(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Dankzij de politieke uitverkoop van Friedrich Merz blijft links in Duitsland aan de bal)
The Bundestag elections of 23 February, which according to opposition leader Friedrich Merz would mark a break with the Merkel era, are resulting in a Merz government that continues Angela Merkel’s policy, albeit without Merkel.
The election result partly forced him into it, but Merz gave up his key points even before the negotiations with the SPD on a new German government had begun. Many CDU/CSU voters feel betrayed. But Merkel praises Merz, her former rival whom she brutally sidelined twenty years ago. She recently told Deutschlandfunk: ‘He has shown that he has einen absoluten Willen zur Macht.’
This week the right-wing populist AfD became the largest party in Germany in the polls for the first time. Alice Weidel, AfD parliamentary leader in the Bundestag, characterised the Koalitionsvertrag as a ‘Kapitulationsurkunde’.
The formation document of Christian democrats and social democrats is called Verantwortung für Deutschland, a somewhat unimaginative title for a coalition agreement. It is a bureaucratic epistle in which the fifth ‘grand coalition’ between CDU/CSU and SPD takes shape. Markus Söder, the somewhat comical-seeming leader of the Bavarian CSU, called it a ‘possible bestseller’.
Merz does not take office as chancellor straight away, because he will probably not be elected by the Bundestag until around 7 May. He needs 316 of the 630 votes. The SPD is first holding a members’ consultation on the coalition agreement; that written procedure runs until the end of April. The CDU is holding a ‘small party conference’ with party notables and the CSU keeps it simple: the party executive decides.
The most important ministerial posts have already been settled. Besides the chancellor, the CDU gets the ministers of Economic Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Education, Public Health, Transport and Digitalisierung und Staatsmodernisierung. The SPD signs for the deputy chancellor, Finance, Defence, Justice, Employment, Environment, Housing and Wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung. The CSU harvested the Interior, Agriculture and Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt. The German ‘mission control’ for space travel is based in Oberpfaffenhofen in Bavaria.
In the programme of the Merz government the guiding hand of the SPD is visible. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described it as a ‘Koalitionsvertrag auf Bewährung’: a coalition agreement on probation. SPD and CDU/CSU act as though they love each other, because there is no alternative.
Before the Bundestag elections Merz excluded the AfD, with the result that he became the hostage of the SPD, which works closely with the Greens behind the scenes. The social democrats, who plunged in the elections from 25.7 to 16.4 percent, have to be ‘greener than green’, otherwise the Greens will poach even more voters. The German ‘abgehängten’ (the equivalent of the Dutch ‘afgehaakten’) ended up with the AfD.
The lurch to the left that Merz made is clearly visible in the 1,000 billion euros of debt that Germany is taking on for ‘investments’ in, among other things, defence (500 billion euros) and infrastructure (the same). Money is the political lubricant par excellence, and Merz hoped with this golden gift to force the SPD into moderation. That hardly happened. In economic terms Merz is pinned down on a left-wing course, and on the promised stricter immigration policy the coalition agreement produces a great deal of ‘soft law’, open to several interpretations.
Merz’s biggest economic assignment is to breathe new life into Standort Deutschland. The German economy has been struggling with a recession for three years. Competitiveness is being undermined by high energy prices. From 2011 Chancellor Merkel pushed through the Atomausstieg. A disastrous stupidity. The best solution is to bring the shut-down nuclear power stations back into operation. But Atomkraft does not appear anywhere in the coalition agreement. Merz is putting all his cards on a Wasserstoffwirtschaft.
It is a desperate grab from the world of fairy tales. The fable of ‘green hydrogen’ to make industry sustainable was once commended by European Commissioner Frans Timmermans with his Green Deal. Hydrogen is not an energy source that is pumped out of the ground, but has to be produced, precisely by using a great deal of energy. That energy is taken from wind turbines, and that is why it is called ‘green’. Many hydrogen projects have been announced worldwide but most have been scrapped again: too expensive.
The hydrogen philosophy recalls the formula once propagated by Lenin: Soviet power + electrification = socialism. In current terms: planned economy + hydrogen = climate neutral. The second formula is just as lame as the first. Germany is launching a Wasserstoffwirtschaftswunder, while Merz during the election campaign called for the nuclear power stations to be reopened. He moved effortlessly to the outdated hydrogen philosophy of socialists and greens. Password: weiter so.
Voters expect that Merz brought home his points on restricting migration. That turned out to be the case only to a very limited degree. There may be an end to the policy of mass admission. The red-green government of Olaf Scholz, for instance, flew 37,000 Afghans to Germany for family reunification. That programme has been suspended. Germany wants to increase the ‘willingness to return’ with migration agreements. A safe country that cooperates can then count on a more generous issuing of visas by Germany. The group of ‘safe countries’ is being expanded with Algeria, Morocco, India and Tunisia.
Germany ‘consults’ neighbouring countries when expelling unwanted foreigners at the German border. But those neighbouring countries, and Germany has nine of them, generally do not cooperate. The coalition agreement states that migrants will be deported in the case of ‘serious crimes’. But what is serious? They are also eligible for deportation when they display ‘not insignificant criminal conduct’. What does that mean? The SPD has built many escape clauses into migration. Deportation is made more difficult by juridification. Migration policy will turn out stricter than with the Greens, but on the basis of this coalition agreement it will not be much stricter in practice.
A contradictory part of the agreement is the goal of Bürokratieabbau, because it is precisely the ‘green economy’ that by nature has all the character traits of a planned economy. The government leads a subsidy-driven economy, and companies do not compete against each other with their best products, but with each other, for more subsidies. If those subsidies then stop because of excessive costs, the activity collapses of its own accord; see the subsidising of electric cars. A basis for market forces is lacking.
The new government wants to reduce bureaucracy by 25 percent. That is the Abbauziel. There will even be Bürokratieabbaugesetze. But anyone who reads the coalition agreement sees that the German government is going to do more and more and interfere in everything. Such as in the public debate.
From the opposition there will undoubtedly be criticism, which is normal. Merz senses trouble; only one third of citizens still trust him. The SPD in any case dislikes critics, as the outgoing minister of the interior Nancy Faeser, a former Antifa activist, has already openly shown. The coalition agreement contains a striking phrase: ‘The spreading of untrue assertions of fact is not covered by freedom of expression’. Disinformation will therefore be tackled ‘stringently’. Faeser recently took an advance on that: she had a citizen arrested who had posted a caricature of her on social media.
Among the Genossen of the SPD, Faeser can be counted in the ‘grim left’ department. Humour and German politicians are unfortunately not communicating vessels. It is, however, a sign on the wall. Germany is setting out on the path of repressive tolerance.
Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.