One man could bring down Germany's coalition government
Germany’s social contract is under pressure and Christian Lindner is speaking the unspeakable.
Have you ever heard of Christian Lindner? If you haven’t, you might do very soon. The year 2024 has frequently been referred to as the year of elections, the most significant one of which is taking place today (though some might argue that, in the greater scheme of things, the election in the resurgent India will over time prove to have even more impact). But that’s got nothing to do with Mr Lindner.
Lindner is Germany’s Liberal Democrat finance minister and leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), who could be in the process of bringing down Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s “traffic light” coalition government. The term traffic light reflects the participation of the centre-left SPD (red), the liberal democratic and therefore notionally centrist FDP (yellow), and the Greens. Since the last federal general elections in September 2021, which offered no clear result, and the formation of the coalition in December of that year, this highly unlikely government – the FDP has traditionally been in government supporting the centre right CDU/CSU block – has staggered along with little moral certainty to its West and too much to its East and at home an economy that has lost its self-confidence and sense of where it is going.
It was easy when the economy was booming. Mutti Merkel’s famous and now infamous declaration that Germany would happily welcome a million immigrants looked fine and dandy when unemployment was low, fiscal revenues were high and when there was an innate sense that the country had become something of a muscle bound oaf. Please don’t get me wrong when I suggest that it had too many highly skilled workers in highly paid jobs but that there was effectively a shortage on the one hand of cheap, unskilled labourers and on the other of the army of carers in the health and elderly care sectors. Suddenly, or maybe not quite so suddenly, Germany found itself lacking the history that helped the UK and France fill those gaps with people from former colonies who had grown up speaking their language.
Yes, post-Second World War, there had been an influx of Turks, and to a lesser extent Greeks, who at the time had had no particular affinity to either France or Britain and who had emigrated in significant numbers to a Germany in the grip of its rebuilding boom and Wirtschaftswunder, its economic miracle. But, after several generations, they have largely integrated in society and no longer provide the manually working underclass which they once did. On paper, they were still Muslims although in many cases no more religiously orthodox than their Christian neighbours. Merkel in her perceived economic wisdom of topping up the bottom end of the jobs market unwittingly also imported a huge social problem. This was not only the financial cost of housing, educating and feeding the huge stream of immigrants which a Germany firing on all cylinders could actually do, but also integrating the cultural differences, which was another matter entirely.
The old colonial powers had social models for multiculturalism. France had tried with little success to foster a society in which all cultures could remain distinct but live with mutual respect in harmony while Britain had raced towards breaking down differences and treating everybody and everything as equally valid. Although not an unqualified success, the British form of multiculturalism has probably done better.
Germany had no such thing. German is not a language spoken anywhere other than in Germany, Austria, most of Switzerland and a few border regions such as Eastern Belgium where it remains an official language and in France’s Alsace and Lorraine where it doesn’t. Germany might be “das Land der Dichter und Denker” - the country of poets and philosophers – but, linguistically, it lacks global reach. Thus the immigrants arrived with no notion of what it means to be German. It is within this context that the rise of the AfD, the xenophobic right, must be seen. Add to this the inherent fear that the practicing Muslims of Middle Eastern and African origin who were flooding in might break - and some cases have - the developing bond between Christian and Muslim Germans, the ones of Turkish origin. Turkish President Erdogan’s “pan-Turkish” revivalism and movement towards reversing the social reforms introduced by Kamal Ataturk as far back as the early 20th century suddenly found buy-in amongst third and fourth generation Germans of Turkish origin.
Germany’s social contract is under pressure and with the current economic malaise, the social stresses are rising. The government and its unlikely coalition, in which the free market FDP sticks out like a pork pie at a Jewish wedding, is facing the problems without a road map. As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going you don’t know when you’re lost.
Then, up pops Finance Minister Lindner, who publishes a paper with a variety of policy proposals which fit into the world of the red and green members of the coalition like, as the Germans say, a fist into an eye socket. Worst of all, the CDU/CSU opposition has welcomed the paper and added that it dovetails nicely with its own world view.
In essence, Lindner concludes that the Berlin government is too tied up in its own ideologically driven pipe dreams in terms of environmental objectives, social justice and regulation of anything and everything and that it lacks the ability to adjust to the ongoing changes in the outside world. In plain text, that means that behaving as though the rise of the political extremes to the left and right of the centre and the decline in Germany’s international standing, both economically and politically, isn’t happening, and sailing on without a course correction, is not the way to go. He calls for a moratorium to new regulation, for a dialling back of Germany’s idiosyncratic and draconian climate targets by harmonising with those laid down by Brussels, and a scrapping of the divisive solidarity tax which had been introduced after reunification and which 35 years later is still in place.
Much has been written about the vagaries of the American electoral system and especially about the continued presence of the Electoral College. Before the existence of modern means of communication – I’m talking the telegraph – it made sense for every state to send its representatives in person to a conference in which the President was ultimately elected. It was there that the candidate pitched to the College and each elector would on the day vote with his – there were back then no hers or theirs – conscience and best judgement. The Electoral College has outlived its time but there are few countries I know in which change to existing and outdated structures is more difficult. The debate for example over what the Founding Fathers’ idea of the right to bear arms has to do with hundreds of millions of lethal weapons circulating around the country continues to go nowhere. As of the last published figures on 5 September, so far in 2024, 11,598 people in America have died in gun violence. I doubt that that’s what Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Ben Franklyn would have had in mind and yet Donald Trump might yet find himself being elected by hailing dying by gunfire in a schoolroom or shopping mall as a supreme and constitutionally protected civil right. I digress.
Lindner is speaking the unspeakable. Germany is mired in its social idealism. The British might bemoan that they have a government that likes to refer to its electoral mandate even though it finds itself in power on a mere 34% of the electoral vote – less than the combined vote of the Conservative and the Reform parties – but at least it has a chance of seeing Westminster led by joined up thinking. They might not like what they see but at least they can see it. There is a road map. In Germany there is none.
Lindner has binned what we here refer to as collective responsibility and has tossed a hand grenade into the Berlin carp pond. He has put into practice what the most famous of Socialist playwrights, Berthold Brecht, wrote in what is without a doubt his most famous piece, The Threepenny Opera of 1928. “First comes the grub. Then comes the morality”.
There is an old joke about the Chief Rabbi of Paris and Rothshild with which I will not bore you but the punchline is that it’s easy to moralise with a bit of cash in the back pocket. Germany has for several decades enjoyed that freedom but no more. Lindner suggests that the time might have come for a reset of the coalition’s idealistic, but in the current time unrealistic, aspirations.
For their own reasons, his coalition partners do not agree. He is leader of the FDP and, if he walks, the government falls. It’s unlikely that Germany will join the list of countries that have held parliamentary elections in 2024 albeit more due to the technical constraints of organising them between now and year end. What might follow if there's further polarisation to the left and to the right – as has happened in France - is hard to predict, but whatever does follow it will not be pretty. The EU has since time immemorial lived with the axiom of the twin towers in that France takes the decisions and Germany finances them. France has lost its moral authority, and Germany is losing its financial capacity, the ramifications of which should not be underestimated.