BERLIN: Germany’s general election shows how badly in need we are of a new political vocabulary. Most commentators would describe the race as one between “left” and “right” — and to some extent, there is sense in that.

Gerhard Schroeder, the Social Democrat chancellor, and Edmund Stoiber, his rival from the Christian Social Union (CSU), do represent values that are progressive and conservative, respectively.

Stoiber, premier of predominantly Roman Catholic Bavaria, is strong on the family and law and order. He is distinctly iffy about gay rights and immigration. He is married to a housewife. He goes to church on Sundays. He may have trimmed his sails to win votes by, among other things, appointing a single mother to his shadow cabinet. But on social issues, it would not be unfair to call Stoiber hard right: just a couple of years ago he said Germans should breed more to avoid having to take in more foreigners.

A Germany run by Stoiber — and that is still the most likely outcome of the September 22 vote — would unquestionably be different from the one of Schroeder, a cleaning lady’s son who became a student leader, then a radical lawyer and is now on his fourth marriage, to a former tabloid journalist.

To say right, however, is to conjure a string of assumptions that do not at all apply to Stoiber and the rest of Germany’s conservatives. For a start, it implies free-market economics. But the Bavarian-based CSU, like the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which represents the right (here we go again) in the rest of the country, forms part of Germany’s great post-war consensus. The CSU, like the CDU, may tend to care more for the interests of the “Mittelstand” (the small and medium-sized businesses and the people who own them), just as the Social Democratic party (SPD) leans more towards employees. But neither mass movement seriously challenges the view that the economy should be essentially corporatist — subject to thoroughgoing state intervention and the checks and balances put in place by the trade unions, the employers’ representatives and a variety of other “social partners”, including the churches.

“You know, we have a couple of bishops on our board,” said an acquaintance who works for the German employers association.

There are forces at work in the conservative movement that would like to change things. Angela Merkel, the leader of the CDU, presided over some navel-gazing that produced a blueprint for a more neo-liberal policy. Even though she was careful to disguise it as aiming for a “new social market”, the plan caused deep misgivings in the rank and file, and may well have helped lose her stab at the chancellorship.

Stoiber, who was chosen because of his record as an interventionist premier, has said openly that he has no intention of introducing American-style hire-and-fire capitalism. For Germany, he declared, security must remain paramount.

Anyone looking for a party that would make sense in London’s political terminology would need to turn to the Free Democrats. They really do believe in free markets and though they describe themselves as liberals, in the language of post-Thatcher Britain they are conservatives.

Because of Germany’s system of proportional representation, the CSU and CDU, if they top the poll, are unlikely to be able to govern alone. They will have to hammer out a coalition deal with the Free Democrats, and that could signal real change. Joschka Fischer’s Greens also have a pretty neo-liberal take on the economy, and in four years as junior partners in Schroeder’s coalition, they scarcely turned around the Social Democrats.

In other areas of the German political landscape, too, it would be hard for a Briton to get his or her bearings. In the UK, for example, it is the right, not the left, which is under fire for toying with debt-financing and promising more than it can fund.

Stoiber’s response to the recent disastrous flooding in Germany was to suggest the state borrow the money for reconstruction.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.