Lawfare Archive: An Election in Germany

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Today, Saxony Ann Hall, a state in Northeast Germany, is holding state elections. Pulling has put the far right alternative for Germany party, or AFD, ahead in the race.

If the AFD were to win a majority of seats, it would be the first time the far right party has controlled the state and Germany since World War II.

The group's success comes to spite being previously designated as an extremist group by Germany's domestic intelligence agency, and a refusal from other political parties to form coalitions with it, in what is known as the branded "Mower" or "Firewall". For today's archive, I chose an episode from September 28, 2021, in which Drake and Schultz spoke with two experts on German politics. Constances stood to the Mueller and Yashimung, about that year's elections. They considered the election results, what German politics could look like after Angela Merkel's time as German chancellor,

Germany's role in European politics, and more. I'm Jacob Schultz, and this is the Waffer podcast, September 28, 2021. Over the weekend, Germany held elections to see who will succeed Angela Merkel as Germany's chancellor. The results are in, but there's still a lot of coalition building to go.

To break it all down, I sat down with Constanza Stelsen Müller, who's the first-stern chair on German and transatlantic relations,

and his senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. And Yashimung, who's an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies. Both of whom are experts in German politics. We talked about the election, how to make sense the results, and what everything means for the bigger picture of European politics, Germany's role in the world, and lots else.

It's the Waffer podcast, September 28, and election in Germany.

“All right, so Constanza, if you could get us started here, so what were people in Germany voting on this weekend?”

They were voting on who would become chancellor, so the head of the German government in Germany after Angela Merkel stepping down at the end of a fourth tenure. Just give us a brief overview. We'll walk through the details of it as we go on, but give us a brief overview of how things should go out. So Germany's politics used to be extremely simple. Before reunification in West Germany, we had two main parties and one small party, the centre-right Christian Democrats are conservatives to which Angela Merkel belongs,

and then the centre-left social Democrats. And the small party of the liberal kind of decided which party would ally itself with.

So over the first nearly 50 years of West Germany's existence, you had either conservative liberal or social democratic liberal coalition.

And of course, in Eastern Germany, which was not a democracy, you did have several parties, but basically the communist party ruled, and the other ones were just there for window dressing. Now, since then, things have really shifted. Germany has become much more diverse. We have a total of six parties. The Greens were created in 1980. They started as a sort of woolly pacifist ecological party.

And then there is the left party, which is the, as it were, the successor of East Germany's communist party. And finally, the alternative for Germany, which is a hard right party, created in 2013, in which came into the literature for the first time, last term around it, came back in.

get more votes, or would we essentially remain a centrist country? And what we see in was that the two big parties which used to get 40% of the vote came in almost a dead heat, but at, of course, a much smaller vote level. So, in the case of the Christian Democrats, 24.1, and in the case of the social Democrats, 25.7, that's a long way away from the 40% percentage points they used to get.

And we're also probably looking at the first time that they have to form a three-way coalition with the Greens or the Liberals,

because Delineka didn't get back in, and the AFD is so hard right that nobody wants to work with it. That's where we are right now. We're discussing what coalition to form, and it's probably going to be a traffic light with the social Democrats in the leadership and the Greens and the Liberals tagging along.

“Was that complicated and extensive enough for you and your listeners?”

That's pro-freately so. And we'll get back to some of that in a bit, but I'm curious first, to open this up to both of you, and maybe, Consasi, you can go first, to what extent did what happened today surprised you? Was it consistent with what most people were expecting, or is it divergent from what you were expecting? Well, I think interestingly enough, the election campaign was more surprising than the outcome, because the election campaign was one of the most whiplash campaigns the country has ever seen.

First, you know, the Greens were trending as the frontrunners for the first time in German history. That gave everybody just vertigo, because that would have been a completely new political landscape, and they were trending really in the territory of yesterday's winner, so around 22%, and then they lost traction for reasons we can discuss, and then the Christian Democrats, Angela Merkel's parties, started surging. And in the end, the least likely party that people thought was practically already dead, the social Democrats,

who had been having a really hard time for years, and, and for the past few months, never getting above 14% or so,

suddenly sort up to the nearly 26, and won the election. That was surprising, but, you know, the fact that the left party sort of fell out of parliament, because they didn't make the 5% threshold, the fact that the AFD got less, you know, all that is not that surprising,

“I think what's concerning to me is that the AFD gets really high numbers in the former states of Eastern Germany,”

but let's, we can talk about that later as well. And Yashal, open the same thing to you. Was this surprising to you in any way?

