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If you’re a German politician looking to achieve statesman status, just follow these three, easy rules:
Don’t cheat on, or lie about your PhD;
Do be a champion of consensus;
Don’t become minister of defense (Boris Pistorius TBD).
The first and third rules are essential for any kind of domestic political existence, statesman-like or otherwise, but you can survive breaking them if your aspirations take you beyond Germany to, say, live out your aristocratic American Dream™ in Greenwich, CT. There, in the land of continuous personal reinvention with other people’s money, they’ve never heard of Bayreuth.
It’s that second one that’s really key. Without it, Angela Merkel could not have evolved into the beloved chancellor and Columbia Teutonia she became, an honorific that remains largely untainted by Russian war in Ukraine, populist rise at home, and climate catastrophe everywhere. Like her American contemporary who helped deliver us Donald Trump before checking out to pursue his true passion in media moguldum, deft rhetorical skill and identity-politics bona fides filled the space left empty by new or bold ideas. When you’re a blank canvas, the collective electoral artist can paint whatever picture on you that suits, soothes, or sells.
Merkel’s onetime foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has also profited from a careful adherence to status quo. The ceremonial and above-the-fray emeritus role as president appears made for him. Steinmeier’s silver-fox optics and gravelly oratory have proved effective, whether showing up in Poland metaphorically “barefoot” — the literal, knee-fall option was taken already by an earlier Social Democrat — extolling the virtues of liberal democracy, or pleading with his erstwhile SPD comrades to enter yet another Grand Coalition “for the good of the country,” even though they promised they wouldn’t, few wanted it, and it actually wasn’t very good for the country (or Europe, for that matter). The devil you know, after all …
Bonus statesman points if you’re dead. Wolfgang Schäuble checked that box on the country’s second Christmas day just gone by. Hailed as a latter-day saint in the Church of German Officialdom, as finance minister Schäuble had the privilege of getting his country a great deal on Greece’s bailout terms at the low, low cost of the European Union’s stability and the euro’s viability. Sure both are still around, and church gospel credits Team Schäuble for that, but austerity has left the EU — in its sum and its parts — poorer, weaker, and full of Eurosceptics preying on legitimate electoral disenchantment across the bloc.
If the EU is the fruition of a system made in Germany’s image, no wonder it is known for simply lurching from one crisis to another with little proactive effort to get ahead of the curve.
Schäuble, an expression of Christian Democrat politics in human form, was in the finance seat when his fellow lawmakers used Germany’s psuedo-constitution to rein in their own fiscal prowess. The Basic Law was amended to cap public borrowing at the low, low figure of .35% of GDP. At current rates, this “debt brake” effectively restricts the world’s fourth-largest economy and the EU’s largest to borrowing just €15 billion annually, ensuring that budgets are both balanced and based on revenues, not debt.
It also ensures that Germany will always have just enough financial firepower to hold the line, but never to advance. In keeping with the military imagery, it’s like providing Ukraine with just enough weapons to let it slowly bleed out in a war of attrition without the capacity to achieve the strategic goals those weapons are intended for. (Not that that would ever happen — merely a thought experiment to illustrate a point.)
Germany’s debt pathology has deep roots, most notably the Weimar experience. By now it’s almost cliche to draw a line from the post-Kaiser republic’s debt-fueled inflationary spiral, catalyzed by global Depression, to Nazi ascent. The constitutional changes themselves, however, were more a response to events of younger memory: the considerable undertaking required to undo East German socialism in the 1990s and a collapse in tax revenue as a result of the Great Recession.
Debt-brake defenders will say that it’s merely a mechanism to comply with European law, but that is something of a fait accompli. The Maastricht Treaty, the founding document of the EU as we know it today that sets national deficit and debt limits for member states and those wishing to be, was a product of negotiations involving Germany. Less tangibly, the place that debt takes in the Teutonic Imaginary is an indicator of its limited ambition. You can exceed the strict debt limits to confront a national emergency — keep up with status quo, in other words — but not to invest in national development. So there is extra money for floods and fighter jets, but not for healthcare and trains.
In coming up with the debt brake, lawmakers apparently could not imagine a scenario where borrowing might not only be useful, but beneficial. So the new rules came into force right when interest rates were so ahistorically and stupidly low that a country like Germany, with a range of means to solicit highly favorable lending terms, could basically spend on credit for free. Under such conditions, stubborn commitment to thrift becomes little more than a pedantic soapbox to stand on — one you dogmatically bought with your own money when a bank would have pragmatically financed it at little additional cost to you.
Germany has a very prudent way of managing its money very poorly. Now, most everything is underfunded — schools, early childhood care, old-age care, healthcare of all stripes, rail, climate adaptation and transformation, broadband internet — just in time for high inflation, the end of free money, and the first time in a long time that the government has a robust, and mean-spirited, opposition to deal with. The resulting budget crisis, which has pulled the carpet out from under the coalition’s three left feet since November, is about as unnecessary as it is unsurprising.
