The New Old World (40 page)

On a perfect autumn evening, Helmut Kohl closed his election campaign in the cathedral square of Mainz, capital of the Rhine-Palatinate, where he began his political career. As night fell, the towers of the great sandstone church glowed a dusky red above the Baroque marketplace illuminated below, packed with supporters and onlookers. Making his way to the front of this picturesque scene, the ‘Chancellor of Unity' delivered a confident address to the crowd of Christian Democratic loyalists, brushing aside barracking from pockets of far left youth on the edges of the square. Security was not tight. On a screen beside the podium the huge pear-shaped face of the statesman, with its heavy bonhomous jaw and sharp feral eyes, was projected into the darkness. From surrounding cafés, bystanders watched the scene with the low-key curiosity of spectators at a possible farewell.

Forty-eight hours later Kohl's helicopter alighted on the grounds of his residence in Bonn, an almost domestic sight as it came in across the Rhine low over the heads of strollers and cyclists along the river path—a quieter Sunday afternoon could not be imagined. Although the polls had not yet quite closed, by then he would have known he had lost the election. An hour later, the first projections on television—in Germany, with nearly perfect proportional representation, they are highly accurate—were being received with relief and delight in the headquarters of Social Democracy. But it would be difficult to speak of elation. Party workers remain proletarian in ways that have largely disappeared in Britain—victory hailed not just with beer and sausages, but hampers overflowing with cigarette packets; a certain stolidity could be expected. But the oddly subdued atmosphere reflected
national reactions as a whole. There was none of the jubilation surrounding Blair's arrival in Downing Street, however forced much of that may have been.

In part, the election campaign itself was responsible for the absence of excitement. Avoiding any sharp challenges or radical commitments, Gerhard Schröder promised no more than a reformist modicum, under the slogan ‘We don't want to change everything, just improve many things'. In point of fact, the SPD's platform involved more reversal of Kohl's tax measures than New Labour of Major's economic policies. But the general tone of its appeal to the electorate—ceremoniously respectful of Kohl's stature as a European statesman—was a good deal less combative than the campaign mounted by Millbank in 1996. In the minds of party managers, the prospect of a Grand Coalition with the CDU was never far away, setting limits to any too divisive rhetoric. Expecting—often, according to opinion polls, wanting—such an outcome, voters were not stirred.

But in the noticeably low-key reactions to the result of the election, a more pervasive state of mind could be detected too. Living in Germany over the previous year, one was often struck by the resistance of so many Germans to registering the scale of the changes about to overtake their country. Politically, every opinion poll made it clear long in advance that, whatever the exact election result, the next chancellor was going to be a Social Democrat—bringing a change of government after a longer spell of unbroken conservative rule than in any other West European society. Geographically, the capital of the country was about to shift back to Berlin—an upheaval of much greater significance, with no recent parallel in any other European country. Economically, the national currency was scheduled to disappear with the arrival of European monetary union: a transformation with a quite special charge in Germany, where the D-mark long served as a surrogate for more traditional forms of national identity. The sudden interlocking of three such basic alterations would make a formidable agenda for any society. Yet the prevailing mood could have been described as a state of denial.

Against this background, the gap between the reception and the result of the September election becomes more understandable. But viewed objectively, it is still striking enough. Recalling the popular enthusiasm that greeted Willy Brandt's victory in 1972, which put the SPD in office for a decade, many observers commented on the lack of any comparable electricity in the air
this time. The paradox is that the electoral upheaval in 1998 was greater. There are two ways of looking at this. One is to compare the relative performance of the two major parties. Between 1949 and 1994, the combination of the CDU and Bavaria's Christian Social Union outpolled the SPD by an overall average of some 7 per cent—a structural predominance of the Right far greater than in Britain, let alone France. Even at the height of its success in 1972, the SPD could secure a margin over the CDU/CSU of no more than 0.9 per cent. In 1998, for the first time ever, the SPD was well ahead of its rival—scoring 5.7 per cent more than the CDU/CSU, a historic reversal.

