Currently, the leading polls are all pointing toward a coalition of the SPD, the environmentalist Green Party, and the leftist Die Linke. Until just a few years ago, the SPD had always ruled out coalitions with Die Linke at the federal level because the hard-left party was too radical, but things have changed.

Never before in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany have the polls been so bad for the governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. As recently as April 2020, Angela Merkel’s CDU was leading the polls with thirty-eight percent. Now, depending on the polling institute, the CDU has tumbled to between twenty-one and twenty-four percent. One reason for the party’s declining popularity is that they are running with a very weak candidate for Chancellor. Armin Laschet, currently premier of Germany’s most populous state, has so far failed to inspire both his own party and the wider electorate.

Above all, however, it seems that the left-of-center Social Democratic Party (SPD) is succeeding in deceiving voters to an extent that is also unparalleled in the history of the Federal Republic. The SPD has gained about ten percentage points in recent polls, mainly thanks to its top candidate, Olaf Scholz, who is widely regarded as a relative “moderate.” Yet Scholz has never been popular within his own party. In recent years, the SPD has moved further and further to the far left. It has elected Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans as co-leaders and Kevin Kühnert as deputy leaders. All three of these politicians have adopted positions that are as left-wing as, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In electing their party’s leaders, the SPD’s members explicitly decided in favor of these extreme left-wing candidates and against Olaf Scholz. So why did the SPD nevertheless appoint the “moderate” Olaf Scholz as its top candidate? For the same reason that the Democrats selected Joe Biden as their presidential candidate. They hope to use Olaf Scholz to mobilize moderate voters who are not as far to the left as the party’s traditional base.

Currently, the leading polls are all pointing toward a coalition of the SPD, the environmentalist Green Party, and the leftist Die Linke. Until just a few years ago, the SPD had always ruled out coalitions with Die Linke at the federal level because the hard-left party was too radical. Die Linke is the latest iteration of the former communist SED party that governed East Germany, having changed its name several times since German reunification. Die Linke is committed to an extensive program of nationalizations, a top tax rate of seventy-five percent, and withdrawing from NATO. Until a few months ago, the party’s new leader, Janine Wissler, was a member of a radical Trotskyist group.

The major focus of the left-wing Greens is protecting the environment and fighting climate change. Many in the German media support the Greens and, on Germany’s de facto state television, most journalists do very little to hide their sympathies. The German capital, Berlin, is already governed by a coalition of the SPD, Greens, and Die Linke. The Greens and Die Linke have thrown their weight behind a campaign to expropriate housing companies that own more than 3,000 rental apartments in the city. The Green’s co-leaders, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, have said they support expropriating real estate companies as a “last resort.” All three leftist parties would reintroduce the wealth tax, which was abolished in Germany in 1997.

The SPD and Greens are now pursuing a policy that can only be described as voter deception. Almost every day they are asked whether they are open to a coalition with Die Linke. While they do not rule it out, they are also careful not to openly profess that this is one of their goals because they know it would lose them thousands, if not millions, of votes.

A coalition of these three parties would radically change Germany. They are all committed to cutting German defense spending, despite the fact it is already low in comparison to other NATO members. What Angela Merkel has already started, namely the transformation of Germany’s market economy into a planned economy, would once again be massively accelerated by these three parties. In the capital Berlin, where the three parties already govern, it is clear what this would mean for the country as a whole: repeated violations of Germany’s constitution. For example, the three parties in Berlin passed a law that forced landlords to massively reduce rents on existing leases. In fact, the law represented nothing less than the partial expropriation of real estate owners. Germany’s highest court declared the legislation unconstitutional, but the SPD and Die Linke now want to introduce a similar law that would apply to the whole of Germany. Political freedom in Berlin is also coming under intense pressure, especially the right to demonstrate. While left-wing demonstrations are generally approved, demonstrations by critics of the government’s coronavirus policies, for example, are banned or broken up with brutal police force. What is happening in Berlin provides a foretaste of how Germany as a whole will change if the SPD, Die Linke, and the Greens come to power. On September 26, Germany votes—and this could very well be an election that radically changes Germany’s political landscape for many years to come.

Rainer Zitelmann is the author of The Power of Capitalism and The Rich in Public Opinion.

Source: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/germany-verge-political-earthquake-192743

The post Is Germany On the Verge of a Political Earthquake? first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The policy package both facilitates deportation of failed asylum seekers and migrants’ access to the labor market.

BERLIN — Germany on Friday passed a controversial package of bills bringing major changes to the country’s asylum and immigration policy following a fierce debate in parliament.

The package included the so-called Geordnete-Rückkehr-Gesetz — or “Orderly Return Law” — which facilitates the deportation of failed asylum seekers and expands related powers of police and immigration authorities.

The new law’s aim, according to its draft version, is to “significantly increase” the proportion of successful deportations. Approximately half of the planned 188,000 deportations from Germany since 2015 failed or were not carried out, according to interior ministry data.

