A postponed by-election begins to shift the stalemated outcome of Germany's general election last month, writes Dominic Coldwell Two weeks after elections failed to produce a clear winner, Germans went to the polls again -- this time in the eastern city of Dresden where the untimely death of a candidate on the campaign trail forced a two-week delay of balloting in this constituency. Neither the ruling coalition of chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats (SPD) and Joschka Fischer's Green Party, nor the opposition led by Angela Merkel of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) had managed to secure an absolute majority of seats required to elect a new leader in parliament last month. Pointing to their rival's inability -- respectively -- to assemble a governing majority, both Schröder and Merkel insisted on becoming Germany's next chancellor. Given the unprecedented electoral draw, the media billed the election in Dresden an important psychological test of strength. Merkel bagged an additional parliamentary seat on Sunday -- bringing the CDU's razor-thin lead to 226 seats versus 222 mandates for the SPD. On the other hand, the SPD won a majority of secondary votes in Germany's system of proportional representation. Neither side is strong enough to break the deadlock in parliament and, again, both camps claim victory. Even so, Merkel's success appears to have shifted some ground. Her ability to expand her party's slim parliamentary lead lends strength to her claim that the CDU should field the chancellor in any future government. Reading the signs, Schröder announced on Monday that he would call an internal party poll to establish whether the SPD would insist on claiming the chancellery for their front-runner once it hammers out a coalition agreement with Merkel, as now looks likely. By the time the Weekly went to press, it was impossible to determine whether Schröder merely sought party backing to shore up his claim to the chancellery, or whether, indeed, he indicated that he might be prepared to resign if a 'grand coalition' between the country's two biggest parties came to pass. According to the second scenario, the chancellor would sacrifice himself in exchange for maximising the number of ministries under SPD control in a 'grand coalition' headed by Merkel. A government comprising the country's two biggest parties is an uncommon beast in German politics. Traditionally, the CDU and SPD form stable governments with one of the country's two smaller parties as junior coalition partners. While the neo-liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) has tended to support the CDU, the Greens have sided with the SPD. What has now made a coalition between the country's two people's parties necessary is an unprecedented fracturing of Germany's political allegiances. On the left, the emergence of the New Left Party (NLP), founded by Schröder's former rival for the SPD leadership, Oskar Lafontaine, and Gregor Gysi, head of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), has dislocated traditional solidarities. While Gysi enjoyed popularity at the helm of a regional protest movement in eastern Germany, he failed to make any electoral inroads into west Germany following the country's re-unification in 1991. But Lafontaine's decision to lock step with Gysi has attracted a sizeable pool of former SPD voters -- disgruntled with Schröder's Blairite labour market reforms -- and handed the NLP nine per cent of the electoral pie. The success of Lafontaine -- with whom Schröder has categorically ruled out any future co- operation -- has deprived the chancellor of the requisite numbers to continue his coalition with Fischer's environmentalists. On the right, Merkel's Thatcherite plans to introduce Anglo-Saxon hire-and-fire legislation and introduce regressive forms of taxation have curried little favour with an electorate, 82 per cent of which consists of workers and employees. It is true that the CDU's long-time coalition partner -- the neo-liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) -- performed well thanks to the tendency of many CDU voters to cast their ballot tactically for the FDP in the hope of fending off a grand coalition. But even then, the two parties' overall share of the electoral pie tallies no more than 45 per cent -- short of the 51 per cent required for a working majority. The CDU's poor showing in the national ballots was nothing short of mind-boggling. Over the past two years, it had ousted the SPD from a number of state assemblies -- granting the conservatives a right of veto over any legislation the government submitted for approval to the upper house of parliament. It was the CDU's ability to wrest the state government in Schröder's populous home state of North-Rhine Westphalia from the SPD -- for the first time in 50 years -- which prompted the chancellor to call early elections in the spring. While the SPD was trailing the CDU by more than 20 per cent in opinion polls in June, Merkel's lead had dwindled to a meagre 0.9 per cent on election day. Schröder pocketed 34.3 per cent of the vote and the CDU barely inched over 35. In fact, the CDU lost to the SPD in 12 out of Germany's 16 states -- including North- Rhine Westphalia. The old adage whereby elections are always won in the centre was a political law of gravity which the trained physicist Merkel chose to ignore at her peril. Nowhere did the CDU lose as much support as among workers -- allowing Schröder to recapture the support of some two million disgruntled SPD voters at the centre whose protest against the chancellor's Blairism had artificially inflated the CDU's popularity. The numerical draw resulting from the electoral emaciation of the two big parties -- together the CDU and SPD barely scored 70 per cent -- now means that the two big parties will either need to enter a 'grand coalition' or form an alliance with at least two of the smaller parties. Yet the latter option is fraught with difficulties. The fiercely free-marketeering FDP categorically refuses to talk to the SPD. Meanwhile, the CDU, FDP, and Greens have explored the option of a so-called "Jamaica coalition" -- the parties' traditional colours (black, yellow, and green) evoking the island's flag. As word of such political novelties spread, German travel agents registered a sudden, double-digit jump in the number of bookings to the Caribbean watering hole. Papers in Kingston declared their country the real winner in a far- away election lacking any genuine victories. Notwithstanding the lure of political tropicality, however, talks collapsed over the CDU's objection to core Green projects like Turkish membership of the EU, and Berlin's farewell to environmentally-hazardous nuclear energy. In the end, it boiled down to an unbridgeable socio-cultural gap -- the Greens draw political inspiration from the 1968 revolt against the social conservatism Merkel preaches. As Foreign Minister Fischer commented sarcastically, he "could already picture us hanging out, dreadlocked, and smoking a joint" with CDU bigwigs "while reggae music is playing in the background." As his parliamentary whip Claudia Roth put it, "I've never been to Jamaica, but I'm an old Reggae fan and this has precious little to do with Mr Stoiber's Leitkultur " -- referring to the declared intent of Merkel's Bavarian ally to administer a healthy dose of Teutonic values to the rampant multiculturalism the Greens espouse. Now that Rastafarian pipedreams have gone up in smoke, Germans face the ever more likely prospect of a grand coalition. Notwithstanding Schröder and Merkel's rival claims to political primacy, it is an option that a narrow 51 per cent of voters endorse. Nor does it seem politically unworkable. The CDU's majority in the upper chamber of parliament has already forced Schröder to seek political consensus in the past period of legislature. Moreover, there is a history of non-partisan co-operation between the two parties in policy formulation. Ultimately, Schröder's Blairism would not be incompatible with the more compassionate conservatism to which a number of prominent CDU politicians are now urging Merkel to return.
