Zhou Ruirui
There has been no new article for a long time since The German Election Day on 26 September 2021. Readers are asked not to rush to accuse me of being lazy. Because, with the emergence of the full list of cabinet ministers, Olaf Scholz was finally promoted from quasi-prime minister to the next prime minister. But until then, all that could be done was to wait passively in a mood similar to opening a blind box.
On 6 December 2021, the last vacant position in the new government was held by Health Minister Carl Lauterbach, a public health expert and social democrat known for his iron-fisted fight against the epidemic. The first official list of ministers for the new Government was released. It has been more than two months since the German election. For more than two months, every day was filled with all kinds of small news. They are like countless fragments flying in the air after a mirror is broken, each reflecting a little truth from its own perspective and then falling down, leaving only a residue that is difficult to clean and easy to cut.
On December 8, 2021, in Berlin, Germany, Germany's new Chancellor Scholz and members of the Cabinet were sworn in in the German Bundestag, ushering in the Scholz era.
The clamor of the election came to an abrupt end on election day. Immediately, he plunged into a dark tunnel. At the end of the election campaign, all the parties came down, both as chess players and pawns, foretold an incomparably complex, mutual checks and balances, arrangements and combinations, and the changeable offensive and defensive momentum of the cabinet attempt. In stark contrast to the public's eagerness and anticipation, suspense has become suspense: not only have all parties kept the communication process secretive, but even the media, which has always been lively, has entered an unusually conservative state after the election. There are small and trivial reports, but there are few links and comments on the big picture. After the conclusion of the official announcement, the details of the process should be missing. The general election of 26 September left a puzzle for all of German society, and people were only informed of the results, not the process of solving the problem.
No matter how much media people inquire, all they can get is some ambiguous words. Marcus Lantz is the host of a prestigious professional political science program. In "ordinary times", and even during the election campaign, this show has always been regarded by political parties as an object that must be fought for, and even a platform for rushing to build their own image on it. On a show about cabinet negotiations, the guests included SpDD campaign manager Kevin Kunat. Landz asked a lot of blunt questions on the show, starting with "Let's talk about it, didn't you talk to the person in charge of negotiating the cabinet in the party, how is this possible?" To the point of being even a little angry, "Well, you just made up your mind not to say anything." Kunat, on the other hand, did not hesitate to provoke Lantz and was reluctant to give any specific answer.
In addition to the lack of writing material for the media, the official tight-lipped bottle is itself a sensitive signal for the media with many years of experience. No one wants to lose their professional reputation in an unclear situation deliberately created by the authorities, because of the speculation or misjudgment of the situation on the big picture. No one can be sure whether the messages that are being sent out in the newspapers today are smokescreens or parts of real progress. After all, just a few days before the official announcement of Lauterbach, the media (many of which were big media) were full of impressions of "Lauterbach's hopeless health minister", and even more than one article was written to analyze how Lauterbach missed the opportunity due to the tilting of the SPD. In this context, any in-depth discussion and further speculation is meaningless (and here is another explanation of why I have been "quiet" for a long time: because most of the news that has broken out in these two months or so is not enough to support an article with comprehensive depth, substance, and not sensationalism in this context). The caution of the media has also brought about the thinness of public discussion and even public opinion supervision: how to talk about it without material?
Along with the ambiguity of the cabinet negotiations came the fourth wave of the covid-19 pandemic. The post-election Germany, on the one hand, is an obscure and trivial combination of cabinet arrangements, and on the other hand, the rebound of the epidemic with the drop in temperature and the spread of variants. In 2021, Germany had a very cool, almost cold summer. The fourth wave of the epidemic lurked in German society, which was excited by the election, emerged after the election, and quickly retaliated with the surge in infections for ignoring and numbing it.
Post-election Germany thus became two worlds: a world of political circles that brought together the top negotiators and politicians from all parties, who were going to decide the future of Germany through talk, but they were closed and no one knew what they were talking about, how they wanted to talk about it, what they wanted to talk about. The other world was a vast German society intertwined with extreme anxiety and numbness. The latter world is noisy, and in the former world there are only whispers that do not pass through the ears.
