Angela Merkel’s departure will not salve Germany’s angst
Voters and business leaders betray a similar ambivalence about an uncertain future
Philip Stephens
You have never had it so good. Harold Macmillan’s famous observation is usually misremembered. The then UK prime minister’s boast about a booming British economy during the closing years of the 1950s was qualified: “Let us be frank about it. Most of our people have never had it so good.” Then came the oft-forgotten caveat: “What is beginning to worry some of us is ‘Is it too good to be true?’ Or perhaps I should say, ‘Is it too good to last?’”
Too good to last. Success suffused with doubt. Macmillan would have recognised Germany’s present temper. The other day I heard an elder statesman remark that the country had never been so prosperous. And yet. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition was unloved, the public mood was fractious and politics was splintering. Germans struggled to recognise their good fortune.
Business leaders betray a similar ambivalence. Germany has a whopping current account surplus. It makes high-quality products commanding premium prices. In cities such as Stuttgart, the wealth this generates hits you in the face. Yet corporate chiefs fret that a play-it-safe culture stifles innovation and risk-taking. Over-regulation does the same. The future belongs to the digital worlds of machine learning and artificial intelligence. They could soon be the sole property of the US and China.
Ms Merkel, everyone in Berlin has known for a while, is in the twilight of her chancellorship. Now she has mapped out a path for her departure. The heavy losses suffered by her Christian Democratic Union in state elections in Hesse were the latest in a series of blows. The CDU’s sister party, the Christian Social Union, had already stumbled badly in its Bavarian stronghold. Her MPs had rejected the chancellor’s choice to lead them in the Bundestag.
Things end badly when politicians overstay their welcome. It happened to Ms Merkel’s predecessors Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl. Her decision to surrender the party leadership in December is an admission that 13 years as chancellor has been too long, as well as an effort to depart with dignity. Her intention to remain as chancellor until 2021 looks like one of those things leaders feel they have to say but do not really believe. If the centre-right CDU and CSU have taken a battering, support for their Social Democratic party partners in the grand coalition is in freefall.
The rise of the xenophobic populists of Alternative for Germany, particularly among disgruntled left-behinds in the country’s east, has caught international attention. But the party making more of a political running has been the Greens. Drawing in both small “c” conservatives worried about the environment and left-leaning liberals who favour open immigration, the Greens have a chance to displace the SPD as the second party.
Oddly, Ms Merkel is still the most popular politician. She sits just about on the centre point of the national political spectrum. For some, that is the problem. Her decision in 2015 to open the borders to 1m refugees enraged the right of her party and opened a flank for the AfD. Yet it also drew support for Ms Merkel personally from the centre-left.
There is a theory among political boffins in Berlin that once Ms Merkel has gone, national politics will revert to comfortable normality. The CDU will shift rightward, at once drawing away support from the AfD and leaving space for the SPD to reoccupy more of the centre-left. This yearning for business as usual sounds to an outsider like the wishful thinking of an establishment with its head in the sand.
The political landscape has been redrawn. Politics used to be a three-party game (four if you count the CDU and CSU as separate). The liberals of the small Free Democratic party provided the swing vote in coalition building. Those days are over. Six (or seven) parties are now represented in the Bundestag. Even if recent poll ratings of 20 per cent and above overstate their national support, the Greens have joined governing coalitions in more than half-a-dozen states. Their pitch is to affluent professionals with a social conscience.
The far-left Linke has a solidly loyal following in the east, where nostalgia for the old communist order — Ostalgia, it’s called — is a reminder of just how short are political memories. The AfD scoops up support from neo-Nazis, as well as those caught up in the scares about refugees.
Left unexplained is why an economy that is doing so well has so obviously lost its political balance. Part of the explanation must be that the riches are unevenly shared. And for all that the government is awash in money, politicians find it curiously difficult to refurbish a crumbling national infrastructure. Bridges and roads go unmended, airports unbuilt. No one should expect to get a decent WiFi connection or mobile phone signal.
Mostly, though, Germans seem to be echoing Macmillan: “Is it too good to last”? The answer may well be yes. The old order is crumbling. In Donald Trump, the US, once Germany’s vital protector, now has a president who represents everything Germans stand against: crude nationalism, the primacy of power and disdain for the rule of law.
Europe, Ms Merkel says occasionally, must rise to its own defence. People nod in agreement and then show no enthusiasm for the cause. The chancellor has never been a passionate European in the mould of Kohl. She does know that German prosperity rests on Europe’s security and stability. But who now will guard the continent’s peace?
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