BERLIN: It may not return him to office, but Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s decision to call an election a year early has jolted German politics out of a trance. Schroeder electrified the nation and smashed years of legislative gridlock with the news he intends to gamble his grip on power in a September 2005 election. A strategy some columnists have described as a “suicide to cheat death”.
“It caught us all by surprise,” said Peter Loesche, a political scientist at Goettingen University. “The early election is churning everything up and getting a lot of people excited again.” Schroeder and his ruling Social Democrats (SPD) party have thrown down the gauntlet to the conservative opposition led by Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats (CDU).
It’s a dangerous strategy in risk-averse Germany, where chancellors usually cling to power, hoping news about the economy, unemployment and voter dissatisfaction will improve and better their chances for re-election. But Schroeder’s act of bravado has energised an electorate that was growing numb to politicians trapped in a seemingly endless game of blame shifting, with little to show the voters.
The left control Germany’s Bundestag or lower parliamentary chamber and the right rule the Bundesrat or upper house. Each pillories the other for the nation’s ills. It often seems to the average German voter that not much else gets done. The call for new elections sent German share prices up to three-year highs in the last week, shook up the entrenched political landscape around Schroeder’s 7-year-old government and has simply everyone gabbing about politics.
“Even people who don’t usually care very much about it are talking politics all the time now. The whole country has become politicised,” Loesche said.
EXCITING TIMES: Germans who were abroad in late May and missed the rapid turn of events that followed the rout of the SPD in a May 22 election in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), a state they had ruled for 39 years, would have trouble getting their bearings again.
Where there was once political gridlock there is suddenly consensus. Where the CDU once refused to consider SPD demands such as cutting multi-billion euro homeowner subsidies, the conservatives are now calling for steep cuts themselves.
Where the CDU and their Bavarian sister party, the CSU, had long wrangled over who would run against Schroeder, the two conservative parties quickly agreed with little if any debate that Merkel would carry their banner.
Where credible, if painful, antidotes for high unemployment and gaping budget deficits once avoided by most parties due to tactical concerns, lawmakers on both sides are suddenly speaking fearlessly of what’s needed. And all the major parties represented in parliament are overwhelmingly in favour of the early elections — an extremely rare display of unity in the Reichstag.—Reuters
