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The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same? the German Federal Election of 2017 and Its Consequences

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The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same? the German Federal Election of 2017 and Its Consequences West European Politics ISSN: 0140-2382 (Print) 1743-9655 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fwep20 The more things change, the more they stay the same? The German federal election of 2017 and its consequences Thorsten Faas & Tristan Klingelhöfer To cite this article: Thorsten Faas & Tristan Klingelhöfer (2019) The more things change, the more they stay the same? The German federal election of 2017 and its consequences, West European Politics, 42:4, 914-926, DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2018.1561079 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2018.1561079 Published online: 21 Feb 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 394 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 3 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fwep20 WEST EUROPEAN POLITICS 2019, VOL. 42, NO. 4, 914–926 https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2018.1561079 ELECTIONS IN CONTEXT The more things change, the more they stay the same? The German federal election of 2017 and its consequences Thorsten Faasa and Tristan Klingelhofer€ b aFreie Universit€at Berlin, Berlin, Germany; bJohns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA Background to the election If one were to compare the partisan government composition before and after the 2017 German federal election, one would get an impression of perfect continuity and stability: Angela Merkel still presided over a cab- inet of Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD). However, this continuity in government make-up masks tremendous shifts that occurred in party competition, the electoral arena, and the party system in the 2017 election and thereafter. The 2013 election had been a clear victory for Merkel’s CDU/CSU, which almost achieved an absolute majority of seats in the German Bundestag. The SPD joined Merkel in the government coalition after then party leader Sigmar Gabriel masterfully engineered a multi-step process to overcome intra-party resistance to another ‘Grand Coalition’ (Faas 2015: 246).1 Making strategic use of their members’ critical stance on entering a Grand Coalition, the Social Democrats achieved quite remarkable policy wins. Ultimately, even sceptical SPD members were convinced and voted in favour of another Grand Coalition in an intra-party referendum that the SPD had agreed to as the decision mode. Angela Merkel was subse- quently re-elected as German chancellor on 17 December 2013. Merkel’s leadership style has been known for its presidential, analytic, pragmatic, and even technical nature. Only rarely has she taken risky, controversial decisions; ending the age of nuclear energy in 2011 after the Fukushima disaster was one of them. However, she was forced to take two such decisions in 2015: First, she agreed to a third financial support package for Greece. Second, and even more important, she agreed to let thousands of refugees, who had been passing through Hungary, into Germany on the first weekend in September. From that weekend CONTACT Thorsten Faas [email protected] ß 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group WEST EUROPEAN POLITICS 915 onwards, up to 13,000 refugees would arrive in Germany each day, adding up to almost one million people in 2015. Somewhat surprising given her pragmatic style, Merkel defended both of her controversial decisions to an unexpected degree, even against harsh opposition in her own party (Helms et al. 2018). Specifically with respect to immigration, she was criticised harshly, but was eventually able to pac- ify her own party (CDU) at the December 2015 party convention. Her Bavarian sister party (CSU) would remain highly confrontational through- out the rest of the term, demanding a strict yearly limit on migration (Obergrenze), even though fewer and fewer immigrants would come to Germany after 2015. In the wake of that, the electoral and parliamentary union of CDU and CSU became ever more fragile. As the 2017 election approached, the sister parties toed the line out of necessity. The Obergrenze was bracketed out of the joint election manifesto and only included in a special CSU programme. This ‘solution’ worked during the election campaign, but would boomerang in the post-election period. No doubt, there were severe lines of conflict within the Christian Democrats, but apart from those, the Grand Coalition governed rather smoothly. However – as was the case in the 2005–2009 government – the Social Democrats had a hard time gaining visibility and profile under Merkel’s leadership. The ramifications of Merkel’s 2015 decision go way beyond CDU and CSU. The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) drew new life from the chancellor’s welcoming stance regarding refugees or – as the AfD would henceforth deceptively phrase it – from her ‘illegal opening of German borders’, ultimately culminating in their demand to ‘Get rid of Merkel!’ (‘Merkel muss weg!’). The AfD – founded only in 2013 as a EU- and specifically EURO-sceptic party – had just barely missed entering the Bundestag in 2013. Their electoral support stayed at about 4% to 6% in the polls, before falling in early 2015 in the context of intra-party fights between the founding Eurosceptics on the one hand and right-wing nationalist forces on the other. In the summer of 2015, the party ousted its founder Bernd Lucke – a professor of economics – with the nationalist forces becoming dominant at the expense of the Eurosceptic economic wing. Against that backdrop, the timing of the comparatively large num- ber of refugees coming to Germany in 2015 worked in the party’s favour. While it had already entered the European Parliament and some state parliaments beforehand, the party started polling over 10% nationally and achieved stunning state election results in 2016, especially, but by no means exclusively, in the East German states of Saxony-Anhalt (24.3%) and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania (20.8%). The socialist Left (Die Linke) was the leading opposition party after the 2013 election, as it came in third after the coalition parties (CDU/CSU 916 T. FAAS AND T. KLINGELHOFER€ and SPD). However, the party was not really successful in actually filling this role with life in the eyes of the public. Despite persistent efforts in parliament, the party was not successful in placing its topics on the wider agenda. The Greens experienced the 2013–2017 legislative term as a period of relative stability. Polling consistently around 10% federally (with somewhat rising figures after Merkel’s 2015 refugee decision), they were quite successful on the Land level. Most remarkably, the first Green Ministerpr€asident in German history, Winfried Kretschmann of Baden- Wurttemberg,€ led his party to a record vote share (30.3%) in the 2016 election and was re-elected for another term in office. However, he had to substitute the CDU for the SPD as his junior coalition party, producing the first ever coalition of this kind (a so-called ‘Kiwi Coalition’). The lib- eral FDP spent its first ever legislative term outside of the Bundestag. The 2013 election result had traumatised the party. In the extra-parliamentary opposition, the party attempted to redefine itself and strongly personal- ised around its new leader, Christian Lindner. The campaign The 2017 campaign began with the announcement of SPD party leader Sigmar Gabriel in January 2017 that he would pass on running as the main candidate (Spitzenkandidat). Instead, he – and following him the entire party leadership – nominated the former President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz. Gabriel also declared that he would step down as the party’s leader so that Schulz could take both positions. After Schulz had ascended to the candidacy, the polls markedly improved for the SPD; it quickly gained an astonishing 10 percentage points (see Figure 1). The party also reported an influx of 10,000 new members in the month after Schulz’s nomination. At an extraordinary party convention in March, Schulz was officially elected as the new party chairman with all of the del- egates’ votes – a particularly noteworthy result in a notoriously div- ided party. The state of elation that characterised SPD sympathisers can be gleaned by the labels that were used at the time. SPD strategists saw an unstop- pable ‘Schulz train’ (‘Schulzzug’) to the chancellery, and a Twitter hashtag referred to the ‘god chancellor’ (‘#gottkanzler’). Many believed that Schulz had a fair chance of replacing Merkel after the election; after all, he seemed capable of triggering something among German voters that the SPD had long been looking for. However, euphoria would erode slowly but surely. The polls deteriorated for the SPD from the end of April onwards (see Figure 1). Real electoral losses corroborated the process of decay: The SPD lost in all three state elections that took place in the first WEST EUROPEAN POLITICS 917 50 Election 40 30 Per cent 20 10 0 01/17 04/17 07/17 10/17 01/18 04/18 07/18 10/18 Christian Democrats Social Democrats Greens Liberals Left Right Populists Figure 1. Poll Results of major German parties in 2017 and 2018. Source: http://www.wahlrecht.de; displayed are numbers from the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen. half of 2017. The election in North Rhine-Westphalia, a traditional SPD stronghold and Schulz’s home state, was particularly painful. With all parties intensifying campaign efforts in the summer, CDU and CSU attempted to repeat the strategy that brought them their resounding 2013 victory. The campaign started rather late (the Chancellor first and foremost has to govern, and not campaign, of course) and was clearly tailored towards Merkel. Amid all the turbulence of the Brexit ref- erendum and the Trump election, Merkel was stylised as the guarantor of stability. With respect to the migration issue, the message was that the government has everything under control.
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