Ralf Goergens

Despite the losses his party suffered yesterday, Gerhard Schröder is still trying to hang on to office. Some of his supporters like to think that he is going to be successful, but it is far more likely than not to be nothing more than a bluff.

Either way, his strange performance directly after the elections indicates that the last months were pretty hard on him. During the televised after-election debate of the various parties’ chairpersons, moderated by two senior journalists from the big two public broadcasters, he behaved downright appallingly. Throughout it all he grinned and grimaced, and when he spoke he petulantly insisted that he is Chancellor and will remain Chancellor. He also garrulously and somewhat incoherently attacked the media, accusing them to have conspired against him, in order to get Merkel into the Chancellery. All this is in stark contrast to his suave performances you usually get from the ‘Media-Chancellor’.

One of the two moderators finally ran out of patience and rebuked him (transcribed from my memory, so the exact phrasing could be a bit different from this): ‘Mr Schröder, and I deliberately say Mr Schröder and not Mr Chancellor, you don’t have any business to make allegations against us, just as we don’t make any allegations against yourself.’ After that he simply turned to Angela Merkel, ignoring Schröder altogether. The Chancellor obviously sensed that he had gone too far, he just sat there and silently put up with this chastisement in front of a huge TV audience. The unusual harsh tone, very different from what he used to hearing from German journalists, likely also took him aback.

Even so he dominated the debate when he spared with his political opponents – Angela Merkel was visibly disappointed by her party’s bad performance at the polls, and Edmund Stoiber from Bavaria was a weak candidate in 2002 and seems to have learned little since then. Both were no match against even a weakened Schröder. Their policies and programs are far superior, but they are pikers compared to him when it comes to politicking.

Schröder can still brazen it all out, and build a new coalition government under his leadership against all odds, but no imaginable configuration will be stable for long. The various parties and their personnel simply are incompatible, and in one or two years there would be another reelection. With that in mind, some of the other parties might form some other, unexpected coalition that excludes the Social Democrats altogether. More on that in another post.

Expectations for the performance of the German economy had improved in the last months, but they were based on the assumption that the conservative Christian Democrats and pro-market Free Democrats would form a coalition, an assumption that also led to an increase in foreign investment and a rise in value of German stocks.

Since these expectations have now been frustrated, it wouldn’t surprise me if investors pulled their money out of Germany at the first opportunity. What with the next govenment being unlikely to be very stable, a sudden boost in additional unemployment might finish it off.

If that would be enough to convince German voters that additional reforms are needed after all, that wouldn’t be a bad thing, at least not a bad as four more years of stagnation.

Christian Democrats get the most votes at 35.5 to 37 %

Social Democrats 33 or 34 %

Free Democrats 10.5 %

Greens 8.5 %

‘Left’ 7.5 to 8.5 %

Even worse, the first extrapolation on the first results bear that out.

Very bad news, no matter which possible coalition will govern – Grand coalition or Red-Left-Green – won’t push the urgently needed reforms through. It seems that my dear compatriots aren’t in enough pain yet.

While greater political particpation of immigrants is overall a good thing, I don’t really like this:

More than a half-million German-Turkish voters are eligible to go to the polls in federal elections this weekend. They overwhelmingly support the Social Democrats, and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has put Turkish voters at the front of his campaign this week.

This week, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder paid a visit to the editorial offices and printing plant of the Dogan Media Group, the German arm of Turkey’s largest media conglomerate. …

…

It was one of Schröder’s easier campaign stops. After all, his challenger, Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats (CDU), in contrast, has alienated Turkish voters with her aggressive opposition to EU membership for Ankara.

But the most telling statistic is the growth in the number of Turkish voters in Germany. Slowly they are emerging as a powerful minority voting bloc. Since 1972, 666,000 of the former “guest workers” who came to help rebuild Germany during the economic miracle that followed World War II have become naturalized citizens. And that pharmacies number has surged in recent years under a new citizenship law that permits Turks born in Germany to apply for citizenship when they turn 18. By most estimates, more than half-million Turkish-Germans will be eligible to vote in Sunday’s election — a crucial voting block in an election in which 30 percent of Germans remain undecided. In its above-the-fold headline on Wednesday, the mass-circulation Bild newspaper asked: “Will the Turks Determine the Election?”

The rest of the article is worth reading, too.

What I like least about the whole issue is that the question of Turkish EU membership might end up deciding the outcome of German elections. Then again, at least Turkish voters are going to vote following direct self-interest or nationalism, and not out of allegiance to Islamist organizations. Rather, the relationship between Germany and Turkey is a lot like that between the United States and Mexico. While annoying, this is vastly preferable to having Islamic hordes flooding Europe, as some American commentators and bloggers claim is happening.