Yet the policy package also included measures to improve access to Germany’s labor market for skilled migrants. For instance, migrants without asylum status who arrived before last summer will be able to stay for the time being if they have a job and speak German. In addition, it scrapped previous rules that required German employers to prove that they found no German or other EU citizen to take the job in order to employ a skilled non-EU migrant.

The package was mired in controversy, in particular due to the deportation legislation, and prompted a fierce debate in parliament, underscoring the extent to which Germany’s political landscape remains divided over migration.

Ahead of Friday’s Bundestag debate, the Greens and the far-left Die Linke party had unsuccessfully tried to remove the vote on the legislative package, which they said infringed on asylum seekers’ rights and had been rushed through parliament, from the agenda.

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer from the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), insisted that the legislation was necessary to ensure failed asylum seekers would be deported.

“This is a turning point in our migration policy,” Seehofer said in the Bundestag, adding that in his eyes “this migration package creates a set of rules that respects humanity and order.” He also underlined that the importance of granting foreign skilled workers better access to Germany’s labor market.

Ulla Jelpke, a member of Die Linke, labeled the new legislation a “catalog of atrocities” and said it amounts to “currying favor with racists.” Jörg Schindler, Die Linke’s secretary-general, called the policy package “unconstitutional.”

The Greens’ Filiz Polat spoke of a “dark day for democracy” and also raised concerns that aspects of the law might not be compatible with Germany’s constitution.

Meanwhile, the far-right Alternative for Germany’s Gottfried Curio said that if so many deportations failed, “maybe we should protect the borders.”

In an op-ed in Germany’s Handelsblatt on Friday, former German Social Democrat (SPD) leader Sigmar Gabriel expressed support for a more “robust asylum policy.”

He encouraged his party, which has tumbled in the polls and found itself in the worst crisis of its post-war history, to look towards Denmark, where the Social Democrats won Wednesday’s general election after campaigning on a tougher immigration stance.

“Mette Frederiksen has shown that the Socialists can win elections if they stand for a clear policy,” Gabriel wrote. “The German comrades are far from it.”

The Social Democrats’ decline has raised questions over the viability of Germany’s ailing coalition government, in which the SPD are the junior partner to Merkel’s CDU. A recent poll found a majority of Germans favor calling a snap election.

But on Friday, the CDU’s Thorsten Frei said his party’s coalition with the SPD was not in crisis, adding that the migration package passing was the best “proof for the grand coalition’s ability to take action.”

The returns law passed by 372 to 159 votes, with 111 abstentions. The labor market access law passed by 369 to 257 votes.

Source: https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-passes-controversial-migration-law/

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• Angela Merkel has had a profound influence on German politics and could get away with radical changes because she tightly controlled her own party
• However, Merkel’s inability to explain her actions during the 2015 refugee crisis helped fuel the Alternative for Germany party — a radical-right populist party whose only policy plank is hostility to immigrants and minorities.
• Merkel had one last chance to leave behind a coherent union— but with her allies demanding “less Europe,” it is clear that she has failed.

The British politician Enoch Powell famously observed that “all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel appears to defy this rule.

The present is hardly a happy juncture for her, yet her October 29 announcement that she will step down as leader of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has been lauded by observers as both dignified and elegant.

Whether she can continue as chancellor until 2021, as she has said she would, is de facto not in her hands: Were the Social Democratic Party to leave the ruling coalition before then, prompting elections, she would not run again.

Still, she is perceived as supremely in control, just as she has always seemed in control since heading her first government in 2005 — with the fateful exception of the fall of 2015, when many citizens felt that the German state was no longer in charge of its own borders, as hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed into the country.

‘You know me’

Conventional wisdom has it that her decision to let in refugees might mar her legacy; in reality, historians might well celebrate her for this moment of courage and compassion.

Sebastian Widmann/Getty Images

It is the long-term effects of her reign on German politics and her evident inability to create a lasting architecture for European integration that make a straightforwardly positive assessment of her tenure more doubtful.

Merkel has had an even more profound influence on German politics than the oft-discussed fragmentation of the party system suggests.

As the German political scientist Philip Manow has argued, she was less a chancellor with a strong party behind her than a president, or sometimes even something like a civil servant-in-chief, floating above parties in an era when a succession of crises — starting with the financial crisis — made concentration of power in the executive more legitimate.

SEE ALSO: Germany is taking a step to punish Saudi Arabia that Trump has repeatedly said he won’t go near

Contrary to the cliche that strong political leaders must be charismatic, she often appeared passive or even impersonal. She once suggested to German citizens that they should re-elect her because, “You know me.” In actual fact, most Germans will feel precisely the opposite: They see Merkel as an eminently reliable and highly analytical civil servant, but not as a politician who has ever systematically staked out a vision for the country.

She could govern smoothly, because for most of her time in office, public coffers were full. (Whether Germany’s boom is the result of the harsh labor market and welfare state reforms undertaken by her Social Democratic predecessor Gerhard Schröder remains disputed; what cannot be disputed is Manow’s insight that, unlike previous chancellors, she had to contend much less with the checks and balances built into the German political system, because rising tax revenues made compromises easier.)

