Photo: Sean Gallup at Getty
Heather Horn at The Atlantic with the round-up. Horn:
The German election results are in, with Angela Merkel reelected to the chancellorship at the head of a new ruling alliance. The bigger news in the election was the dramatic decline the the Social Democratic Party, still No. 2 in terms of seats, which some observers are hailing as the “end of an era for the European left.” How have the elections changed Germany’s direction, and what does it mean?
John O’Sullivan at NRO:
The headline result is therefore: Center-Right Coalition Replaces Right-Left “Grand Coalition.” Merkel will finally have the reforming conservative coalition she has always said she wanted. Her socially conservative Christian Democrats will have the economically conservative Free Democrats as their junior partner.
Together with the fact that Merkel’s own spokesman on economics is a risk-taking believer in market reforms, this probably means that Germany’s so-called “social market” economy will shift slightly rightwards with long-term structural reductions in tax and economic regulation.
There is unlikely to be a change in Germany’s relatively cautious fiscal stance, however. It represents an all-party consensus in favor of lower stimulus payments than Washington and London have launched. It reflects the German nervousness of inflation. The built-in fiscal counterweights to recession such as unemployment and welfare transfer payments have built up a large budget deficit as it is. And, finally, the overall mixture seems to be working without any additional injection of spending — and perhaps because there is no additional spending.
Angela Merkel wound up winning a strange kind of election victory, the kind where your party gets less support than it got before. Still, the CDU’s support only went down a little while the Social Democrats’ support collapsed and the liberal (in a European sense) Free Democrats gained a lot. The Greens and the Left Party also picked up support. The result is going to be some controversial free market reforms for Germany (I think the evidence suggests that most Germans actually don’t want the kind of reforms that this election result will lead to) and a real moment of crisis for the SPD that needs to really rethink some things
John Hinderaker at Powerline:
Once again, we see the sad spectacle of the Obama administration trying to mimic what has been worst in European politics, at the very time when Europeans are trying to break the shackles that have made their economies so much less productive than ours.
Gideon Rachman at Financial Times:
I think there are two big tests to look out for. First, tax cuts; both the CDU and the Free Democrats promised tax cuts – will they, can they, deliver? Second, what are they going to do about the Opel bail-out. Securing the future of a big car manufacturer was an important achievement for Merkel in the last days before the vote; but leading figures in the Free Democrats expressed misgivings about such a costly, anti-market measure. Whose views will prevail?
From Britain, where we face the prospect of spiralling tax rises, I can only envy those lucky Germans with their promise of lower taxes. But I wonder whether Merkel can really deliver. It is true that Germany’s budgetary position is slightly less dire than that of the UK – but it’s still pretty bad. Unemployment seems likely to rise over the next few months, which will put a further strain on the federal budget. The young professionals who voted Free Democrat and feel oppressed by the German tax burden will push for the coalition to deliver on its promises. But I suspect the tax cuts might be fairly token, at least at first.
I also think it highly unlikely that the new coalition will reverse course on the Opel bail-out – whatever the Free Democrats may think. The only thing that might persuade the German government to change course is pressure from Brussels and from Germany’s “European partners”.
Ole Reißmann at Business Week:
At around 2:20 a.m. local time, when the organization managing the federal elections published the voting results for all of Germany’s 16 federal states on its Web site, the nation saw a new power sitting on the seventh rung of the political ladder: The Pirate Party had managed to get 2 percent of the vote.
Granted, it’s not enough for the party to enter the German government, since a political party has to get 5 percent of the vote to do that. But for political newcomers like the Pirates, this can be interpreted as a success worth paying attention to. In many large German cities, they even got as much as 3 percent of the vote. And they were particularly popular among first-time male voters, from whom they might have won as much as 13 percent of the vote.
“This election has shown that the issues we’re campaigning for are important and that we will be more successful in the future,” party leader Jens Seipenbusch said at its post-election celebration. In a short time, his party has become the unofficial representative of Internet activists in Germany who don’t feel any affinity for the other parties and who have been feeling threatened in their natural environment—that is, online.
Around The Sphere 