Documentaries on television about old bottles of new wine began to be shown: the most common account of The history of The Third Reich, which was most common in Germany, from the perspective of how an unhandled crisis drove Germany and the world into the abyss. Everything is secretly telling the mood of this society that is confused and does not dare or cannot declare it.
In the September 26 general election, the official vote count results were not counted until a day or two later. Tensions in the election campaign continued into the post-election period: the SPD won by two percentage points, the Alliance party recorded a record low, the Greens were below 15 percent, and the Liberal Democratic Party was not much different from its vote.
Before exploring the future further, the results should be analysed. Those parties that have become opposition parties in particular should not be ignored. As I have predicted before, all the parties in Congress are both chess players and pawns in this election, so even the opposition parties do not lack influence on the cabinet negotiations or even on the new government – they are just retreating behind the scenes.
For example, the position of the Left Party in the Congress can be described as a twist and turn: when the second vote was just opened, the Left Party won 4.8%, less than the 5% threshold, and was about to be squeezed out of the Parliament, saved by the first vote issued later (it is generally recognized that the second vote is more important, because the first vote is the parliamentarian of the specific constituency, and the second vote basically determines the allocation of parliamentary seats, usually people call "general election results" refers to the second vote statistical results). In stark contrast to the second vote that missed the threshold, the Left candidate won a sweeping victory in three constituencies, thus preserving 39 people entering Parliament as "straight-up parliamentarians". Thus, there is only one plausible explanation for the Left's fiasco in the second vote: it was their punishment on behalf of the SPD left, represented by Esken, whose voters had not forgotten that she was in a hurry to meet with the left's representatives just two or three weeks after Scholz's vote had begun to soar. The left party received votes because voters were saying no to the "red, red and green" combination, and "red and green brought about the dictatorship of all-left economic terror" was the voice that the Coalition party had been emitting since the late stages of the election campaign.
According to Germany's Basic Law, Merkel's federal cabinet remained in office after election days until the first plenary session of the new Bundestag, a month later, on October 26. And even after October 26, as long as the new government does not complete the formation of the cabinet and take the oath of office, Merkel will have to continue to serve as the caretaker prime minister.
And that's exactly what happened. Merkel led the caretaker cabinet as caretaker chancellor for no longer.
On November 24, 2021 local time, Scholz (second from left) attended a press conference to announce that the three parties had reached an agreement to form a cabinet. The first left is LDP Chairman Lindner, and the third and fourth left are green party double chairmen Berberk and Hubbeck.
About a week after the election, a selfie circulated in the major media: The Green Party's prime ministerial candidate, Balbok, and the coalition leader, Habeck, appeared in a selfie along with the LDP's prime ministerial candidate, Lindner, and secretary-general Falk Wiesing. Tweet caption: "Rock bands come back, look good!" The leaders of the two parties met quickly, accompanied by the official propaganda of the people-friendly nature that comes with social media. Boiling public opinion is like a soldering iron dipped in cold water, scorned a few wisps of smoke and then returned to silence.
It was too quiet for the great suspense facing Germany. And this silence continued. The diametrically opposed to the rapid start of the contact cabinet negotiations is the factual difficulty of the cabinet.
That's because the joint selfies of the leaders of the two parties are not so much mutual identification as they are way to appease voters. On the eve of the end of the election campaign, the situation was clear: the winner could only emerge in the SPD and the League, but there would be no overwhelming majority. Thus, the direction of the new government depends to some extent on how the Greens and the Liberal Democratic Party together choose. However, it is well known that the two parties do not deal with each other in their philosophy. Fortunately, the Greens, which had just won the polls that gave the official announcement of the candidates in April, had to prove to voters that they were capable and worthy of a battle, while the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been silent for years and had lost power due to the collapse of the "Jamaican Alliance" in the last government negotiations, did not want voters to see that the hard-won opportunity to govern was messed up by itself. So they have to agree, at least they have to try to reach it.