Well, first of all, thank you, Constanze, for your Twitter force of talking listeners through some really boring material,

in the least boring way possible, that's, that's the task I would not have wanted to do, I would not be able to do it with your elegance. Look, I think sort of, as Constanze was saying, the outcome of the election was not very surprising compared to a week ago. You know, the polls turned out to be pretty much on point, and so nobody sort of looked at those projections, late on Sunday night when we, for this was stabilizing, oh my god, five hours earlier, I would afford something completely different.

There were pretty surprising compared to where we were a few months ago, in the way that Constanze already outlined.

“I would add, but there are also quite surprising relative to where we were at 10 or 20 or 30 years ago.”

So for a long time, it seemed like there were very stable catch-all parties, independence of political science, it looked like party systems across many Western democracies were frozen, roughly the same characters dominating a political landscape for decades or an end. Once one party has a bit more votes, once the other party has a bit more votes, but some alternative and government, but the basic players are sort of well known, and there's a couple of major ones. And then you started to see really with a decline of a social democrats as a catch-all party, as what Germans call a folks' party,

party that has broad support in the people. And you know, people prognosticated the death of social democracy, and that happened in some European countries. And it is for now a French sister party of the SPD, a party socialist, has become basically in a relevance and was forced humiliatingly to sell off its former headquarters, because it has so little support and so little money now, and it looked as for the SPD was was heading for the same thing. But one of the lessons from this election is that this is happening to all catch-all parties, but this wasn't less a story in particular about social democracy,

as it seemed to be 10 years ago, it's actually story about all catch-all parties.

And the CDU yesterday, and this is still what I've been in surprise 10 years ago, had historically bad performance.

“There's now no party left in Germany, but can reliably get 25 or more percent of the vote. And that I think is a really fundamental transformation of the electoral system.”

Now, that has some good things, because it means that parties can search when they have a strong candidate or have a good vision that seems to speak to that particular moment. And so actually it might inject a little bit more healthy competition, we overall electoral landscape, but it also has some bad things for the quite characteristic of many forms of proportional representation.

And the most important for that is that it's really hard for voters to cast the ballot to change the government, because even if you're voting for an opposition party,

that party might simply join the government in some kind of slightly reconfigured coalition, and suddenly your vote, which was meant to remove the chancellor, might help the chancellor stay in office. And of course, you get the situation that we now have in Germany, where the election is over. We know exactly what the results are. There's no Donald Trump running around saying what would be outcome of the results of election was fraudulent. And yet we don't yet with a hundred percent certainty, you know, who the chancellor is going to be, because that's going to be figured out by a bunch of politicians and backroom deals over the course of the next few months.

So you can, you have a lot of choice in which part of your vote for, but you don't have much choice in what government that vote actually ends up supporting.

And that problem in a way that would have been surprising a few decades ago is more acute now in Germany than it was in the past.

“And so I want to move to that coalition building. So, Consas, could you talk a bit about where we're at in the coalition building process?”

So you mentioned a bit the two parties who are sort of in Neconex in the voting. Talk a bit more about what those two parties are and what you see is the sort of offroads for what coalition building might lead to.

So, because Germany is a parliamentary democracy and not a presidential democracy like America or France, coalitions have always been the way of life in German politics.

It's just that the coalition leaders these days start from a much lower base, much lower vote chair. And this time around for the first time, they're going to have to, the leading party is has to share power with not just one party, but two. In theory, three coalition models are possible, but one is politically extremely unlikely and of the two remaining one is swiftly drifting out of sight. Let me explain, numerically, a repeat of the grand coalition that Merkel ran for three out of her four terms is possible.

In other words, a two-party coalition between the centroid Christian Democrats, her party and the centroid left social Democrats. But since the centroid left social Democrats got about just sort of 2% more than the Christian Democrats, they would be in the lead.

“I think we can, at this point, practically issue a caste iron guarantee that that's not going to happen because that would be humiliating for the Christian Democrats.”

