Post-Merkel Germany’s Race for the Center Regardless of who wins, Sunday’s election will deliver a coalition that governs by consensus. By Josef Joffe
Who will replace Germany’s eternal chancellor, Angela Merkel, in Sunday’s election? None of the six parties in the Bundestag will capture a majority, and so it will be on to Act II: coalition-building, which may take weeks, even months. But it hardly matters whom the Parliament finally anoints. The voters will have affirmed tepid centrism.
That isn’t the Germany of the 20th century. “Centrists” the Kaiser and Führer were not; they wanted to fuse Europe into a German fiefdom. Such types are ancient history.
Germany’s new players are essentially unknown in the U.S. Leading in the polls is the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz. Behind him trots Armin Laschet, the equally uninspiring candidate of Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats. He is trailed by the youngish Annalena Baerbock of the semi-left Greens and Christian Lindner of the Free Democrats. Mr. Lindner, an old-style liberal, speaks for them all: “We secure the country’s center.”
Each candidate could win a place at the cabinet table. Whatever the winner’s political coloration, the government will be gray. That is a blessing—or curse—of multiparty government. Two-party systems like America’s and Britain’s tend to polarize. Coalitions of the many gravitate toward the middle; otherwise the parties couldn’t govern together.
Germany in 2021 is a consensus country. By American standards, that looks like sheer bliss. A change of government will shift things only a couple of degrees to the left or right. All Germany’s political parties, not only the Greens, want to save the planet. On taxes, the Greens and the “reds” (the color of the Social Democrats), want to soak the rich a bit. Anybody for lowering taxes? No, but the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats promise not to raise them.
Such nuances matter little, given the Modern Monetary Theory that delivers unlimited funds at close to zero interest. Like every Western government, the new German government won’t rein in a state grown fat on Covid trillions. Like the Biden administration, it will expand entitlements. Why penny-pinch or squeeze out more taxes if you can pay off your clientele for free? This new faith now rules from Sacramento to Stockholm. The U.S. is being Europeanized.
Yet trans-Atlantic togetherness ends at the water’s edge. Like his predecessors, Mr. Biden won’t get Berlin to invest seriously in defense and assume a strategic role befitting Germany’s heft as the world’s fourth-largest economy. In their party program, Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats didn’t even mention spending the magic 2% of gross domestic product on military defense that members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreed to years ago.
Mr. Biden would love to recruit Germany—and the rest of Europe—into a hands-on alliance against Russia and China. He will be disappointed, though the Greens have recently stepped up their rhetoric against those two enemies of human rights. No German political party will fall in behind Mr. Biden. Berlin lacks the will and wherewithal to take on Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. China is too far away to pose a direct threat, while Russia is too close to risk riling. As in real life, where you stand depends on where you sit.
The Germans and French will dispatch the occasional warship to the Indo-Pacific, but for show, not combat. The reflex is to evade entrapment in America’s global conflicts; let the Japanese, Indians and Australians help the U.S. defang Chinese expansionism. Naturally, the Afghan experience hasn’t galvanized European resolve. The allies weren’t even consulted about the chaotic American pullout. The French won’t forgive the U.S. for torpedoing their nuclear-submarine deal with Australia.
It is a safe bet that either Mr. Scholz or Mr. Laschet will lead the next government, perhaps with a third party in tow. Any threesome will plod along in Merkel’s tracks. To survive, such a government will have to rule by daily compromise, which actually reflects the secret yearning of the German electorate.
Let’s not grant, but dilute power, runs the silent motto. No charismatic figures, please, but trusty party horses bridled by coalition discipline. Imperial overreach was yesterday; today, power politics isn’t us. We will try to please Uncle Sam, our security lender of last resort, but won’t alienate China and Russia. In the classic German understanding of foreign policy, we are a “power of peace,” having profited nicely from our “culture of strategic reticence.”
As goes Germany, so goes the rest of Europe; neither will act as Mr. Biden’s lieutenant against Russia, China and Iran. And yet the New Germany remains America’s default partner (and vice versa). It will be Mr. Scholz or Mr. Laschet, plus cohorts. It hardly matters who collars whom, given the built-in centrism of coalition governance.
The U.S. plays in a different league. A world power can’t outsource its global responsibilities to regional grandees like Germany, nor will Germany shoulder the burden. It’s the difference between a big brother and a kid brother. It’s family, but in the shadow of disparate interest and power. Sixteen years of Angela Merkel proved the limits of fealty as well as the resilience of the world’s oldest alliance. The new chancellor, Mr. Whoever, won’t ditch Ms. Merkel’s playbook.
Mr. Joffe serves on the editorial council of the German weekly Die Zeit and teaches international politics and political theory at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies in Washington.
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