Europe's Shaky Giant

Wirepullers: in un mondo che sta andando sempre di più verso il multipolarismo, il voto di domenica in Germania assume un'importanza non trascurabile. Berlino ha ormai fatto i conti con il proprio passato, si sta sempre più emancipando dagli Stati Uniti, verso i quali il senso di deferenza sta andando sbiadendosi (basti pensare al "no" tedesco alla guerra di Bush in Iraq) e sta lentamente assumendo un ruolo centrale in un'Europa che stenta a trovare una guida e soprattutto un'identità ben precisa. Stati Uniti e sopprattutto Russia sono alla finestra, l'esito del voto farà pendere un bel pezzo d'Europa da una parte o dall'altra, in un continuo rigurgito di guerra fredda, sbiadita anch'essa, che proprio a Berlino ha vissuto i suoi momenti più tristi ed eroici. (1)

Germany’s upcoming elections have been widely dismissed as uncompetitive, predictable, and downright boring. But the country looks to be headed for a roller-coaster ride that will be anything but dull.

On the surface of things, Germany is heading into its Sept. 27 general election in an optimistic mood. The latest numbers suggest that the economy may be picking up again. The potentially most explosive issue in foreign policy -- the participation of 4,200 German troops in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan -- has hardly figured in campaign debates. And for the moment the current chancellor, the conservative Angela Merkel, holds a comfortable lead in the polls over her main rival, the Social Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Germany's friends and allies might well wish that this were the end of the story." But in fact there is plenty of uncertainty lurking beneath the surface. Germany's political system is suffering from a combination of complacency and fear. Urgently needed economic reforms have languished. And notes of ambiguity are creeping into Berlin's hitherto ultra-predictable foreign policy.

At the moment, the dominant mood can best be defined as apathy. Some analysts suspect that this election could well be characterized by record-low turnout -- not all that surprising, considering that the current government is based on a stultifying "grand coalition" of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) that has governed for the past four years. Polls show that around 40 percent of the electorate haven't made up their minds yet how they will vote. All this is remarkable for a country where voters have traditionally harbored strong party affiliations. Thomas Petersen of the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research notes that, as recently as 15 or 20 years ago, the two big mainstream political parties of CDU and SPD could each consistently count on drawing 40 percent of the votes in national elections. That made the country's political landscape steady, predictable, and consensus-oriented -- read "downright dull."

This appears to have changed for good. The power of the unions and traditional working-class groups that used to make up the bulk of the Social Democrats' support has been steadily waning. The weakening of the Catholic Church's hold on more conservative voters has had a comparable effect -- though to a lesser extent -- on the core of the CDU. And the smaller parties on the right and left -- the Liberals and the Greens -- have benefited. All of this could complicate post-election politicking considerably. The main danger is that an ambiguous result could lead to long and paralyzing coalition negotiations at a time when decisions on larger issues urgently need to be made. The old predictability, in short, is no longer a given.

Plus, nowadays there's a wild card: the Left Party, created from the ruins of the old East German communists and the disaffected left wing of the old SPD. The Left talks about "overcoming capitalism" and questions the long-standing alliance with the United States -- and correspondingly rejects Germany's participation in NATO's Afghan campaign. Though most Germans probably don't accept every plank in that program, polls show that about two-thirds of them consistently agree with the Left's skepticism on Afghanistan. Constanze Stelzenmüller, of the Berlin Office of the German Marshall Fund, says the reason the issue hasn't flared up much during the election campaign so far is that all the main political parties except for the Left support the Bundeswehr's presence in Central Asia, meaning that no one has much of an interest in allowing it to become a marquee issue. "That could translate into a vote for the Left on election day," Stelzenmüller says. In particular, she notes, the Social Democrats "are being torn down the middle" as frustrated left-wingers desert them for the Left.

And the economy? Here, too, there's more going on than first meets the eye. The current cautiously positive mood is based on relatively good growth and employment figures that have emerged over the past two quarters. But the economists worry that too much of this could actually be the ephemeral result of Germany's 124-billon-euro stimulus program, the biggest in the country's history. A centerpiece of the package, the 5-billion-euro "cash for clunkers" program (since imitated by the U.S.), has done much to buoy the car industry. It has now ended.

A series of agreements by unions and management to keep wages down looks set to run out soon as well. The IWH Institute in Halle, an economic think tank, predicts that unemployment will jump to 10.3 percent in 2010, up from 8.1 this year. Germany's ballooning public debt places serious constraints on politicians' ability to spend their way out of the next stage of the crisis. Meanwhile, some analysts continue to warn that the government has failed to tackle lingering problems in the banking sector. None of this adds up to a particularly encouraging picture for those who hope to form the next government -- which is why, perhaps, no one has really seen fit to talk frankly about these pitfalls during the current election campaign.

The current political debate has also failed to deliver clarity on another pressing issue that goes to the heart of Germany's political future: What to do about Russia? Many Berlin policymakers have turned into bear-huggers. They believe that Germany has a special role to play in bringing Russia closer to Europe by intensifying economic ties between the two countries -- a policy dubbed by some, with appropriate clumsiness, as "rapprochement though economic interlocking" (Annäherung durch Verflechtung). Germany's big economy, so the logic goes, is thirsty for Russian gas and oil -- and Russia's growing domestic market, long a lucrative destination for German exports, looks increasingly like a source of salvation in desperate times.

Last month, for example, when Merkel met with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the two discussed wide-ranging plans for Russian investment in the German energy industry as well as several troubled German companies -- an East German shipyard, a semiconductor manufacturer, and the automobile maker Opel. The latter, of course, is a particularly tricky issue, given that Opel is a long-time subsidiary of moribund U.S. automaker General Motors. Earlier this month the government in Berlin gave its approval to a deal that sold Opel off to a Canadian-led consortium that included major participation by Russia's Sperbank.

Critics both within Germany and without say that Berlin should beware overly cozy ties with Moscow. The skeptics raise concerns both about the reliability of Russian investors and the broader policies of the Kremlin at home and abroad. This summer divisions over the issue broke into the open even within the German political establishment, when ex-foreign minister Joschka Fischer announced that he was taking a job as a PR ambassador for the Nabucco pipeline project, aimed at reducing EU dependency on Russian energy supplies. That seemed to place him at odds with ex-prime minister Gerhard Schröder, who now works for a subsidiary of Russian natural gas champion Gazprom. Fischer and Schröder were partners in government in the Social Democrat-Green coalition that ran Germany from 1998 to 2005.

For the moment, as voting day draws near, the headlines will continue to focus on the horse race. The latest polls give Merkel a 10-point lead over Steinmeier (although the CDU, which is less popular than its leader, shows less of an advantage over the Social Democrats). As things stand now, though, determining who will be the victor on Sept. 27 may well be the least of Germany's problems.

Autore: Christian Caryl

Fonte: www.foreignpolicy.com