Angela Merkel’s legacy is a polarized Germany now verging on the ungovernable
The German electorate is splintering. Instead of two dominant parties alternating in power with a junior partner, six parties now sit both in the Berlin Bundestag and the state parliaments. (Bavaria has seven, since two parties to the Right of Merkel’s local allies have seats in the Munich parliament). Both the CDU and SPD have shrunk so much that the Social Democrats breathed a sigh of relief at scraping just under 20 per cent in Hesse this weekend and the local CDU proclaimed 27 per cent a “mandate” to govern.
The Greens have begun to emerge as the alternative to any centre-Left party, while the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is rendering the CDU incapable of getting the 40 per cent plus needed for a secure coalition. Like the ex-Communist Left, the AfD is a pariah to the other parties, but that makes cobbling coalitions together out of the CDU, SPD, Greens and FDP very difficult because they disagree on key issues and any alliance rarely has more than half the seats across the country.
It is not only in Berlin that decision-making is getting fiendishly difficult. Brussels has relied on Merkel to give a lead in moments of crisis. Greeks certainly resented the German Chancellor’s role in setting the terms for the handling of their financial debacle, but it was done. Italy’s euro-rules busting budget is now on the EU Commission’s agenda and the strongman in Rome, Matteo Salvini, has not disguised his glee at Merkel’s discomfort. With no-one really in power in Berlin, Brussels lacks a firm hand to whip in the rest of Europe…
Impasse looks set to be Angela Merkel’s legacy at home and in the EU. She has presided over the fragmentation of the political spectrum inside Germany which raises the spectre of ungovernability in Europe’s power-house. By trying to cling to the chancellorship after December, Merkel will deepen that troubling trend. Her slow-motion departure won’t reverse the growing polarisation of politics across the EU which marked her 13 years as the group’s dominant political personality.