The End of Merkel is Nigh

Yesterday Brazilians elected the fascist Jair Bolsonaro president. Possibly the more momentous election yesterday was in the German state of Hesse. There the two parties -- the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) -- that govern Germany nationally in coalition each saw their support drop by over ten percent. The big winners in terms of increased vote share were the Greens and Alternative for Germany (AfD), which enjoyed a jump of 8.7% and 9%, respectively.

Even though in terms of number of seats won CDU came out on top as the clear winner in Hesse, the erosion of support from the last election is the big story, so much so that today Angela Merkel announced that she will not seek reelection as party chairwoman.

Merkel wants to serve as chancellor until federal elections in 2021, but the pressure on the SPD to withdraw from the GroKo is going to be immense. If the SPD scuttles the GroKo, new elections will be called; if new federal elections are called, SPD's disappearing act will continue.

The Greens seem to be the chief beneficiary. In a story published after state elections in Bavaria earlier this month, Ella Joyner's laid out the electoral dynamic currently at play in Germany:

The answer lies in the performance of Germany’s ruling parties, today joined in a grand coalition. Following multiple cabinet showdowns this summer, each of which brought the gears of government to a halt, discontented voters from all the ruling parties — the CDU/CSU and the social-democratic SPD — seem to be drifting toward the Greens. Just over two-fifths of the Green’s new supporters have migrated from the SPD and a quarter have wandered over from the CDU/CSU, according to a poll published in Die Welt newspaper.

There was a good post-Bavaria write-up, "As Voters on Left and Right Rebel, Glimpse of a Post-Merkel Germany," by The New York Times' two main reporters in Germany, Katrin Bennhold and Melissa Eddy, that accurately forecast yesterday's result in Hesse and today's announcement by Merkel. Bennhold and Eddy wrote that in the elections in Bavaria,

“The sheer exhaustion exuded by Merkel and the grand coalition shows there is no energy left there,” said Martin Florack, a professor of political science at the Duisburg-Essen University. “People have the urge to see change.”

Change is what both the Alternative for Germany and the Greens in Bavaria promised, and both gained support in the vote.

But the Greens, running on a platform of open borders, liberal social values and the fight against climate change, gained more. The once-fringe environmental party has now emerged as one of the strongest forces in German politics. It doubled its vote in Bavaria, to nearly 17.5 percent in an election in which turnout surged to over 70 percent.

“You’re seeing an affluent, beautiful stretch of Germany diversifying, normalizing after nearly 60 years of the closest thing to a single party state in a democracy,” said Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff of the German Marshall Fund.

[snip] 

The question of how to win back disaffected voters from the far right has preoccupied Ms. Merkel’s conservative party ever since the latest wave of migrants began arriving in 2015, and the AfD started eating into its voter base. Some fear that by moving the party too far to the center, the chancellor has energized the far right.

Now that Bavaria’s conservatives have tried — and failed — to lure voters back by echoing the far right’s anti-immigrant slogans, some conservatives are urging a more positive message.

“With this result, we have seen that a shift to the right is false — plain and simple,” said Armin Laschet, one of Ms. Merkel’s deputies in the Christian Democratic party and the governor of the industrial state of North Rhine-Westphalia. “We need to focus on liberal voters, Christian voters, and stop talking about the threat from the right.”

Far-right ultra-nationalist electoral politics is a mirage that can baffle voters in a two-party system like the United States (when a demagogue captures a branch of the duopoly), as well as a multiparty democracy like Brazil.

The positive development in Germany is that it appears support for AfD has reached its ceiling. The new center will be some combination of Greens, Christian Democrats and the SPD moving in the direction of its youth wing.

The problem is with this last GroKo as tainted as it is, and with new federal elections likely to deliver a splintered landscape, it's hard to see how to form a government out of this.

Trump scrapping the INF treaty, not to mention the U.S. embrace of al-Saud, will push German voters in a pro-peace direction.