Although it is rarely revealed that the people concerned are in a prisoner's predicament, careful observers can roughly divide the difficulty of the process of forming a cabinet into two paragraphs: the first is centered on the whereabouts of the Coalition Party, and the second is about the struggle between the SpDs, the Greens, and the Liberal Democrats after "only each other remains.".
Despite the Defeat of the League, the League was not out of the game from the start. Because, in theory, the first person to get a vote is not necessarily the prime minister. In the governments formed in 1969, 1976 and 1980, the prime ministers, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt (in the last two years, Schmidt was re-elected), who were inferior in terms of votes in the general elections of that year, but because of the support of other parties, they formed a cabinet and became a great prime minister.
Apparently, Amin Laschet, then leader of the Coalition, was reluctant to give up, both out of a sense of honor and out of self-interest. As I wrote in a previous article, Laschet gave up the nomination of the constituency, the first vote, in order to go all out for the general election, and bet on the second vote. If you lose the election, you may even lose your qualification to enter the National Assembly as an ordinary member of Congress. And he not only lost the election, but also lost miserably. Not only that, but the Coalition even lost the hometown of prime ministerial candidate Rashet and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where he was a former governor: the CDU received 26% of the vote, while the SPD received 29.1%. It was a great shame for both the League and ForRahette. In all kinds, Laschet only has the hope of leading the Alliance Party to attack the cabinet to maintain the party leader and even his political career. Once abandoned, he is likely to face political retirement because he no longer has "meaning of existence" in the party. Thus, in the first post-election period, whether it was for the mobilization within the party or for the shouts outside the party, Laschet had been trying to agitate for support for the "Jamaican Alliance" (black, yellow and green).
Laschet's attempt was quickly disrupted. After hitting a record low of 23 percent, the League's various actors came to the fore. Although he lost the election, it was not that there was no hope of forming a cabinet at this time, and everyone hoped that they were that hope. But there are two reasons behind the eventual decline of "Jamaica". The first reason is that there aren't so many Rashet supporters in the League party, which is understandable. The second reason was that the League party soon appeared on its own: Spann, Dobrint, Meertz, Rotgen, and they all demanded and desired the party leader. Behind the mountains are not only the rift between the CDU and the CSU, but also the double absence of candidates and political platforms.
Thus, within a week in October, two events occurred: the "traffic lights" cabinet negotiations began the first formal intentional contact, and the leader of the Coalition Party, Laschet, withdrew and announced that he would fully re-elect the party's leadership. Two things happened on the front and back feet, only a few days apart.
Although many hills in the League Party rose up for a while, none of them was enough to become a mountain to overwhelm the people in a short period of time. Infighting soon drained the Alliance's already little fighting spirit. Then Defense Minister Anne Gretel Kramp-Karrenbauer and Economic Minister Pete Atmayer announced on the same day that she would not run for the next CDU leadership, announcing the fading of Merkel's cronies and the ensuing reshuffle of party personnel. The Coalition, which had no time to look around, eventually accepted the result of going to the opposition.
The contacts between the SPD, the Greens and the Liberal Democratic Party have evolved in this context to become increasingly "genuine". The First Greens to play their cards made a noise: they intended to support Robert Habeck as deputy prime minister. Habek and prime ministerial candidate Annalena Balbok are leaders of both parties. Not supporting the prime ministerial candidate, but supporting Habeck as deputy prime minister, shows that the Greens have long planned for such a situation, and it is also a test for the other two cabinet negotiators. After not gaining opposition, the Greens grew bolder.
However, the Greens are well aware that they cannot "ask too much". Otherwise, first of all, it will not be the SPD, but the LDP, which will not support it. For example, the Greens and the Liberal Democratic Party have long competed for the position of finance minister. Finance Minister is the position of Quasi-Chancellor Scholz in Merkel's government, and it is also a matter of taxation. The LDP took a tough stance and eventually won.
The difficulty of the negotiations between the three party groups stems from constant testing between each other. Everyone wants to ask for a higher price, but everyone is afraid that the price is too high for other people to leave. Looking at the cabinet candidates, all three parties have made no small compromise for the formation of the cabinet.