And because, frankly, they can't stand each other's guts anymore. They want, as Yasha hinted, what they want and what Germany wants is a new kind of government that solves some of the or addresses some of the issues that Merkel's government has over time left undone. And which at this point is becoming more emergent. And here are two three ways are theoretically possible for the winners of social Democrats to head a so-called traffic light coalition with the Greens and the Liberals. The Liberals have the color yellow, the social Democrats, the color red and traffic light.

The other alternative would be what for the longest time in this campaign, the Liberals and the Greens thought they were heading for, which was what we call a musingly for everybody else, Jamaica. Because the Jamaican flag is black, green and yellow, and the color of the conservatives is black, all the parties are color code. But, and, in fact, last night, in the prime time live TV meeting of all the candidates and party leaders. This is entertainingly called the elephant round in the German political tradition because, you know, you used to be these all used to be older white men who, I think, were compared to elephant bulls.

You know, sitting around waving their trunks, snorting and flapping their ears. And the Christian Democrat candidate in the elephant round last night said, "Of course I, I may be just behind the social Democrats, but of course I claim the possibility of negotiating a coalition and I'm going to do this."

The, the pervasive sense that he's really a lightweight who was well beyond his, his point of competence and the entrenched rivalries within the, the party's leadership.

“Between, it has to be said about half a dozen elephant bulls who thought that they would have been the better chancellor candidate and sort of, and, in fact, thought so through all the 16 years of angular Merkel's reign.”

So it is entirely possible that the Christian Democrats will self-implode, and that the option of Jamaica will remove itself from the table, leaving the greens and the liberals with no other choice, but to talk to the certain Democrats. Yeah, that's really useful. So I want to take a little bit of a step back. So one thing that, particularly I see getting discussed a lot in English language media is the extent to which the election was or wasn't a referendum on, on angular Merkel's tenure in office.

“Yeah, sure. What would you say to that? What would you say to people who, who make a comment maybe that part of what was at stake here is a referendum on her success and her time in office?”

Well, I think it's hard to make the case that that was really what was going on because, you know, those three candidates.

One of whom was from within the person party and, broadly speaking, from within the ideological wing of the person party was to say that he is sort of a moderate within the party. He's not one of the people who wanted to push the party back towards a more right-wing, more conservative policies. The second was the vice-chancellor in her own government, the head of a social democratic party, but somebody who had worked very closely with Merkel, and to in many ways seem to campaign as a sort of a Merkel look alike, you know, very calm, not really pushing the policy agenda very actively.

Somebody who has sort of good judgment but not a lot of sort of great rhetorical firepower or a lot of desire to sort of be in Obama-like transcendent figure.

And then third I suppose was the head of a green party who stood for most of a contrast with Merkel, but you themselves actually would probably like to enter a coalition with her party under the right circumstances ideally with them as the senior partner and Merkel's conservators as a junior partner, and to, you know, wasn't overly critical of Merkel's legacy either. So I think, you know, there was actually a broad consensus within the main parties that it's time to move on, Merkel was in power for 16 years and that's probably a good thing with Germany's going to have a new chancellor, but they were all to very extent quite complimentary of Merkel or these, you know, reluctant to criticise her too much.

There's also a second dimension to this question, which is sort of the idea that the American readers and listeners have that, you know, really the thing with how Germany together for the last 16 years, the thing with explains why Germany mocks he hasn't come apart, was Angela Merkel. And that of course raises the risk over danger, the fear that Germany will trumpify after Merkel, but once she has left the political stage, you know, this moment of moderation and Germany, but one democracy that still sort of works will be over.

I think, as consensus said, the very clear emphasis on moderate political parties, the decline in the vote of a farad alternative for Germany, but a client even moved for a well as dangerous, but still not particularly appealing with our left, left party, all of our shows that German products will remain pretty moderate after Merkel.

“I think this is a historic election because changing chancellor after 16 years has a historic feel to it, but it is not, I think, a historic election in the sense that it will make a big difference.”