But there is another and more significant measure of the scale of the change, that puts this success into proportion. In 1972 the SPD won 45.8 per cent of the electorate. In 1998 it got just 40.9 per cent—well below its level even in 1980. There was no simple triumph of Social Democracy, old or new, here. The larger reality lay elsewhere. Overshadowing the performance of the SPD itself was the total score for the Left. With the Greens taking 6.7 per cent and the post-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) 5.1 per cent, for the first time in German history the Left as a whole won a clear-cut absolute majority of the country—52.7 per cent, a figure it has never reached in Britain.

What was the pattern of this victory? In West Germany after the war, religion was always the most reliable index of the regional strengths of Right and Left. Christian Democracy was interconfessional, but invariably predominated in the Catholic south—Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Rhine-Palatinate; whereas Social Democracy always did better in the Protestant north and centre—Lower Saxony, the Ruhr, Hessen. The exceptions were Schleswig-Holstein in the far north, where the large refugee population from the east initially tipped the balance towards the CDU, and the Saar in the far south, with its iron and coal the most working-class of all
Länder
, which later swung to the SPD. The correlation was always somewhat asymmetrical, since a majority of practising—as opposed to passive—Protestants voted Christian Democrat, so that SPD dominance in Lutheran Germany was never as secure as CDU in Catholic, and over time the link between religion and partisan preference has weakened.

But in 1998 the confessional gradient in the West German electorate was as striking as it had ever been. The SPD's highest scores came in the three northern-most
Länder
(higher still in its traditional bastions in the city-states of Hamburg and Bremen)—
all above 45 per cent; followed some way down by a middle belt of Hessen and the Rhine-Palatinate at 41 per cent; ending in the far south with Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, the two firmest strongholds of Christian Democracy, at around 35 per cent. The Saar was once again the exception, with the highest SPD vote in the country, over 52 per cent. Nation-wide, the CDU/CSU took 46 per cent of the Catholic and 36 per cent of the Protestant vote—the SPD, vice-versa, 46 per cent of the Protestant and 32 per cent of the Catholic. It was among non-believers that the SPD piled up a crushing margin over its rival—41 to 21 per cent.
¹

Class, of course, has been the other great determinant of German voting patterns. In the West, Christian Democracy this time lost more working-class votes than Social Democracy gained—the SPD increasing its share by only a percentage point. Schröder's appeal, pitched expressly to ‘the New Middle', proved most effective with white-collar employees, where the SPD gained 6 per cent nationwide, and pulled over significant numbers of the self-employed, some of them former Green supporters. There was little gender variance in the vote, with the exception of young women under twenty-four, who went for the SPD much more strongly than their male counterparts.

The truly dramatic change, however, came in the East. Traditionally, this was uniformly Protestant terrain, with large working-class concentrations in Berlin, Leipzig, Chemnitz, Dresden, Merseburg—enlarged by DDR industrialization after the war. It had long been reckoned natural SPD territory, in the event of reunification. The CDU's complete command of the democratic
Anschluss
of 1990 ensured the exact opposite. Promising ‘blooming landscapes' to the Eastern compatriots he had released from bondage, Kohl won a landslide in the former Communist
Länder
in 1990 and the critical margin for victory in the much closer national race of 1994. Four years later, disillusionment was complete, and popular anger at the collapse of employment in the East scythed the CDU vote, which fell to little more than a quarter of the total—a drop twice as steep as in the West. For the first time the SPD became the leading party in the region, if still with a much lower vote than in the West (35.6 to 42.4 per cent). Post-Communist success made the difference. The PDS took over 20 per cent in the East: more than two million votes.

In the electoral geography of Germany, these results are likely
to prove the real landmark. In the East the balance of forces has swung far away from that in the West, and will probably stay there. The contrast between the two nations can be seen from the total vote for the Left (SPD, Greens, PDS) in each: 60.3 per cent in the East against 50.6 in the West. Here was the pivot on which the precise parliamentary arithmetic of Schröder's government finally turned. It was the twelve ‘excess' mandates—beyond its proportional quota—the SPD won in the East that gave the Red–Green bloc its majority in the Bundestag. If the CDU had held its losses in the East to their level in the West, there would have been a Grand Coalition instead.