The first is the SPD. In the "small cabinet", only the Minister of the Interior is a comrade of the Party. The financial power is in the hands of Lindner, the current leader of the Liberal Democratic Party. The Green Party's Habeck has served several terms, and in addition to the deputy prime minister who has not been rejected, he has also combined the economy and environmental protection into one. Even Balbok, who made major mistakes in the election and had no experience in governing, was offered the post of foreign minister. Instead, he left the most thankless health minister in the epidemic to himself.
But that doesn't mean the Greens can sit back and relax. They must make a lot of concessions to the LDP for the success of the cabinet. The scenery in the small cabinet is a promise they have to make to voters. In the coming government, taxation will play an important role in industrial transformation and pacifying post-pandemic societies, and even the greens themselves will be able to stand on taxes. But taxes fall under the jurisdiction of the Liberal Democratic Party, which is far from its political stance. In addition, the Greens have not been given any other important positions outside the "small cabinet".
From the LDP's point of view, re-participation in the government after many years is certainly a victory. But the LDP is also the only right-wing party in this cabinet. In addition, since the election results are the weakest of the three parties, the corresponding number of members of Parliament is correspondingly the smallest. The friction after the beginning of the administration can be imagined.
Perhaps because of this entanglement, the cabinet negotiation agreement followed the style of the pre-election campaign platforms of the parties: long, but vaguely where necessary. The 180-page negotiated agreement for the formation of the cabinet either intentionally or unintentionally adopted a historically echoing title: "Dare to Make More Progress" – in 1969, under the leadership of fellow SPD willy Brandt, the SPD and the LDP formed the first coalition in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany with both social and liberal leanings, and the cabinet formation agreement was entitled "Dare to Be More Democratic".
The same combination of social and liberal, the same "first in history", the subtitle "Dare to Make More Progress" is "Alliance of Freedom, Justice and Sustainable Development". As if to appease voters about the alliance of these inclined "less than a table", the subtitle adopts a way of making it clear that each party has its own expression in it: freedom for the Liberal Democratic Party, justice for the SPD, and sustainable development for the Greens.
Compared with its two rivals, the SPD, which is leading the current government, has arguably been the slowest to act. Until the official announcement of Lauterbach at the Willy Brandt Building on 6 December, Scholz kept a secret of his own or the party's plans. However, as for the cabinet negotiations, the leaders of the left-wing two parties, who have always been "thorny heads", still expressed their own approval. However, the statements of the two party leaders are subtly different. Walter-Bolyans, who had already abandoned his re-election as party leader, was relatively blunt: the SPD was full of spirits, returned with blood, once again became the leading force in Germany, and had to activate the brake mechanism of the Union Party to prevent it from failing for a long time, and the Union Party was now an opposition party, and it was time to think about itself. In contrast, Escen, who had a clear desire to retain the post of party leader and had more disagreements with Scholz but was determined to win the new government ministerial position, said some diplomatic rhetorical clichés while not saying so much: "We use traffic lights to write history." Such progress is not so easy to achieve, you have to have courage. ”
In the first weekend of December, the SPD had already voted on a negotiated agreement to form a cabinet. Immediately after that, the Liberal Democratic Party and the Green Party also passed the cabinet formation agreement by a large number of votes in the next two days. The unanimous high vote expressed the three parties' affection for the long and painful negotiations on the formation of the cabinet and their ardent hope for a ticket to power. The new government is finally coming into office.
On December 8, local time, Scholz accepted the appointment of German President Steinmeier at the German Presidential Palace.
It is clear that the incoming Chancellor Schoelz has a long-term vision. The current government has not yet taken office, and he is already thinking about the next one. He told the SPD that the cooperation with the LDP and the Greens was "friendly cooperation and so that we could be elected again". At the SPD Special Party Congress, he also — as hinted at the cabinet negotiating agreement — mentioned Willy Brandt in 1969, the first SPD Prime Minister: "A breakthrough like [Willy Brandt], we can do it again".
For the dark tunnel and everything that happened in it, I can only say "I am all the way to it" until now. Germany has finally come to the end of this tunnel, and the journey after that can be made public.
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Yan Zhang