I have to jump domestic policy or to German farm policy, and thereby in larger have to say, you know, there certainly a need for rural reforms in Germany, as a need for some change in domestic policy, but I'm not too concerned about the fact that broadly speaking, there will be a steady hand on German domestic policy, but the mix between capitalism and the welfare stage is going to continue, that all of the people who are going to be in power now are pretty socially liberal. Without being extremist in any direction that they're physically responsible, but care about the welfare stage, all of that is fine with me.

I'm a little bit more concerned about the farm policy, because I think that actually, on that front Germany has really been a sleep at the wheel for the last couple of decades in a way that concerns me.

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I'm wondering what you make of all that.

Well, I do have concerns. I mean, my field is foreign insecurity policy, and I sort of undertook the fairly unenviable project of reading all the foreign policy chapters in the party programs, the election platforms of all the six parties concerned. And I do think that we end up with, if we end up with the traffic light coalition in Germany, a chancellor Olaf Shorts, and his team will have some sort of real intellectual and practical challenges in foreign insecurity policy, and fairly soon.

“I mean, the real challenges, of course, are, you know, an increasingly assertive Russia and China, not just in their own domains, but in neighborhoods.”

In our neighborhoods and in fact, in our own countries through hybrid forms of interference. The challenge is a transatlantic relationship, which the Biden administration has professed renew, but where we are still seeing some fairly significant disagreements, such as on the recent spat with France and Australia over submarine purchases, or the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And finally, you know, there's the sort of foreign policy calendar stuff like Germany heading presiding over the G7 from January 2022, the in December, the COP26 climate negotiations in Copenhagen, and the, you know, French elections, presidential elections in the spring, and then the American midterms, all those things will present immense challenges.

And I would maybe add to the mix the fact that the Biden administration has to undertake a global force posture review, and a nuclear posture review, which could have considerable consequences for Europe. And if I look at the party programs of the social democrats, the Greens and the Liberals, it seems to me that consciousness of the extent and the severity of the challenges is not reflected in those programs. So much depends on who becomes a national security advisor, who becomes foreign minister, and who becomes defense minister.

In two weeks that were those foreign policy issues salient at all during the campaign. No, no, no, no. So we had a number of three way nationally televised debates. And the three big ones didn't cover foreign policy at all with the exception of a 15 minute segment on the Afghan withdrawal. And then there was a final so-called septel, because all parties, just to make things complicated for you foreigners.

The CDU is, the Christian democrats of Angola Merkel actually has a Bavarian sister party. So they count themselves as two, although they're really, you know, united, and their votes are counted together. And so it was a septel, and there they actually tried to talk about foreign insecurity policy, because viewers and the media had complained so much about the absence of these issues. But I'm not sure that that resolved any of my doubts to be honest. So, so yeah, if I mean, people worry that we, that this election campaign and maybe the soldiers overwhelming complexity and number of challenges besetting us could make us inward-looking.

I don't think they have, they'd have some pretty good indications for that being a real issue. I very much agree with Conflonso on these points, I'd like to add sort of two particular areas in which I worry about a lack of direction being quite dangerous actually for Germany and for the world if the country doesn't figure out its foreign policy.

Have rapidly creed away from democracy, at this point, Hungary is no longer classified as a free country by freedom house.

“And we're seeing other member states of the European Union and potentially following suit, as particular concerns, for example, about the Czech Republic and some other countries within the EU.”

And this is a real problem, a real challenge for the quality of the European Union, because the block lives from the willingness of citizens to share and pool the sovereignty with other European countries. But that is much more to ask, if you essentially ask them to pool sovereignty with a dictator and Budapest rather than a treaty democratically elected government. Angola Merkel tolerated Fidesh, the party of the Hungarian leader as part of the same political family in the European Parliament, as part of the same faction in the European Parliament.

She indirectly opposed a real steps to sanction or ban for his attacks on democratic institutions. And as a result, the EU, I think, now has an existential crisis. And I don't see any particular desire from either, all of choice, oh, I'm in Russia to deal with that existential crisis on those terms, and that I think will exactly a big long term price.

And the second, which may be even more concerning, has to do with Europe's positioning between the United States and the one side and Russia and China on the other side.

“Over the last years, Germany has remained politically aligned with the United States, it is of course a member of the area's western alliance structures for most important of which being NATO.”