On view, then, is potentially the emergence of a long-run sociological majority for the Left in Germany, as the East reverts to what might be called a historical ‘default position', where the SPD and PDS regularly dominate. The religious landscape could be critical here. The one durable legacy of the DDR was Jacobin: within two generations, it achieved an astonishing de-Christianization of the population. Today 80 per cent of East German youth have no confessional affiliation whatever—the comparable figure is 10 per cent in West Germany—and no more than 7 per cent of Easterners are church-goers of any kind.
²
Lutheranism has given way to an irreligion still more inhospitable than the Evangelical Church to any hegemony by a Christian Democratic Right.

What kind of government has come out of this drastic shake-up? It is conventional to compare Schröder with Blair. One genuine point in common is the way both were effectively picked as candidates by the media before they were chosen by their party—comparison with Blair, in Schröder's case, being part of the anointing process itself. Telegenic looks, rhetoric of modernization, pursuit of the New Middle, the inspirational call of ‘time for a change': other parallels are ready to hand. But in some ways they are misleading. This has partly to do with the political figure himself, and more largely with his party. Where Blair—private schooling, stint at Oxbridge, lucrative practice at the bar—is a typical product of
a privileged middle-class background, Schröder—whose father was killed on the Russian front—comes from the broken debris of post-war German society. His mother was a charwoman; first job behind the counter in an ironmonger's shop; degree eventually obtained at night school. He became a leader of the Jusos, the SPD's youth organization, in the early seventies, when it was a rebellious arena well to the left of the party, and took active part in mass demonstrations of the time. In the eighties, though no firebrand, he helped topple Helmut Schmidt, and as late as 1994 was blocked by party elders as too unreliable to run for chancellor. The aura of moderate pragmatism is quite recent. But there is no lack of charm: rugged good looks, attractive thick voice, mischievous smile.

The larger difference, however, is institutional. The SPD is not in thrall to its chancellor. The party remains a very different animal from New Labour. Twice the size, with 700,000 individual members, sociologically its sub-culture remains noticeably more working class. The atmosphere of an SPD rally in any big industrial town is closer to Labour meetings of the sixties or seventies than to anything in today's Britain. The contrast is rooted not so much in any lag of modernization of the SPD—whose Bad Godesberg programme turned to the middle class long before Labour—as in the greater strength of German manufacturing, whose world-class performance has shielded workers in the West from the extremes of de-industrialization that have broken up so much of the traditional identity of the British working class. Trade-unions weathered the eighties better, and enjoy stronger relations with the party.

But a still more important difference between the two organizations lies in the regional distribution of power in the SPD. Germany's federal structure means that political careers are made first and foremost in the
Länder
, whose rulers always offer a repertoire of possible candidates for chancellor. By winning four successive federal elections, Kohl achieved a remarkable concentration of power in the CDU, but even he could not stop bitter enemies in the party from becoming important regional figures, like Biedenkopf (‘King Kurt') in Saxony. The SPD has never allowed the same personalization of authority as the CDU in a single leader. When it has been in power, the pattern has always has been a diarchy—Brandt and Wehner, or Schmidt and Brandt—with the chancellor flanked by a party chairman exercising major independent power, not to speak of the SPD regional prime ministers.

Schröder, catapulted within six months of winning a provincial election in Hanover to leadership of the country, is entitled to the gratitude of his party for its victory. But he has no deep following within it; indeed was widely distrusted, the party's attitude recalling the pithy maxim of one of Claud Cockburn's characters: ‘charm and dependability—so rarely go together'. The favourite of members and apparatus alike remains Oskar Lafontaine, whose skill, charisma and discipline galvanized the SPD machine in the years of Kohl's decline. Another post-war orphan from a poor family, educated by Jesuits in the Saar, Lafontaine became the brightest of ‘Brandt's grandchildren', the generation of SPD politicians who came to prominence in the eighties. Chairman of the SPD, and minister of finance, he is the first Western politician of aggressively Keynesian outlook in twenty-five years.