.5 percent and a position in parliament that will determine the shape of the new coalition government, was the heir of classic German liberalism, the Free Democratic Party.
It campaigned on a promise of tax reduction and of deregulation in order to stimulate the economic growth that Germany needs to get out of the economic crisis.
The real losers of the election were the Social Democrats, with a drop in support of 11 percent that is without precedent in the very stable history of German electoral behavior.
Some on the left claim that the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) catastrophic result was the product of too close an engagement with liberalism and deregulation.
According to this view, the party is now paying the price for former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s successful attempts at economic reform in the early 2000s.
It seems more likely that the party was punished for its lackluster electoral campaign and for the negativity with which it tried to present the outcome of the election (the center-right coalition) as a threat to social peace in Germany.
In the interwar crisis of democracy, participation in elections surged as voters tried to protest against what the radical parties denounced as “the system.”
In Germany this year, electoral participation fell by 5 percent, to 72.5 percent. Those voters who were disillusioned by politics simply thought that there was no point in voting.
The only point in common with the interwar results seems to be that economic crisis then as now strengthened the radical left. But what a difference! Then there was a powerful communist party, closely aligned with the interests and policies of the Soviet Union.
Now the party of protest is unambiguously the party of historical losers: in the east, of Germans who are nostalgic for the planned economy and society of state socialism; in the west, of critics of the SPD who lost a power struggle with Schroeder. It is a party with no coherent program, but rather a compendium of popular and nationalist slogans.
It is a testament to the responsibility and maturity of the German people that this miscellaneous alliance of the disaffected only attracted 12 percent of the vote.
RSS