Merkel’s sharp policy turns, on nuclear energy and the draft, for instance — which actually outright contradicted the “you know me” claim — could only have been pulled off by someone who was seen as more of a civil servant-in-chief, someone who simply chose the most seemingly reasonable course of action, quite beyond partisan commitments.

Something like technocracy

In fact, she raided the policies of her competitors, the Social Democrats in particular, thereby systematically demobilizing the party’s voters. At the same time, the decision to abandon nuclear reactors after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster opened the possibility of coalitions with the Green party — thereby increasing the room for strategic maneuver of the CDU.

Merkel could get away with such radical changes partly because she tightly controlled her own party, sidelining potential competitors in a Machiavellian manner. But the other reason was that she convinced many Germans that there was a reasonable center over which she presided, where partisan differences did not matter all that much.

 Christian Hartmann/Reuters

A less polite way of saying this is that Merkel’s default way of governing was something like technocracy. Especially during the euro crisis, she claimed that there was no alternative to her solutions to policy challenges. All who disagreed effectively revealed themselves as irrational — and bad Europeans, as well as, by implication, bad Germans to boot, because the definition of a good German is being enthusiastic about European integration.

As in other countries, technocracy actually paved the way for populism. It is not an accident that the far-right party that was created in response to Merkel’s leadership is called Alternative for Germany (AfD). Populists can (correctly) claim that democracy without choices makes no sense; there is always an alternative, and it is up to voters whether they prefer it or not.

Migrants weren’t the crisis

In retrospect, the initial reaction of many centrist politicians to the AfD, then still mostly led by respected conservative professors and businesspeople, was probably a mistake: All criticism of measures to rescue the common European currency was condemned in highly moralizing terms, which arguably contributed to the radicalization of the AfD.

 Alexandros Avramidis/Reuters

In 2015, the Euroskeptic party still seemed likely to disappear, as many right-wing challengers to the CDU had done in the past. After all, Merkel took a very tough stance on Greece in the summer of that year and thereby satisfied voters who (wrongly) believed that Berlin was giving money to Athens for free.

Yet, soon after, the decision to take in refugees revived — and further radicalized — the AfD, making it what it is today: a radical-right populist party whose only real policy plank is hostility to immigrants and other minorities (and which, alas, is now represented in all German state assemblies, as well as the federal parliament).

It was Merkel’s inability to explain her conduct in 2015 — and the fact that all parties represented in parliament at the time supported her, alongside many in the media — that probably helped to solidify the image on which all populist parties crucially depend: that of an homogeneous elite that is in all likelihood corrupt, but at the very least not acting in the interests of ordinary people.

To this day, many Germans find it hard to understand whether the temporary opening of the borders was a matter of hard-nosed strategy to prevent a collapse of the European Union or humanitarianism. The answer that there was no alternative proved insufficient then and is insufficient today.

Democracy is not just talk, but politics can also never stay silent. Merkel’s pronounced pragmatism — combined with a discourse so noncommittal that it would drive journalists crazy — has contrasted sharply with, for instance, the sometimes sentimental conceptions of Europe put forward by her Christian Democratic predecessors, most notably Helmut Kohl. And Merkel’s aversion to anything like visionary leadership has certainly made it more difficult now to build a proper structure for the EU in the wake of the euro crisis and what is often misleadingly described as the “migrant crisis” — as French President Emmanuel Macron pointed out, migrants weren’t the crisis; it was a crisis of the European political order.

‘Less Europe’

While many Europeans (not least in Brussels) are allergic to talking about the EU as a state in the making, the obvious fact is that at least parts of the union by now have two of the essential attributes of statehood: a common currency and a common border. The challenge after 2015 would have been to make both function properly.

Clearly, Merkel’s attempts to forge a common European approach to refugees became more difficult as an increasing number of politicians, from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to Austria’s Sebastian Kurz and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, discovered that xenophobia could make their political careers.

Still, Merkel had a last chance to leave behind a coherent union when Macron launched his plans for a renewed EU in 2017 and when she was forced into a coalition with the Social Democrats earlier this year.

Rather than simply muddling through in yet another grand coalition, Merkel and her defeated opponent, Martin Schulz (who had spent most of his political life in the European Parliament), could have provided a real rationale for their cooperation by laying out an ambitious plan to remake the EU — which would have justified the two largest parties working together to maximize backing from German society.

None of this has happened, and it is now unlikely to happen, as Macron is losing momentum and even nominal Merkel allies such as Dutch leader Mark Rutte mechanically demand “less Europe.”

Perhaps one day Germans will blame Merkel for not having used excellent economic conditions to dare to do more. They might also wonder whether the creation of an eminently reasonable, technocratic center was not ultimately detrimental for democracy — and if the fragmentation of the party system, while making political life more complicated, was actually also a way to re-establish a sense of democratic choice.

In any case, they will think of Merkel as embodying a fundamental decency — an especially important contrast with certain other leaders today.

Read the original article on Foreign Policy.

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  Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/angela-merkel-leader-world-failed-2018-11?r=UK&IR=T

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