German election: Seeking best candidate

Ignas Kleden, Director, Center for East, Indonesian Affairs, Jakarta, ceia@centrin.net.id

There is a belief among German political analysts that in 1998 Gerhard Schroeder from the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) won the general election not because he was the strongest candidate, but rather because most of the German people no longer wanted to see Helmut Kohl from Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) head the government he had already ruled for 16 years. In the German language-game, the 1998 general election was said to be not a "wahl" (voting for the eligible) but an "abwahl" (voting out the ineligible).

During the last two weeks before Germany's election day on Sept. 22, this same dilemma again haunted many people who wanted to cast their votes. Both candidates, Gerhard Schroeder from the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) and Edmund Stoiber from the Christian-Social Union (CSU), did their best during the campaign either to attract or to convince their followers. The end-result seemed to be a strange balance: Schroeder was more attractive than convincing, whereas Stoiber had some persuasive arguments without, however, becoming terribly attractive.

This balance between the two continued all the way through to the counting of the ballots, so much so that the entire country was involved in a kind of tense vote count never before seen in Germany. Some newspapers called it "Wahlkrimi", or election thriller. After the last vote was counted, it became obvious that both SPD and the Union parties (CDU/CSU) had achieved exactly the same percentage of support from voters, 38.5 percent. Though in absolute numbers, the SPD won 8,864 more votes than the CDU.

This situation, however, reflected different developments within each of the two parties, because the Social-Democratic Party received 2.4 percent less support than in 1998, whereas the Union had 3.4 percent more than in 1998.

The question for an outsider is, of course: why did the SPD win despite the fact that it had no clear advantage over its rival? This can be explained with regard to at least two other developments. On the one hand the coalition partner of the SPD, the Green Party, won 8.6 percent of the vote. Whereas the coalition partners of the Union, namely the Liberal Party (FDP), got only 7.4 percent of the vote, far below its own estimate.

Also, the SPD received some votes from the so-called Ueberhangmandate, which happens when the votes from the direct election turn out to exceed the votes from the proportional election. The German election consists of a direct election, which decides more or less 300 parliamentary seats, and a proportional election, which also decides more or less 300 seats.

The total number of seats in the German parliament is 603, so an absolute majority is achieved when a party wins 302 seats. If the votes from the direct election exceed those from the proportional one, the surplus votes should go to Ueberhangmandate where they will be calculated to maintain the balance between the direct and proportional votes.

In the last election the Social-Democratic Party won four seats from the Ueberhangmandate and thereby could win the election over the Union parties. The coalition of the CDU/CSU and the Greens (the so-called Red-Green Coalition) therefore won 306 seats, which means four votes more than the required absolute majority.

Both Schroeder and Stoiber tried to play with sensitive issues during the last stages of the campaign. Schroeder wanted to gain sympathy for his foreign policy by taking a political stance that was more than one just dictated by the U.S. This ploy was received with general ambivalence, both inside the country as well within the European Union.

In contrast to that, Stoiber raised the issue of migration to Germany, thereby trying to win support from inside the country, playing on the idea that restricting the number of immigrants to Germany would solve the problem of 4,000,000 unemployed Germans.

Schroeder said in an interview with German's Der Spiegel that he hoped never to have to secure his political life on the back of those people who could not defend themselves.

A more substantial argument was given by Deutsche Bank, which calculated that considering the present birth rate in Germany, the restrictions on immigration as proposed by Stoiber would lower the German population from 82 million to 65 million within 50 years, and would decrease Germany's labor force by 27 percent to 30 million by 2004.

Needless to say, the SPD owed its victory in large part to the achievements of the Green Party, in particular to Joschka Fischer, the "real chairman" of the Greens (the actual chairperson is Claudia Roth). Fischer, who is known in Germany as the pop star of German politics, turned out to be the most talented and the most popular politician in the whole country, and attracted most of his followers with his personal appeal (wearing jeans, going jogging, no smoking).

Besides that he must take into account the demands of his party for more power in the government, though Fischer hinted quite early that the Greens would not insist on having more posts within the cabinet. The Greens, however, require that their minister for the environment should also be given responsibility for energy politics. And that the ministry for consumers not only be in charge of the condition of foodstuffs, but should also be entitled to control gene technology.

It seems that after the short celebration of their common victory, the partners in the Red-Green coalition will have to deal with the internal problems of their own party and with a more reasonable division of labor and authority between them.

After the victory of the personal appeal of Joschka Fischer, the Red-Green coalition has to decide whether Germany will allow more room for the reddening or the greening of German politics.

Dr. Ignas Kleden was one of 12 social scientists from 12 countries who were invited by the German Service for Academic Exchange to observe the last stages of Germany's recent general election.