NOTNEVER LEAVE anyone who says that a handful of votes doesn’t change anything. Last October, the German Liberal Liberal Democrats (FDP) won 74 fewer votes in an election in the East German state of Thuringia, they would not have entered its parliament. Bodo Ramelow, the People’s Prime Minister, could have had the figures to renew his leftist coalition. And Thomas Kemmerich, the FDPThe leader of Thuringia, would not have scandalized the country on February 5 by relying on the votes of the far-right alternative for Germany (AFre) to win a parliamentary election to succeed Mr. Ramelow.
No German Prime Minister has ever been elected AFre support. As protesters chanted anti-fascist slogans outside the state parliament in Erfurt, and MPs inside mocked, Mr. Kemmerich promised to keep the firewall against the AFre, whose branch in Thuringia is particularly harmful (its bait course leader, Björn Höcke, pictured on the right with Mr. Kemmerich, heads the extremist wing “Flügel” of the party).
The reaction was swift and savage. Chancellor Angela Merkel called couture “a bad day for democracy”, saying it broke the values of the center-right Christian Democrat Union (CDU). The Social Democrats (SPD), a junior partner of the national government, denounced the vote as a low point in German post-war history. On February 6, Kemmerich welcomed the inevitable and offered to resign, calling for new elections. We don’t know how FDP, with only five seats out of 90, could have led a government.
Yet Thuringia is only the most extreme example of the fragmentation of German politics. For decades, the great tent of the country Volksparteien (“Popular parties”) guarantee stability and a certain predictability. West German governments tended to oscillate between the center-left (the SPD) and, more often, center-right (the CDU, as well as their Bavarian sister, the CSU), with the FDP generally acting as a kingmaker. In the 1970s, the CDU/CSU and SPD together, they won more than 90% of the national vote.
This comfortable image had to be triple disturbed. The Greens, founded in 1980, first became shaggy radicals as a government party. The reunification in 1990 brought in former communists from the east, who then merged with the West German leftists to form Die Linke, Ramelow’s party. The biggest shock was the rise of AFre, which started in 2013 as an anti-euro party, but quickly turned into xenophobic populism. Today there are six parties in Parliament and the decline of the Volksparteien means that three of the four governments led by Angela Merkel since taking office in 2005 are “grand coalitions” CDU/CSU and SPD; two failing giants leaning on each other for support. According to current polls, they attract barely 40%.
Fragmentation is at its peak in the unusual German federal system. Thirty years ago, seven of his 16 State (the states), which have powers over education, the police and infrastructure, were led by single parties; all but one had bipartisan coalitions. Today, almost half are governed by three (see graph). There are 13 coalition combinations in the 16 states (see map). East Germany is particularly afflicted, thanks to the strength of the untouchables AFre. Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg are all ruled by “Kenya” CDU–SPD– Green coalitions (the colors of the parts correspond to the Kenyan flag), fragile and unloved devices erected only to keep the AFre out of office.
Federalism has its uses. States can serve as laboratories for unusual coalitions. Today’s ties between the Greens and CDU in Baden-Württemberg and Hesse, for example, are blank tests for a potential national government. But ideologically disparate coalitions often find it difficult to govern effectively, voters cannot predict how they will govern, and they can erase work in the Bundesrat, Germany’s upper house, which is made up of state government officials . In addition, unite to stop the AFre only served to confirm his anti-elite argument, said Thomas Poguntke of the Institute for German and International Law of Parties and Party Research in Düsseldorf.
There is another difficulty in a system where politics in one state inevitably resonates in another. It is CDU never work with Die Linke or the AFre to government. However, some of the party’s great people believed that the CDU in Thuringia should bite the bullet and support Ramelow, a charismatic avascular type who has competently run the state since 2014. Kramp-Karrenbauer feared approval of such an agreement would embolden conservatives CDU in states like saxony or saxony-anhalt to ask why they shouldn’t be allowed to AFre. But avoiding this headache simply created another one: now she has to mop up the mess created by her colleagues from Thuringia, who exposed the CDU accusations of collaboration with extremists. As state policy becomes more fragmented and polarized, tensions between parties at the federal and state levels seem likely to escalate.
After briefly elevating Mr. Kemmerich to victory in Thuringia, the AFre soon realized that she had made herself indispensable to the construction of conservative majorities. This argument seems a little less convincing now than its agreement with the rumor FDP ended in disarray. Even so, there are several cases of CDU and the AFre quietly cooperating at the municipal level. Many analysts have long assumed CDUAnti-AFre sanitary cordon would end up in one state or another. Thuringia may not have reached this level, but it shows more clearly than ever the dangers of political fragmentation in Germany – and all thanks to these 74 votes. ■
This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the title “The splintering states”
