DOES anything illustrate Germany’s opacity to Anglo-Saxons like the hysterical Anglophone coverage of the country’s political impasse? By the placid standards of German politics, the pro-business Free Democrats’ (FDP) unexpected withdrawal from coalition talks with Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU and the environmentalist Greens on Sunday night is a substantial ruckus. Yet it really—really—is not Germany’s “biggest political crisis since 1945”. It is not “bigger even than the UK’s ongoing crisis”. Britons need not “take a look at Germany […] to see real political chaos”. The country is not at risk of retreating into a “nationalistic crouch”. Nor is it in “meltdown”.
The comparison with Britain is instructive. London is gambling the health of all its trading and geopolitical relationships on the dubious claims of a bunch of serially disproven political hucksters and is drifting into territory that no-one, said hucksters included, seem to have a clue how to navigate. Germany’s problem, by contrast, is a deadlocked coalition negotiation—a novelty in the federal republic, as the country’s president Frank-Walter Steinmeier noted in his measured address yesterday, but one for whose management and resolution the constitution provides clear procedures. Exports are booming, growth is strong and the state is running a surplus of about €20bn ($23bn). One factor in the talks’ breakdown was disagreement about how to spend all that money. Britain could well use a problem like that.
The reality in Germany is as distinct from the all-consuming, deer-in-the-headlights shemozzle of British politics as it is from the greatest crises of the country’s own recent history. It does not compare to the political turmoil of, for example, the Berlin Wall’s construction in 1961; of the collapse of Willy Brandt’s chancellorship in 1974 over an espionage scandal; of the “German autumn” in 1977 when the Bonn government seemed powerless against bombings, hijackings and assassinations; of the terminal crisis of Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship amid donation scandals in the 1990s; of the huge weekly demonstrations at soaring unemployment in the early-2000s.
***
Though a serious headache for Mrs Merkel, the deadlock in Berlin is a sign of Germany’s representative democracy working as it should. The country’s society has become more plural in recent years, so the system has produced more parties (seven, up from four) with parliamentary mandates to represent that variety—a valuable adaptation mechanism that barely exists in majoritarian electoral systems in the Anglo-Saxon world, but which makes forming a government fiddlier.
The particular circumstances of the current impasse further belie the idea of a democracy in crisis. The Social Democrats (SPD) are refusing to form another government with the CDU/CSU. But perhaps it is not a bad thing that the “grand coalition” is not rolled-over semi-automatically and indefinitely. In Austria, where that has been the norm for decades, government is sclerotic and politics plagued by far-right extremism.
And while the CDU/CSU and the Greens insist (credibly) that a deal with the FDP was possible and pooh-pooh the latter’s claim to have “protected Germany from chaotic government”, the flounce spoke of personality clashes and lacking trust between the parties after four weeks of talks. Better to learn this now than in the early months of a new, and unexpectedly wobbly, government. It is worth noting, too, that the clash helpfully disproves the populist narrative that Germany’s over-cosy mainstream parties are just a homogeneous blob.
Both of the paths now available end with a viable solution. A minority government, though not Mrs Merkel’s preferred option, would be relatively secure once in place: a minority chancellor cannot be easily dismissed by the Bundestag, which cannot dissolve itself without the chancellor’s approval. Both the SPD and the FDP have indicated that they would constructively support such a government in individual votes. This arrangement would be new to German federal politics, notwithstanding a few short interim periods, but a minority government ran North-Rhine Westphalia, the country’s largest state, successfully from 2010 to 2012. It managed to push through education reforms and improve public finances. Mrs Merkel, a skilled and unideological dealmaker, would stand a good chance of making one work in Berlin.
The alternative path leads to new elections, her preferred option. These could break the deadlock. Snap polls taken yesterday suggest voters may punish the FDP for its walk-out. Perhaps they would even enable the parties to face up to thorny subjects, such as the future of the euro zone, that went disappointingly unconfronted in last summer’s sleepy election campaign. The worst-case scenario for many in Europe would be if the elections backfire and Mrs Merkel is forced out; doubtless a dramatic moment, but in practice just the accelerated execution of a departure already on the horizon. German observers were declaring her chancellorship’s twilight long before Sunday night.
***
Resolving the current predicament could take a few months. But spare us overwrought talk of German ungovernability. The country’s overhang government—the afterlife of a CDU/CSU-SPD coalition that often seemed to be running on autopilot anyway—is functioning smoothly. Most day-to-day services (schools, infrastructure, policing) are provided by the Länder, or states. Recently the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium have gone 7, 10 and 18 months respectively without government, in each case enjoying above-trend growth throughout the period in question. And Mrs Merkel’s legitimacy is uncontested; she remains the second most popular politician in Germany after Wolfgang Schäuble, the president of the Bundestag. Yesterday’s snap poll showed that 58% of voters want her to stay chancellor. In her party recent events have, if anything, strengthened her as ranks have closed.
All of which helps to explain why the DAX stock-market index in Frankfurt rose yesterday (it is up another 1% today at the time of writing) and why the press here is broadly sanguine. “We can cope with a little uncertainty” runs a commentary in Der Spiegel; “National crisis? Hardly”, mocked Die Zeit; “Strength lies in upheaval”, begins a cautiously optimistic commentary in today’s Die Welt (reversing Mrs Merkel’s saying “Strength lies in tranquility”). In the words of Mr Schäuble—not a man know for boosterism—Germany faces a test, not a crisis.
It would be churlish to deny that a Germany distracted by domestic politics for a number of months is bad news for Europe. A prolonged government-formation process in Berlin narrows next year’s rare window between big elections in which the EU and the euro zone can take big decisions about the future. Reforms to the currency union, common solutions to the migration crisis and Brexit will all be on the agenda at next month’s summit in Brussels, for example, and Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, wants a deal on further euro-zone integration by next June.
Nonetheless, by talking down Germany’s ability to act now, it is possible to overstate its willingness to do so before. Take those summit priorities. Mrs Merkel has long been sceptical about the sort of euro-zone integration demanded by France’s Emmanuel Macron, cautious about grand plans to redesign the EU’s border regime and intransigent on Brexit (pace London-based commentators, she was never on the verge of intervening to improve the terms on offer). There is a very small gap between the probable German negotiating position at the upcoming summit and what that position would have been had Mrs Merkel won a storming victory in September and formed a coalition within days. Deadlock in Berlin does not deny Europe its great helmsman—because Germany was never that helmsman in the first place.
This speaks to the broader folly of the “Germany in meltdown” tendency, which imagines the country’s current strength and prosperity as the fruit of ambitious, even hyperactive leadership. Doing so gives Mrs Merkel and her compatriots at once too much and too little credit. It overstates the vision and dynamism of Germany’s political class but also overlooks the country’s underlying stability, how little tinkering (in the short term, at least) its state and economy urgently require and the intricate balancing acts that go into its multi-party governments. The current uncertainty may last a while. But it will also illustrate the effective operation of a sophisticated constitutional democracy, in a successful country for whose problems most would trade their own in an instant.