Everybody hates Olaf Scholz

Germans look at democracy and they don't like what they see.

Did you know the Bundesrat does stuff? No, neither did I! And I have lived here and covered these things for years.

Perhaps you don’t even know what the Bundesrat is. Or that Germany’s political system is bicameral. After all, as one of the world’s largest democratically elected houses of parliament, it’s the Bundestag that gets all the attention. Pff.

The Bundesrat is Germany’s much smaller, upper house of parliament. Whereas the Bundestag represents voters, and are directly elected by them (and also not! Because voting is so nice it’s better to do it twice), the Bundesrat represents the states, of which there are 16. This is one reason why you can’t nod off when the news turns to election results in Schleswig-Holstein.

The current composition of the Bundesrat

And you wanted to say that Schleswig-Holstein doesn’t matter. Pff.

The composition of state governments impacts the make up of the Bundesrat, which can influence federal lawmaking. The Bundesrat is where the states have their say. Germany is very proud of its federalism, and this is federalism at work. Or, as they say around here, Ländersache.

If School House Rock came to Germany, this is basically how it would go:

Parties form a government coalition and sign off on a coalition agreement that lists their legislative priorities → The government cabinet ministers put forward bills, based on that agreement, for the Bundestag’s consideration → The Bundestag is, by definition, controlled by the parties in government, so there is some fake debate and the opposition gets a chance to say how much better their bills are that will never pass → The Bundestag rubber-stamps the bill that the government already agreed to → The Bundesrat rubber-stamps the bill that the Bundestag passed → The cabinet signs off on the bill that it put forward in the first place → Voila! A law is born.

I am oversimplifying a bit, and there are some additional pathways in that flowchart, but you get the gist.

There is a fundamental tension here. Due to its history, Germany really craves political stability. For as much as Germans yearn for the clever zingers of the British Parliament, they are too scared to actually embrace them. An effort in the Merkel-era to adopt the United Kingdom’s famous Prime Minister’s Questions got bogged down in so many careful parameters and such self-defeating process, it became a predictably very German affair. John Bercow would have had very little to do.

“Or-der!” Aber gerne!

The system is designed to protect democracy from itself, keeping a lid on core democratic characteristics — namely, debate, dissent, and disagreement. Too much of any of those provokes memories of Weimar. What you get instead is at least the appearance of consensus and conformity. Most everything has already been negotiated in advance, making the public-facing legislative process largely a fait accompli.

It’s a rather authoritarian way to secure democratic norms. What the government has announced it wants to see happen more or less does.

Until now …

The government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been one of the most unpredictable in a very long time. Maybe ever. Bills have failed to pass. Parties in the coalition have jumped ship. The opposition has effectively stood in the way.

Then there’s the Bundesrat, where the tables turn. The conservative Christian Democrats might be out of power at the federal level, but they still control several state governments, which gives them power in the upper house. Already that has helped push back against the government’s desired pandemic regulations, a reform of social benefits, and now there’s talk of killing the government’s much-touted “growth opportunity act.” (No, it doesn’t sound much slicker in German.)

Social Democrat Scholz might be OK with giving German industry a seven-billion-euro tax break, but the states effectively paying for that out of their tax base are less pleased. Some of them are already saying: Back to the drawing board. That has happened in previous legislative periods — four times on the Bundesrat’s part during the last one — but the upper house’s role is getting new attention these days.

Mind you, we are not talking American-levels of political paralysis where budgets can’t pass and government shuts down. What we’re seeing is competing interests staking out positions as they vie for the upper-hand in policies that hope to address major issues in a time of mounting crisis. Meanwhile, a major party in opposition — something Germany has not had in a long while — has an eye on the next round of general elections and is looking to score points with the public.

In other words, democracy is happening. All of the political grumbling should be music to any democrat’s ears. Yet Germans are looking at it and don’t like what they see. That consistently shows up in polls.

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Olaf Scholz may count himself among them. He seems to be rather surprised that governing is hard, and there are people out there who may be dissatisfied with or even try to derail his policy ambitions.

It could be that Scholz was expecting the same treatment from his coalition partners that his predecessor, Angela Merkel, received from hers. You can’t fault him for this assumption, seeing that he was Merkel’s coalition partner. Three of her four government’s were Grand Coalitions — an uncreative pairing of Germany’s two largest parties, the CDU and SPD — and Scholz was finance minister and vice chancellor in some of them.

This was great for Merkel and terrible for just about everyone else. For all those years, Germany basically had de facto one-party rule. With both major parties in power, there was no real opposition to contest government initiatives or inject new ideas into the public imagination. The SPD, in the interest of stability and harmonious politics, largely kowtowed to CDU leadership.

