Issue #15, Winter 2010

German Lessons

Should progressives frustrated with our democracy pine for a parliamentary system? In a word—nein.

Clay Risen

Germany’s national elections took place on Sunday, September 27, a warm, clear fall day that brought people out to Berlin’s sidewalk promenades, trying to soak up one last day of good weather before the long winter. My wife, two friends, and I, all of us political junkies, had plans to hit a few parks and museums, then settle on a bar to watch the returns once the polls closed at six. Later that night we’d work our way to one of the campaign parties around town.

At 6:05, just done with a leisurely bite at a garden café in Charlottenburg, we rang up another American friend with our evening agenda. “Not sure the parties will be swinging much longer,” he said. “The election’s just been called.” With stunning accuracy, exit polls were already showing a decisive win for the coalition of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP). By 6:10, concession speeches were being prepared; within the hour, the election was over.

We scrambled to find a bar with a TV. There were crowded pubs everywhere–but the patrons were all watching soccer. After half an hour we found a bar with an unused flat screen. “Can we watch the election returns?” we asked the server. Judging by the look on her face, we might as well have asked about competitive knitting. But hey, we were paying customers, so she said yes. We watched for an hour, and not a single person joined us.

What a contrast to last November in Washington, when my wife and I bounced from crowded bar to bar watching the U.S. presidential election returns. To be fair, we were on the verge of electing the nation’s first African-American president, while this year Germany was bringing to a merciful end what everyone, even some of the candidates, deemed the country’s most boring campaign ever.

Then again, whether one considered the election “boring” speaks volumes about the difference between German and American political cultures. True, Merkel and her Social Democratic (SPD) opponent, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, made for excellent insomnia cures (a last-minute music video by the sexed-up “Steinmeier Girl” notwithstanding). This year, barely 70 percent of Germans voted, the lowest number in postwar history. But to an American observer, the election had all the elements of high political drama: The sudden, double-digit power of the far-left Linke party, the once-dominant center-left SPD fighting for relevance amid tanking poll numbers, the popularity of the pro-market center-right during a deep recession.

Germany is a vibrant parliamentary democracy, yet its body politic is asleep. Germans either trust their elected officials to take care of things, or they sink into a deep political apathy. The latter camp is growing: A recent poll showed only 49 percent of Germans had faith in their democratic institutions, dropping to 29 percent in the former East Germany. Yet aside from a small activist current, they rarely try to change things.

Next to European health care and European urban planning, the aspect of European life for which liberal Americans pine most often is the continent’s parliamentary politics. Whenever I run down the litany of niche German political parties–alongside the Greens, the FDP, and the Linke, there’s the Animal Protection Party, the new-age Violet Party, and the Retired People’s Party, among others–for left-leaning American friends, they sigh and say, “I wish.” Parties that actually represent people’s interests? Coalitions built on cross-party compromise, rather than ideological stone walls? Wouldn’t that be great, they say.

A progressive’s dream. I agree. Or rather, I did, before I spent this previous August and September in Germany. After seeing German politics up close, I’ll take my two-party system, thank you very much.

There is a lot to recommend the political structure in Germany. Just look at the results: Since the founding of the federal republic in 1949, it has held the country together through the era postwar rebuilding, the Cold War, the left-wing violence of the 1970s, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and reunification.

In the early postwar years, Germany, like the United States, had two massive “people’s” parties, the center-right CDU and the center-left SPD, along with the much smaller, eccentric FDP, which over the last 60 years has aligned with both sides of the spectrum. For nearly 40 years, the SPD and CDU accounted for about 90 percent of the vote.

This worked, for a while. But already by the late 1960s, frustrations were growing. Because the parties are structured as membership organizations, with lifelong career ladders, it is almost impossible for grassroots movements, even inside the membership, to influence a party’s course. The parties may represent “the people,” but they are led by oligarchic central committees, which have little incentive to adapt in response to changes in voting patterns.

Little incentive–until it’s too late. As in the United States, the left-wing radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s drew on deep generational and political contradictions in German society. But it lasted longer, and expressed itself much more violently, than in America because there was no party system to absorb it. By 1972, former radicals in the United States were campaigning for McGovern; in Germany, they were bombing U.S. Army bases.

Eventually, some of those radicals entered politics as the Green party; others shaved, put on suits, and joined the SPD. But the SPD bigwigs were unwilling to make room for them. Many of them were never entirely comfortable there, and out of frustration with SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s welfare-law reforms of the early 2000s they left to form the Linke.

Issue #15, Winter 2010
 
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Hamjatta:

Reading Clay Risen article (on what progressives can learn from Germany, or not) I was reminded of something I said to myself sometime ago upon commenting that the quality of articles in "Democracy" are of such excellence that I have yet to read any I can fault with the sort of sloppy thinking that afflicts much of the debate we purport to be having in the media. Disagree with the normative thrusts of a particular author–“€™s preferred policy preferences, to be sure; but nary a complaint on the quality of the writing and/or command of the facts. The monologue I had with myself was that very soon, and it was simply a matter of time, an article will appear on the pages of "Democracy" that will be an exception to this observation on the generally unsurpassed quality of "Democracy" articles.



Sure enough, Risen's article on Germany has proven this private speculation of mine. Since his article is riven with an almost incalculable amount of factual errors that will not pass the test of aggressive fact-checking in any good publication, I shall limit myself to the most egregious example. Of current healthcare reform in the US, Risen writes that:



"At the time of this writing, the United States is on the verge of passing sweeping reforms of its health-insurance system, a mid-stream step that few countries could dream of achieving."