It’s not Merkel’s cuddly CDU anymore, which dissolved into its SPD partner — and vice versa — until the two parties were all but indistinguishable. The ideological dilution has exacerbated the pull of the AfD’s far-right populism, as reflected in the rightward lurch of the rest of the spectrum. It has also flattened political diversity — an impressive, albeit undesirable feat for a multi-party system. Instead, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has the CDU of Friedrich Merz to confront, a party leader whose level of apparent self-satisfaction more than makes up for any paucity of external affection. You don’t climb to the C-suite of one of the world’s most notorious investment firms without cracking a few skulls, and that is on display every time the two men duel at the parliamentary dais.
Granted, it’s easier for opposition to criticize than government to execute, but Merz has Scholz at every rhetorical turn. More than two years on the job, it has not seemed to dawn on Scholz, himself no stranger to self-satisfaction, that positions are defended, not imposed; and support for them is earned through argument, not assumed with aloofness. When things go poorly, you take responsibility for it even if factors beyond your control are to blame. Pointing them out is a bad look. It’s a raw deal, I agree, but that’s the one you take in exchange for power.
Merz’s CDU has effectively checked almost every government policy initiative, sometimes with the Free Democrats acting as double agents from inside the coalition it belongs to. After years of Merkelian consensus, which should worry any good democrat, it’s been refreshing to see prickly debate return to the Bundestag. Ideally, however, democratic disagreement arises in the interest of the country and its constituents. In Merz’s case it often comes off as in his interest — to tank the government, at almost any cost, and become chancellor himself.
Partially as a result, you now have farmers once again rolling out their tractors to block roads in nationwide protest of proposed cuts that may impact their livelihoods. Their tactics look a lot like the climate kids who glue themselves to intersection asphalt, but no one in Germany’s media and political elite is calling the farmers “terrorists” and supporting police raids against them.
The glaring double standard suggests Germany’s “center” is perhaps not as centrist as it likes to see itself. I’ll let you guess which of the protest groups seems to have more of a right to their rights. (Hint: It’s the one with at least murmurs of “fatherland” sentiment running through it and, like pandemic conspirators before them, are more likely to directly confront officials with their discontents.)
It is a fine example of how insisting on staying the course just blows you more off course. So desperate the Greens are to fight a losing battle against the dogged perception of their eco-radicalism, they would rather distance themselves from climate allies in the streets and embrace old-guard farmers than come out with a bold agenda their critics accuse them of secretly harboring, anyway. And by “bold” I mean such revolutionary changes as a highway speed limit, which in Germany is tantamount to wanting to overthrow the federal republic as we know it.
Merz, of course, denies taking pleasure in any of the little fires he has helped set, as he did when defending his party’s decision to take the government’s budget proposal to court last year. The twinkle of glee in his eye, as he asserted to “not have triumphed” over the constitutional court’s agreement that €60 billion in unused credit earmarked for the COVID-19 pandemic could not be reallocated to a catch-all climate fund, suggested otherwise. It’s hard to knock rule of law, but it’s an open question whether judicial review was really what Merz was after when he challenged the government’s financial shenanigans.
They were shenanigans, no doubt, but only because that’s the way German law wants them to be. The budget “crisis,” not unlike the lingering migrant one, is a made up one. Leaving €60 billion of powder dry is a political choice, not an inviolable decree. Now, the country so often applauded for its technocratic seriousness and far-sighted stability faces budgetary uncertainty for 2024 and beyond. In a place where just about everything is, one way or another, state funded, that is particularly unnerving.
The more real and serious crisis — constitutional, economic, ecological — is not whether this fiscal bait-and-switch was a technical violation of the debt brake, but how to comply with this ruling and one from 2021 that goes the other way. Taken together, the court has essentially ordered the state be in two places at once: Do more to combat climate change, but not with all this leftover pandemic money. No wonder even some CDU members are waking up to realize that maybe the debt brake, as written, poses as much a threat to the national interest as the insolvent extreme it exists to prevent.
For Americans and those who follow American politics, this whole ordeal may sound rather familiar — much to the chagrin of German Officialdom that feels a great deal of schadenfreude whenever its ally across the Atlantic gets caught in its own imaginary traps. Only, in the United States, it’s not a brake that brings deficit spending to a halt, but a ceiling that keeps finances constrained. Neither has much grounding in economics, or relation to national priorities or flexibilities; they’re invented mechanisms to feign responsibility, use irresponsibly, and ensure that nothing can ever be too good.
What’s the difference between a German brake and an American ceiling? Culture. The U.S. is a circus of showmen, where politics plays out as public spectacle to the winner-takes-all benefit of (or detriment to) the individual. Germany is a gentlemen’s club of petit bourgeois, who obsessively safeguard their collective gains. It’s easier to laugh, or recoil, at the American show, but the closed-door placidity of German spending pathos is just another means to a similar end. The more things stay the same, the more things fall apart.