Who has more to offer?
September 30, 2009
Today is quite a big day for the Germans, as today will decide the shape of government for the next four years. I like the fact that the Germans vote on a Sunday, which means that most people do not have to stress on their way to work.
Unlike the US two-party system, the Germans have a huge number of parties. There are the ecologically-minded Greens, special interest parties such as the Grey Panthers (senior citizens), the Bible-Abiding Christians, etc., although there are two parties that emerge as the strongest, the relatively conservative-minded Christian Democratic Union or CDU, epitomized at the moment by Angela Merkel, and the SPD, traditionally known as the party of the working man. Although the parties are supposed to hold more or less antithetical views, they governed jointly in a grand coalition over the past four years as neither was able to gain the majority, so that the televised ‘debates’ a few weeks ago led to yawns all around (one US-born political science teacher who shall remain nameless even dozing off between times). But realistically, what choice did the two parties have but to laud themselves for a job well done? The ‘duel’ became a ‘duet,’ fumed the press, and therefore less than compelling to watch.
The result of today’s vote is in some respects a foregone conclusion: Angela Merkel will continue to lead the country, undoubtedly, but without an absolute majority. Hence the question remains as to whether the SPD will govern at her side or whether it will be a party more to her taste, such as the FDP, who are more conservative than the SPD and traditionally more in favor of protecting individual financial interests than providing assistance for the downtrodden. (Short personal note: after having received my first pay stub here, I tend to sympathize with the FDP’s catchy campaign motto: Mehr Netto vom Brutto, loosely translated as ‘more take-home from your net’).
Merkel is a trained physicist and the first chancellor hailing from the former East Germany. (This is a historic voting year, by the way, because this is the first year in which eighteen-year-olds who know of the separation of East and West Germany only from hearsay or history books will go to the polls; it makes me feel rather old to thing that I was a university student here when the Berlin Wall fell, and now we have generations of kids who never saw it).
Merkel is articulate, well-respected and well-liked despite one hilarious snafu regarding a poster designed by a fellow party member, Vera Lensfeld, purely in order to draw attention to the CDU in the election – it showed Merkel and Lensfeld showing generous amounts of cleavage. The poster’s caption read: “We have more to offer.” Priceless, no? It provided a much-needed moment of levity in a rather drab campaign.
Since there are very few issues on which most parties do not agree – everyone wants to lower the current unemployment rates and create millions of new jobs, everyone wants to work hard to reduce deficit spending and CO2 emissions etc. - the only two real points of contention are how quickly German troops in Afghanistan should be withdrawn and how quickly Germany can reduce its dependence on atomic energy.
Germans traditionally take the civic duty of voting very seriously and have even loosely discussed the possibility of making the vote mandatory as more and more disillusioned people have begun to stay at home, but I am not entirely sure what to think of such an attempt to force democracy down people’s throats. As a US citizen, I will not be voting in today’s election, but I suspect that four more years of Angela at the helm is not the worst thing that can befall the country.
About the Author : Tamara-Diana Braunstein brings us her stories from Senegal every week. She was born in
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