Over time, the parties sorta just merged into a single, blob-like entity in the safe and ubiquitous center of German politics. They didn’t really stand for anything more than continuity and evading the train wreck of global affairs crashing into the gates of dependable Deutschland. To the SPD’s credit, many of their policy priorities did become law, but it made little difference politically because Merkel took up so much of the oxygen, no one else could breathe.

This is a pretty mediocre exercise in democracy, and enough Germans were happy with that. When they weren’t anymore, German Officialdom was too scared of its own potential to try anything bolder. When Germany in 2017 had — gasp! — a minor political crisis because it could not swiftly put together a coalition after elections, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier — an SPD foreign minister in an earlier Merkel government — pleaded with his party to sign up to another Grand Coalition that it had pledged not to do.

That nobody wanted another GroKo was less important than avoiding the thing everybody is really afraid of — that is, the specter of minority governments and new elections, which the Teutonic Imaginary pegs as the downfall of Weimar and the door-opener to Hitler. It’s another failure of Germany’s Erinnerungskultur, focused only on its past and the particular way it went astray back then that it is totally blind to any other misstep that could put it on a different path to the same destructive destination.

What happened in 2018 — it took some six months to form a government, a record for postwar Germany — was just instability by another name. The appearance of agreement papered over very real issues in need of addressing. That period of course did not cause the crises and uncertainty Germany and others now confront, but it certainly did not help ward them off or prepare for their arrival. As a result, Germany got exactly what it hates — instability — and all in the myopic pursuit of post-national tranquility.

As an added bonus, with the two, big-tent parties in government, there was no serious and responsible opposition. The Greens, too niche; the Left, too small; the FDP, persona non grata after blowing up coalition talks in the first place. That handed the opposition soapbox to the far-right AfD, which came out as the strongest party after the governing ones.

And this is Germany trying to avoid Weimar II? Pff.

One legislative period later, with Merkel untouched and enjoying retirement, this half-baked concoction has landed on Olaf Scholz’s lap. He isn’t helping himself by coming off as mighty aloof, and his coalition’s regular infighting is not a good look. Scholz appears to have drawn the wrong conclusion about his victory in 2021. He didn’t win because he was so strong, but because his opponents were so weak. Victory by default.

At the same time, you have real opposition now. The post-Merkel CDU under Friedrich Merz has gone back to its roots as a conservative party. That’s great for democratic diversity, but it only works if there is a center-left yin to the center-right yang. The SPD is still not filling that role, while the Left is falling apart, and the Greens and the FDP are two sides of the same, liberal-centrist coin.

Without labor, all you end up with is a political culture shifted right. The CDU comes off looking like the sensible, palatable alternative to the AfD, even if many of their policy goals are little more than nicely worded versions of the same, parochial worldview. The next government could easily be a far-right one in all but name.

We know this to be true from developments in other European countries. It is far-right parties that have risen out of the ashes of once mighty social democratic ones. In some cases, conservative and populist allies get them just over the line and into power. The only thing keeping Germany from looking, say, overtly like Italy is the moral-historical burden it carries. However, that does not mean it won’t at some point. As a case in point, look at Bavaria or, if you really like it on the nose, Saxony.

Still, let’s cut Scholz a little slack. Democracy is, by definition, a messy process, and societies are confronting major questions with few ready answers. Only the CIA thought Russia would actually move on Ukraine, and America’s IC till then didn’t exactly have a sterling track record worth trusting.

Headlines yelling “worst chancellor ever” are somewhat specious. First of all, the Germany that superlative is referring to is not that old. Scholz is just the ninth since the (west) federal republic’s founding in 1949, and third since so-called reunification in 1990. To the extent we can use that period as the baseline, it is one sitting high on the bellcurve of postwar American hegemony and post-Cold War American unipolar dominance. For establishment liberal forces, on which today’s Germany was built, this was a fleeting, golden age of stability and prosperity.

Those days are over. Back again is great power competition, interest-based alliances, resource scramble, and conflict and uncertainty. Everywhere is discord and disunity. Why should Germany be any different?

The new normal is the old normal, with Germany caught in the middle as it tries to avoid repeating a pattern that ended poorly for everyone. So the skittishness is understandable. That said, government by denial is a pretty strange way to defend the democracy you say you hold so dear. The only way out is charging head-first in.

I’ve done my best to this point to avoid referring to the Churchillian cliche, but I’m a sucker for it: Democracy is a pain, but it’s also all we got standing between us and sheer madness. Pff.