Crisis? What crisis? The state of German conservatism.
| Author | Maier, Clara |
| Position | Features |
With Angela Merkel as Germany's most beloved politician and European politics at her feet, it seems there is little ground for thinking that there is a crisis of German conservatism. With the recently announced SPD Chancellor candidate Peer Steinbruck deeply committed to answering the single question of why a speech by him could be worth [euro]25,000 there is little, it seems, that can keep Merkel from re-election in 2013. Success next year raises the prospect of a reign of Kohl-like dimensions - meaning something around sixteen further years, of course.
Government without guidelines
However, the state of German conservatism is less blissful than Merkel's record might suggest. Commentators still benevolently characterise Merkel's blurred political profile as 'pragmatic'. But the distanced, presidential political style that has so far secured Merkel's position in a post-Schroder, post-charismatic era of German politics might now seriously weaken her power basis in the CDU.
Reviewing the years of Merkel's government - first in coalition with the SPD then with the liberal FDP (Freidemokraten), it is indeed hard to see consistent motivations underpinning Angela Merkel's politics. Her attitude towards the issues of the day can shift quickly through the pressure of public opinion - a source of hope, surely, for the people of Greece and Spain, and maybe of Germany too. The most striking example of this political flexibility is her complete change of course on energy policy in 2011. After the nuclear disaster of Fukushima, Merkel swiftly decreed a complete renunciation of the CDU's decade-old pronuclear power policy, when she re-established the previous SDP-Green government's nuclear power phase-out plan. This left the CDU's natural allies in the economy completely baffled. An equally surprising move was the government's sudden and complete abolition of general conscription - something that had long been seen as one of the pillars of Germany's democratic self-conception - under the then-minister of defence Theodor zu Guttenberg.
Merkel's political style can thus be described as a deliberate and calculated dismissal of the traditional Richtlinienkompetenz (responsibility to set the guidelines of government) of the German Chancellor. By declining to set a political agenda she makes her ministers equal players in the political game. Conflicts that arise from the different interest structures of individual ministries must be solved by negotiation between them, and do not touch Merkel's authority as Chancellor.
Subsidising the German Hausfrau
This became eminently clear in the government's disputes on family policy and women's equality - a newly highly contested field after Gerhard Schroder had notoriously dismissed it as 'Gedons' (hullabaloo). Indeed, family politics can today be seen as the remaining cornerstone of conservative ideology, while the distinctive economic projects of the SPD and the CDU have been hollowed out by their respective entanglements with neo-liberal theory. Nevertheless, this is exactly where the Merkel government is losing credibility.
Merkel's first family minister Ursula von der Leyen's so-called Elterngeld...
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