Werner's Political Notebook

State of the Free Christian Union

I have chosen the word exasperated because it is the strongest feeling one can muster about German political parties. They are all more or less similarly inoffensive bodies tied together by constitutionally imposed incompetence.

This month, I have no answers. You probably don’t expect answers from me, but still. So what do you expect? If we take one reader’s letter as a legitimate cross section of everyone who reads this column, you expect “neo-con political views”. I should tell you, so we all know where we stand, I voted for the Left party (first vote) and the Social Democratic Party (second vote) in last September’s general election. So I am a pussy just like you.

Accordingly, I am exasperated by the mess that the current coalition of the Christian Democratic Union, the Christian Social Union and the Free Democratic Party is making of the country. This is a rubbish government. And, by extension, I am exasperated at the German electorate, who voted these fools in with such emphatic decisiveness last autumn. (I have chosen the word exasperated because it is the strongest feeling one can muster about German political parties. They are all more or less similarly inoffensive bodies tied together by a common bond of constitutionally-imposed incompetence. My exasperation is like a bubble popping out of a placid lake of apathy somewhere in the flat, grey, northern European countryside. Politically-speaking, Germany is a mild-mannered, self-satisfied country. And a good thing, too.)

A poll carried out on January 8 by the state broadcaster ARD showed that a majority of Germans were suddenly opposed to tax cuts! That’s right - “a majority of Germans”. The same majority of Germans who were taken in by Guido Westerwelle’s “Givemiddle-class-people-an-extra-ooh-shall-we-say-€37-a-month?” election campaign have now got cold feet about the FDP’s plans for the economy, and have decided that it might be better not to let the country slide into a Greek-sized debt. Well then listen, you “majority of Germans”, you’d better go and lock that stable door before… Oh, hang on, what? 

But what really gets my goat and takes the biscuit - in fact, what really takes a really big biscuit and gives it to my extremely exasperated goat - is that even the government does not want the tax cuts! The CSU and the CDU, the so-called allies of the FDP who signed a coalition contract last October so that the parties I voted for couldn’t form a government, have spent their first months in government doing nothing but bicker about these bloody tax cuts and, in fact, about everything else the FDP wants to do. The personal animosity between Westerwelle and the CSU leader Horst Seehofer is not just personal: it is political, and no amount of summit meetings can iron those differences out. The fractures in this government are a lot worse than they were under the last one - a coalition of the ostensibly opposing CDU and SPD who, we were told, were forced together by expediency. But those two were clearly a lot closer together than the CSU and the FDP, who must now share an increasingly uncomfortable bed. 

It’s all the CSU’s fault, obviously. The CSU, often referred to as the CDU’s “Bavarian sister party”, is a flaw in German politics that won’t go away. If you ask me, it’s a party without a democratic mandate to be part of the federal government. Its members talk a lot about how they aspire to “national politics”, and whenever the CDU gets voted in, they get to install three cabinet ministers. But unless you live in Bavaria, you can’t vote for them. Only their unholy pact with the CDU allows them into the government in the first place, and then they have the cheek to moan that the CDU isn’t rightwing enough, or to complain that Westerwelle is being too friendly with Turkey. If they want to be a national party, why don’t they bloody well leave the CDU and campaign all over the country? But then what? Oh yeah: no one would vote for them, because they are a bunch of ignorant twats.

March 2010 [issue 81]