The Alternative für Deutschland Future
Germany Plans February Poll
By John Foster
Snap elections often have unintended consequences.
As Germany’s governing coalition limps through its final days, one wonders if Chancellor Olaf Scholz has considered all the possible outcomes once the electorate has spoken.
Thuringia, anybody? How about Brandenburg or Saxony?
The current government is often referred to as the Ampel-Koalition (Traffic Light Coalition) because the colours associated with the SPD (red), the Freie Demokratische Partei (yellow), and Die Grünen (the Greens) are the same as those of traffic light.
Unlike a traffic light, which keeps everything moving by behaving in a predictable and orderly way, the behaviour of this coalition has been shaped by the fact that it comprises three parties that want different things.
The Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands is one of Germany’s two remaining cartel parties (the other being the centre-right but increasingly far-right adjacent CDU-CSU).
Like all the nominally social democratic parties in Europe, they have positioned themselves in the middle of the political spectrum and hold to their extreme centrism even in the face of evidence that it is causing them to leak votes to the right.
The general line of SPD policy is reminiscent of The Simpsons episode in which Lisa Simpson buys a copy of (what purports to be) Al Gore’s latest book, Sane Planning, Sensible Tomorrow, saying, “I hope it’s as exciting as his other book, Rational Thinking, Reasonable Future.”
Long gone are the days when the SPD felt connected to any sort of radical project. Nowadays, their primary selling point is moderate growth and “We won’t crash the economy.”
The Scholz government has also committed to raising German defence spending (as a proportion of GDP) to the 2% threshold of the NATO target. The means adopted to do so illustrate the malaise afflicting leading governmental circles.
In part, the difference between the actual defence budget (which runs at about 1.3% of GDP) has been made up by some fiddling with the books (counting outlays of assistance to Ukraine) and creating a special fund to purchase missile defence equipment.
This has improved Washington’s general attitude toward Germany, which had grown hostile under the first Trump Administration. Since the end of the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly complained Germany is getting a free ride from the US and not fulfilling its NATO commitments.
Purchasing American gear certainly helped. To that end, Scholz committed to buying two squadrons of F-35 jets, costing an initial $10 billion, an estimated $5 billion worth of Patriot missiles and another $3.5 billion for the Israeli Arrow ABM system, which was financed and co-developed with the United States.
Although this was done to improve German-American relations, Scholz did not consult with European allies, from whom he could have bought similar aircraft and missile systems. Particularly France, which Berlin worked hard with to combine defence businesses and procure similar gear.
Problems abound here. There is now a lot of politicking surrounding the idea of a Europe-wide missile defence system. Not every EU and NATO member state is comfortable with the idea of following Berlin’s lead and investing in an Israeli solution, especially given the war in Gaza – and now Lebanon.
Worse yet, the budgetary commitment on which German policy was based is not sustainable. Tension with the FDP over budgetary allocations was one of the primary reasons for the current coalition’s demise.
The Free Democrats, who spent much of the postwar era as a junior cartel party, were nearly chased out of existence in 2013. They have only just recovered their political fortunes to the point of being a player in German politics again.
When the Ampel-Koalition was formed in 2021, party leader Christian Lindner received the finance minister’s portfolio. This was quite a coup for a party whose national vote total was roughly proportionate to that of Alternative für Deutschland.
The current coalition crisis resulted from a breakdown in Olaf Scholz’s relationship with Lindner. Several elements contributed to the crisis, but the final straw was Lindner’s publication of a white paper on the German economy that was fundamentally at odds with government policy.
The FDP is the inheritor of German liberalism’s heritage. In many respects, it is the postwar fusion of the Deutsche Volkspartei and the Deutsche Demokratische Partei of the Weimar Republic and the successor to the National Liberals of the Imperial period.
Lindner’s party firmly opposed unreconstructed economic liberalism. Thus, it is not surprising that, during a time of economic stress, its leadership called for discontinuing regulations and reducing the tax burden of the wealthy.
The Greens, the third element of the coalition, have a less socially oriented agenda than the SPD. Yet they, too, found themselves at odds with Lindner and the FDP because the latter’s anti-regulatory agenda clashed with the Greens’ commitments to mitigating climate change.
Lindner’s white paper threw down the gauntlet with the Greens by calling for postponing climate change targets. Since this constitutes the central plank of the Green platform, it was clear the environmentalist party would also push for his ouster.
The general feeling in Germany is that Lindner’s paper was less about what is happening in the government right now and more about what might happen in a future government, one in which the FDP partners with someone else.
The obvious alternative (given that the FPD is hardly likely to increase its vote share) is the CDU/CSU. If the latter returned to the level of support that they received in 2017 (just more than 32%), then a partnership with the FDP might work.
Of course, this assumes that another 10% of the electorate could be found. Enter AfD.
Until now, the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands has refused to partner with AfD. But stands on principle in national politics are notoriously brittle, and it is not hard to imagine the CDU thinking that AfD might be acceptable as a junior partner, thinking they’ll turn them centre-right.
This mistake has a long history in German politics and should not be repeated. The CDU has been pushing for elections as soon as possible. While the SPD has pushed the elections back until February, it is difficult to see exactly what might change between now and then to recoup their political fortunes.
This is not to say Christian Lindner should have been kept at all costs. But it does raise the prospect that German politics might be on the verge of another rightward lurch, which alarms those familiar with the country’s fascist political history.
Once again, the failing lies mainly (although not exclusively) at the doorstep of a cartel party unwilling to take steps to rejig the economic structure of a low-growth industrial economy at the risk of alienating wealthy donors. We know where that leads.
The SPD must now feel itself in a bind. But with the winds blowing to the far right, only a move to the left (even if only on left Keynesian premises) has the prospect of convincing voters in the lower reaches of the income distribution that this is where their fortunes would be best served.
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Photograph courtesy of Matthias Berg. Published under a Creative Commons license.