If Risen had done his history, especially comparative history, he would surely have not failed to observe the absurdity of this claim. Consider the following comparative historical facts:



(a) if the US does succeed in passing the comprehensive healthcare reforms currently making its way in Congress - and all indications are that a Bill will eventually be passed, however tepid the final outcome - it would have taken the US about a century to reach the goal of universal healthcare since the case for it was politically articulated;



(b) currently, compared with its industrial peers, that is, other wealthy industrial OECD countries, the US is the sole country without universal healthcare;



(d) all OECD countries, bar the US, Mexico and Korea, have some form of parliamentary democracy;



(e) is it therefore an accident that it is the non-parliamentary government members of the OECD that still either have no universal healthcare coverage (the US and South Korea) or a very tepid version of it (Mexico)?



Indeed, if Risen had bothered to do even a smattering of history, he would not fail to have observed that modern universal healthcare is an achievement, principally, of the parliamentary government in Bismarckian Germany - albeit a comparatively weaker and less- democratic form of parliamentary system than we are accustomed to.

From legislation on climate change to financial regulation, OECD countries that have parliamentary governments have done far more than the US has in combating some of the most important policy problems the world faces. Whilst Washington dithers with respect to breaking up the financial cartels that nearly brought the US to its knees, the Westminster government (in the UK) has passed the most comprehensive and rigorous financial regulation bill in the Western world and have started breaking up the big banks.



Can Risen say the same for the US Congress or, more generally, for policy-making in the US? Presumably, Risen is unaware of the frank and blunt exasperating remarks of Senator Durbin (D-Illinois) to the effect that the US policy-making process with respect to financial regulation has been 'captured' by the banks and similar vested interests:



"And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place..."



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/29/dick-durbin-banks-frankly_n_193010.html







More to the point, in the academic study of 'regulatory capture' the presidential system of the US, with its strident and elaborate separation of powers, has the propensity to be most at the mercy of lobbyists and assorted interests that are not necessarily serving the public weal. The financial crisis and the historic attempt to give the US what its industrial managed to achieve more 60 years ago amply demonstrated the degree to which the parliamentary has relative superiority over the US presidential model in terms of solving societal problems.

Dec 9, 2009, 4:49 AM
David Stinson:

This debate about Parliamentary vs. Presidential systems is one of those recurring features of liberal debate, with no apparent answer. Either conflict within parties, or conflict between parties - seems like six of one, half a dozen of the other. Except it isn't. The presidential system introduces disprortionalities and perverse incentives that don't exist in the parliamentary system, no matter how you slice it.



To start off with, a parliamentary system has no possibility that the prime minister can win simply by spitting the opposition. When Clinton rises to power off the back of Ross Perot, he don't owe anything to Perot. In a parliamentary system, on the other hand, if the plurality party weren't a majority, they would have to form a coalition with at least one of the minority parties. Thus Risen's claim that radical leftists had nowhere to go but terrorism is clearly false, on his premises. If the radical leftists managed to win even one seat in parliament, there would have been a possibility that they could have exercised veto power over the entire government, including even the executive - something that just doesn't exist in Presidential systems. Moreover, in a system proportional representation, it wouldn't be as hard to start a new party as Risen implies.



According to Risen, "the big decisions in contemporary politics–“€“climate change, global terrorism, international financial reform–“€“demand a policymaking coherence and stability that only broad-based, pragmatic parties like America–“€™s can provide." But coherence isn't necessarily a virtue for highly technical problems where there isn't a magic-bullet solution, like global warming. Stability isn't a good response to an extremely dynamic problem like terrorism. Even for financial policies, which is our traditional strength over Europe, our system isn't as effective as a parliamentary system would be. Congress originally tried to vote down the fiscal stimulus package that saved our economy. Both parties revolted against their leadership - showing very clearly that this was a structural problem, not a policy debate. Congress can avoid responsibility for its actions simply by blaming things on the president. In a parliamentary system, where the legislature and the executive of a particular party share the same fate, (because the members of parliament pick the president) no group of policy-makers can pass the buck like that.



Risen notes that more than half of Germans don't think it really matters who wins. He sees that as a weakness of the German system. In our American context, it would be a weakness, because we're always trying to increase voter turnout. However, Europe doesn't tend to have problems with voter turnout. Perhaps that statistic means that Germans are happy just the way the system is? That it's already achieved its goal, and the need for activism has been reduced? Focusing on just the number of parties misses other important aspects of a political system, and those less obvious aspects decisively favor parliamentary systems.

Dec 10, 2009, 1:40 PM
Solarjoy:

Simplistic deductions truly spoil the article. Apparently, in the entire world only Americans, who had American History in high school, do not realize that lobbyists firmly control the country. Sadly enough, the people and the two political parties are just marionettes. Leonard Cohen's Democracy and Kevin Carey's That Old College Lie (in this Winter 2010 issue) offer a more real, pragmatic view of the U.S.

Jan 9, 2010, 9:36 AM
Li:

quote: 'But Germany now has six factions (including the CDU–“€™s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Socialists) in the Bundestag,.....'



This sister party isn't named Christian Socialists. They are the Christian Social Union - CSU.



At last, it doesn't matter who rules any country. It just matters how it's done. No polity can provide a guarantee for ...... what? A good life for everybody?

Jan 12, 2010, 4:40 PM

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