Friday 1 November 2002

TWO CHEERS FOR GERHARD SCHROEDER

Chartist, November-December 2002

The big news in European left politics this autumn has undoubtedly been the victory of Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrat-Green coalition in the German federal elections in late September.

It was remarkable not least because, for most of the year, it had seemed extremely improbable that Schroeder would retain power. The centre-right bloc of the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, had led in the opinion polls until 10 days before the election. And its candidate for the chancellorship, the CSU’s Edmund Stoiber, believed he had won even after the votes had been cast. Almost incredibly, he claimed victory on the basis of inaccurate exit polls – only to concede defeat after real votes had been counted.

Of course, Schroeder’s victory was narrow. The share of the vote taken by the SPD was 38.5 per cent, down from 40.9 per cent in 1998 and only 9,000 votes ahead of the CDU-CSU nationwide. The ruling coalition would not have been returned had it not been for the exceptional performance of the Greens – who fought an excellent campaign focused on the charismatic foreign minister Joschka Fischer and took 8.6 per cent, up nearly two percentage points, their best ever share of the vote. As it is, its majority is slim, down from 21 to nine seats in the Bundestag, and it remains to be seen whether it will survive a whole term. With nearly 10 per cent of the workforce unemployed and growth sluggish, the government is particularly vulnerable on the economy.

Nevertheless, the result is a resounding success for the centre-left – and one that has major implications both for German domestic politics and for the rest of Europe and the wider world.

Domestically, the election not only confirmed the Greens as Germany’s third party ahead of the liberal Free Democrats – who won a disappointing (for them) 7.4 per cent – and appears to sound the death-knell for the former-communist Party of Democratic Socialism in what was East Germany. Its onetime supporters deserted it in droves for the SPD, and it failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold for proportional representation in the Bundestag. With only two seats in the new parliament, down from 36 in the last, its future as a player in German politics at the federal level is now bleak.

It is on the European and wider international front that the German election result is most significant. Most obviously, Schroeder and Fischer won after – some would say by – explicitly distancing themselves from the Bush administration’s sabre-rattling on Iraq. Their stance caused uproar in Washington, but it has also drawn their government closer to Jacques Chirac’s French government, which is also openly sceptical about precipitate unilateral American action.

But this is not the only issue on which Berlin and Paris find themselves in agreement. Both are in trouble under the terms of the stability and growth pact because, with their economies stagnant, they are spending much more than they are receiving in tax revenue – and both are increasingly open to the idea that the pact should be reformed to allow eurozone states more room to spend their way out of recession. There have been too many false dawns for the sort of “Eurokeynesianism” advocated by Jacques Delors and other European social democrats in the late 1980s and early 1990s for this to cause an outbreak of rejoicing on the left, but the signs are definitely more hopeful on this score than for several years.

The Germans and French are also increasingly prepared to cobble together compromises to ensure that EU enlargement happens on time – witness the way Chirac and Schroeder stitched up a deal to preserve the Common Agricultural Policy at the Brussels summit in October, to the apparent chagrin of Tony Blair.

All this has led to much speculation about the revival of the Franco-German axis that dominated west European politics – more specifically, the politics of the European Community – in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet, although the new warmth between Berlin and Paris is significant, it is not the whole story.

For a start, even before the next round of EU enlargement takes place in 2004, the ability of the EU’s two most populous countries to call the shots is not what it was 10 years ago, let alone 20. With the enlargements of the 1980s and 1990s to take in Greece (1981); Spain and Portugal (1986); and Sweden, Finland and Austria (1995), and with the concomitant growth of qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers on a variety of policy areas, even the big countries have to get smaller allies to back them. France and Germany acting together are undoubtedly a heavyweight act, but they cannot steamroller through anything they want. Once Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia join the fold from 2004 – as, after Ireland’s yes vote in its referendum, they are almost certain to do – the idea that a Paris-Berlin axis can drive European politics becomes almost laughable.

What is more, France and Germany disagree profoundly on one of the most important bones of contention in current EU politics – the future constitutional framework for the enlarged EU.

The Convention on the Future of Europe, which has been deliberating in Brussels under the chairmanship of former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, has not set the world alight. Indeed, it has been largely ignored by the media, not only in Britain, where European politics has never been taken seriously, but also on the continent.

Yet the issues that it is discussing are crucially important. The EU has had a problem with its lack of democratic accountability since long before it became the EU. Put bluntly, it has been clear for years that most of its crucial decisions are made behind closed doors by means of intergovernmental stitch-up in the Council of Ministers – with the rest emanating from the unelected European Commission. Democrats have long argued for reform, either by making the EU more answerable to national parliaments or by increasing the powers of the European Parliament.

With enlargement, however, relying on intergovernmental stitch-up becomes more than a democratic disgrace. It could lead to the whole EU decision-making process seizing up in intractable arguments. Everyone now agrees that institutional reform of the EU is an urgent necessity.

The problem for Giscard is that the two main recipes for reform that have been put forward are incompatible. On one hand, federalists – crudely speaking, Germany and most of the smaller states, though not the Scandinavians – think that the way to avoid stasis and increase the democratic legitimacy of the EU is to create a supranational polity in which intergovernmental horse-trading is reduced and the European Parliament assumes greater powers. On the other, the intergovernmentalists – Britain, France, Spain and the Scandinavians – see increasing the accountability of the EU to national governments and parliaments as the only possible solution.

Unsurprisingly, no compromise acceptable to all has emerged from the convention – but unless it does it is difficult to conceive of enlargement not being an almighty mess. It’s just possible that the new Franco-German entente will yield a solution, but at present the signs are few and far between.

The final significance of Schroeder’s victory is that, together with the election success of the Swedish social democrats just before it, it appears to have stemmed the advance of the right in continental politics, which now seems to have reached its furthest points this spring with the socialist disaster in the French presidential and National Assembly elections and the spectacular success of the Fortuyn List in Holland. The 1998 dream of social democratic hegemony in Europe is still a pretty distant one these days, but at least it seems less hopelessly utopian than it did this summer.