Opinion

A traffic light for governing Germany

photo_camera Candidato elecciones en Alemania

The tight election results in the elections to appoint Chancellor Angela Merkel's successor show a first consequence: Mrs. Merkel will remain at the helm of the country on an interim basis for at least six more months. This is the time it will take for the leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) to form a coalition that will enable the Federal Republic of Germany to form a stable government and the 27 members of the European Union to know what to expect in a challenging future. 


If the enormous volume of postal votes does not change the final results, it seems that the winner of these elections is the hitherto Vice Chancellor, the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, whose moderation, both in his speech and in his actions at the head of the German economy and finance, have consolidated Germany's undisputed leadership in Europe in the last legislature. In accordance with the customs of modern German politics, he is therefore the candidate who will be charged with putting together the necessary alliances to form a stable government for the next four years. 


For Scholz, the 26% of the votes is clearly a great triumph, since his party came from the worst result recorded since the fifties of the last century. This is not the case, however, for the controversial Armin Laschet, who has significantly lowered the 33% floor that Merkel herself harvested in the 2017 elections at the head of the CDU/CSU coalition. Between the two major parties, they barely get half of the votes, which rubberstamps the deep atomization of German politics, as in other European countries moreover, and requires the entry into the equation of other actors. 


Avoiding the risk of paralysis of the European Union

Logically, Scholz should achieve, after long and surely arduous negotiations, a tripartite coalition that in Germany is already called "traffic light": the red of the SPD, the green of the ecologists of Annalena Baerbock, and the yellow of the liberals of Christian Lindner's FDP. Between the three of them, they narrowly exceed half of the electorate, but it would be enough to avoid both the repetition of the Grossen Koalitionen of the SPD with the CDU and the entry into the equation of Die Linke (The Left), the brand used by the former communists of the GDR to soften their presentation to an electorate that abhors Nazism and communism equally, the two plagues borne by which the current FRG, despite such stigmas, is the undisputed leader of the EU and the fourth economic power in the world. 


From a broad European perspective, and for the sake of the urgency required to face the global challenges at hand, it would be desirable that the negotiations do not take too long, at the risk of plunging the pachydermic EU into paralysis, at least until well into the first quarter of 2022. But, in addition to the internal issues to be discussed, it is more than evident that whatever the members of the new German coalition government agree on will inexorably affect the rest of Europe. 


If there is one thing on which there is no disagreement about Merkel's legacy, it is that, despite its lights and shadows, she has given stability to an EU that will now have to deal with the open confrontation between the United States and China and their corresponding derivatives. The new Chancellor has therefore the enormous challenge of strengthening the European Union and facing the strong turbulences that are coming. If he hesitates in such a task, the first consequence will be the distrust of a European citizenship that has just woken up from its dream of prosperity without risks, which would feed not a little those inside and outside the EU who are whipping up the dogs of nationalism, fragmentation and even the implosion of the best experience of voluntary coexistence that the Old Continent has lived through in its entire history.  


Internally in Germany, but also as an example for the rest of Europe, it would be desirable for the new coalition to reform its own electoral law, at least so as not to increase the number of deputies to worrying levels. In theory, the Bundestag officially has 598 seats, but in the legislature now concluded there were 709 and in the previous one 631. At the end of the current elections, the number of seats could rise to around 850, which is clearly excessive. This is due to the electoral system whereby each voter casts two ballots: in the first ballot he votes for his representative in his own constituency, and in the second ballot he votes for a party list. 

Half of the seats are allocated by direct mandate, and the other half by party-list candidates. However, if a party wins more direct mandates than it would be entitled to by the second vote, the system itself generates more seats to ensure the proportion, but also compensates the other parties. The result is that, if this dynamic continues, the old Reichtag building will soon become too small to accommodate so many representatives of the people's sovereignty.