And at the same time, it has struck a lot of deals with all the quads around the world. And the German government is now essentially reliant on Russia to add a one in Turkey. If it doesn't want a lot of refugees flooding into the country with very difficult political consequences for ruling parties, as we saw in 2015, Germany is essentially reliant on flooding a Putin to keep the gas on for it to have enough heat for pensioners to be able to get through the winter and that reliance is probably going to get worse out of the completion of Nord Stream 2.

And the German economy is very reliant on exports to China. And when you take those things together, I'm really concerned about Germany and eventually other countries in Europe or Europe as a whole, a sliding into a kind of quasi neutrality between the democratic countries like the United States and the authoritarian countries like Turkey, Russia and particularly China. It's the sort of creeping Switzerland desation of Europe. And again, I don't see this strategic vision from Ivershal to Russia to take that seriously, make this strategic choice and hopefully avert the Switzerland desation of Europe.

And so one thing that both of you have touched on at different points is the relatively poor performance of extremist parties in the selection. And Yasha, I'm curious, you mentioned that there's a election in France coming up in eight or nine months. To what extent do you see the relatively poor performance of extremist parties here is something that's reflective of broader political trends in Europe or if it's something sort of unique to German political dynamics.

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“It's a little bit of birth, so I have argued in a piece in the Atlantic a couple of months ago, but for the first time in a very long while,”

I'm starting to see some potentially optimistic trends about the fate of populist governments around the world.

And again, this is very early. Things may well continue to worsen over the next years. This is not the moment to stop sounding the alarm. But if five or ten years from now, there will be a positive story to be told, we're starting to see what it might look like.

“So in a French regional elections a few months ago, Marien Le Pen failed to win a single region, a majority in a single region.”

So the ability of that part of a far right to actually win majority continues to be limited. In Scandinavia, in the Netherlands, in a bunch of European countries, we're seeing that where populists haven't taken over a few years ago, they don't seem to be improving their share of a vote they're standing now. So the danger that more and more countries might be taken over by populists seems less acute when it did a few years ago.

And finally, we're seeing that populists in countries who have ruled for a long time are starting to be a little bit less popular.

But people are figuring out that promises were often empty, that the countries are not doing better than we were in the past, and populists in countries from Brazil, to a few other places like Mexico, are starting to pay the price for that. And there's just a possibility that perhaps Victor Aban will lose power in upcoming parliamentary elections there in this spring. That depends on whether the opposition is able to break through, despite a very heavily biased media against them, because there's a barely free media left in Hungary.

And it depends on whether Aban would actually give up power, which I think is not a problem, but when you're looking at current polls, the opposition is doing pretty well, and that is just the chance that even if in Europe some of these defining populists are going to start being out of office. So when you look at Germany, and you say a lot, the left party and nearly missed its chance to re-enter the government, and most importantly, the really very extreme alternative for Germany, for the first time in its history, has declined in the World Chair and National elections, is down by about 2 percentage points to between 10 to 11 percent, you know, and that looks like a pretty good sign.

What I would add for is that Germany is a little bit of an outlier, that we extend to which a moderate party is dominate in the political landscape, despite the, you know, continuing worries about the AFT, which are important and well taken, is a bit of an outlier. And certainly in France, probably because it's on to be re-elected as president of France, but it is far from unthinkable that Marine Le Pen will be the president of France, and at this point, it is not even unthinkable, but Ericsson Moore, a far-right writer and propagandist will be the next president of France.

So yes, you could see Germany optimistically as part of a trend, it's a little too early to be sure about that. I hope that five or so years from now will be able to look back at this moment and say yes, this is part of a trend with a certainly also things that would make Germany a little bit of an outlier. And for reasons, but I don't entirely understand the German political system just appears to be working significantly better than that of most peer countries and most democracies in the world at the moment.

To me, as a German, I have to say, you know, the fact that 10.6% of German voters are still under those circumstances willing to vote for the AFT is hair raising. And what I mean even more concerned by is the fact that it gets far a far greater work of votes in eastern Germany, and in fact it rolled in in first place at around 21% in two of the five eastern German states. And that to me is truly terrifying because that means that the established democratic parties, you know, just don't have an answer to the problems that make people vote for the AFT.

That's really quite distressing and we'll see how that plays out in the future. I do think, though, that we can consider ourselves lucky as, as Yasha said, that our politics is still relatively centrist and moderate compared to others.

