Intelligence

A new age is dawning in Berlin

A new age is dawning in Berlin - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

By Richard Bernstein The New York Times
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2005

BERLIN Fully two months after one of the strangest and most inconclusive elections in Germany's modern history, Parliament seems set on Tuesday to elect Angela Merkel, chairman of the conservative Christian Democratic Party, as the first woman chancellor.

Merkel will immediately take power, name a cabinet and, after weeks of intense negotiations over a program to pursue, actually start governing in what is called a grand coalition with her chief rivals, the Social Democratic Party of the outgoing chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.

But there is more than the fact that Merkel is a woman or even that she will be the first chancellor from the former East Germany that is promising to make Tuesday a moment to remember in this country's history.

In what now seems a swift and, in many respects, unexpected change, Merkel's arrival in power signals a shift to a new political generation here, one that did not go through the usual rites of passage to power in Germany.

By an almost eerie coincidence, the Social Democrats last week elected a new leader, Matthias Platzeck, who is also an Easterner, leading to much comment that, after holding them in something close to contempt for the first decade after reunification, the Western power brokers of this country have turned to Easterners to guide them out of deep economic crisis.

The similarities between Merkel and Platzeck are remarkable.

They are not only both Easterners, but also the same age, 51, or 10 years younger than Schröder. Like Merkel, Platzeck was trained as a scientist and again like Merkel, he became involved in politics only as the East German government was falling.

That Merkel and Platzeck both emerged to leading roles just now probably does not constitute a broad trend. Yet, analysts believe, they do represent some of the qualities of the generation that is taking over in German politics.

That generation is being viewed by commentators and analysts as a potentially more pragmatic, less ideological group than those who have governed Germany for the past half century or so.

Perhaps most significantly of all, the new leaders are one step further removed from the earlier leadership's preoccupation with German history and the limitations that this history placed on their freedom of action.

Gone, in other words, is the generation, represented by such former chancellors as Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, that brought West Germany safely through the Cold War and into the era of reunification. Gone too are the more recent politicians, like Schröder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who received their political formation during the 1960s student protests and who have dominated German politics for the last seven years.

What takes their place is not entirely sure, in part because they are outsiders and thus have less of a track record than is normal at that level of German politics.

Indeed, it is far from certain that the coalition government Merkel will bring into power will last long enough to make much of an impact.

But what is certain is that, at a moment that everybody deems a critical one for this country, the top leaders of both parties are different from what came before.

"It's an important symbol that the Easterners have come to power," said Uwe Andersen, a political science professor at Ruhr University in Bochum. "They have a more pragmatic way of doing things and they are used to big changes in life and therefore, I think, they are not so reluctant to face up to new challenges."

Another specialist on German politics, Claus Leggewie of Giessen University, predicts that the new leaders, in partial rebellion against the generation that came before, will be more conservative, more focused on business and on concrete problems and less interested in the moral preoccupations of the recent German past.

"The irony of the political generation of '68 is that they created a kind of normal Germany," he said. "Their approach was one of guilt, of never again this kind of dictatorship. They had an alarmist approach to German history and society."

Despite that, he said, Germany under their rule has become more like other countries, able to pursue its self-interest more or less unapologetically.

"Whatever direction we go in will not be justified by history any more," Leggewie said. "It's no longer about history, but about the concrete problems that we have. This has really changed."

Merkel comes to power in a situation as fraught as any facing a new government, with Germany's economy having stagnated for five years, unemployment at post-World War II highs and, perhaps most important, no consensus across the nation about what to do about it.

Over the weeks, as the price she had to pay for coming to power, Merkel not only had to give the rival party half the seats in the cabinet, but also had to jettison, at least for now, many of the elements of the platform on which she campaigned.

In exchange for agreement from the Social Democrats to retain a 3 percent increase in sales taxes, a central part of her original program, Merkel accepted an income tax increase that will be imposed on the wealthy and saw her proposals to reform the labor market and health insurance system put on indefinite hold.

The deal to create a coalition has been criticized by many in Germany as a sort of lowest common denominator program inadequate to the task of reviving the economy. But the compromises that the two sides made also seem to reflect the deep uncertainty in the electorate about how much to give up in the country's elaborate social welfare system for the sake of economic competitiveness.

Will the coalition last its full four-year term? Many believe that it will, if only because the electorate will punish any party to the coalition that stops cooperating and forces unwanted new elections, which might be as inconclusive as the election in September.

But others believe that the parties and their constituencies are too different to be able to avoid serious conflict in the near future, especially if there is no progress in Germany's most immediate task, which is to bring down the 11 percent rate of unemployment.

November 21, 2005 at 06:04 PM in Europe | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home