“We have, in a sense, I think, followed the trend in the rest of Europe and becoming more diverse and more volatile, but we haven't actually sort of feathered out to the extremist fringes, and I'm grateful for that.”

The fact that Delinker, the extreme left party, didn't make it across the five percent threshold. I think really is a result of its, you know, just, its policies that are a very pro-Russian very out of sync with with with people's concerns. It has only ever worked in areas where it's seen, you know, in eastern Germany, really, where we're seen as the, you know, an legitimate successor to, in the, legitimately, East German Party, the Communist Party, because the other parties were seen as carpetbackers.

But, but still, you know, it's, I think, the, the left party's time may actually be over. And I'm still concerned by the existence of the AFT. But in general, Germany's federalism and its sort of tendency towards moderation, the fact that we don't have the possibility to, to, to gerrymander electoral districts, the fact that we have very strict supervision and regulation of campaign contributions, and the fact that we have generally publicly respected public media.

“I think all means that that there is a sort of much greater sort of common basis of consensus in German politics,”

that in other countries where that's no longer the case. And just sort of wrap up, I'd be curious to hear from both of you, what you think is sort of the big picture take away. The one thing that really stuck with you and you'd want to convey to listeners.

Yasha, you first, who curious?

I think, well, let me say a big take away that we haven't talked about, which is that the dog that we didn't back in this election. You know, if one, a narrative outside of Germany about this election was, "Oh, my God, Merkel is leaving. We can't be going to Trumpify and I've explained why I think that's a wrong reading."

“A second narrative, a little bit more sophisticated, but I think no less wrong, is that this was going to be the election which shows,”

but populism sort of decides to really, what we're seeing and going to see in European politics is the rise of the younger generation, the rise of really strong support for environmentalist movements. The green party is going to become, not just the dominant party of a left, but the dominant party in the country,

is going to win the chance to be because Germans recognize that the fight against climate change is the most important issue of a day,

and that the way to fight against climate change is essentially to admit that we've seen against nature to self-largeulate, to promise, to cycle, to work, and leave the air conditioning on not too much in the summer. Actually, ideally, you don't have air conditioning at all in Germany. You know, to be a little, I can't recall it in the winter, to give up on the idea of flying into your holidays and so on and so forth. And I think the fact that the green party was so hyped and ended up, you know, not just the third, but a distant third,

really bunched in with the liberal party and until even the AFD rather than the so-called Democrats and the Christian Democrats, it was a big surprise.

The fact that among people who voted for the very first time in Germany, it was the sort of centroid pro-business of liberal party,

that edged out the greens and had the most votes. And that actually, even among voters, the lobby edge of 30, the left was not much stronger than the right when you look at the overall vote count. All of that shows that those hopes were slightly overstated. And that actually, we're not going to have a radical shift in, in, at least that form of environmentalism in the future.

They do want to act on climate change.

They're very different than that respect from a party like the Republicans, but still are very reluctant on this topic. But they are promising citizens, but it is possible to combine economic growth, combine fighting for jobs with dealing with climate change. But the way to do that is much more fluid investment and technology. And yes, government regulation, but that will have more affluent and more comfortable lives 20 or 40 years from now, rather than having to atone for having syndicance nature.

“And then, I think, is an interesting indication of when I'm just German, but European politics is likely to go.”

That stands in contrast with how even some of the most sort of sophisticated observers of Europe often perceive a continent in the United States. In Constanza? Well, my big takeaway is I think we are going to see a German government that has to grapple with a lot of domestic and external challenges. In ways that Merkel's government for all her excellence in crisis management refused to really tackle the big transformational issues, carbon neutrality, the energy transformation from fossil fuels to renewables,

really coming to grips with the assertiveness of authoritarian great powers. That has been left for this next government to undertake the digital transformation.

These are big, big challenges for three parties who have never worked together before in this way.

“And it is, I think, a significant importance for the future of Europe, but also of the transatlantic alliance for this government to get it right.”

What happens in Berlin does not end at Germany's borders. It has tremendous impact on the stability and security of Europe as a whole and with that of the alliance. So, what's the space? Thank you both so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

“You're very welcome. It's much later for Yasha, but I think we've all had a long day.”

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