Botched in Berlin

In the wake of Germanys election results, one cant help suspect that Angela Merkels battered Christian Democrats are asking themselves a question that U.S. Democrats are all too familiar with: How could we blow it this time? And to such a weak incumbent?

At the outset of this campaignheld a year early because Chancellor Gerhard Schrder asked his center-left coalition in July for a vote of no confidencethe race was Merkels to lose. Her party was crushing Schrders Social Democrats in polls by 48 to 27 percent. With the conservatives traditional coalition partner, the libertarian Free Democrats, bringing in another 6 to 8 percent, the pundits and public opinion polls all pointed to a center-right takeover by fall. As they saw it, the economic and labor market reforms that the Social Democrat-Green coalition had hammered through were too little, too late, and badly packaged to boot. Unemployment was rising and the economy was grinding to a halt. Voters wanted a change, and now they had their chance.

Cut to Sunday night. While Germanys other four parties either did somewhat better or slightly worse than expected, the Christian Democrats tanked, posting a mere 35 percent. That was only 1 percent more than the Social Democrats, who had crept upwards in the polls since July, and more than 3 points lower than what the conservatives got in 2002, when they lost to the Social Democrats in a squeaker.

Merkels problem was not that German voters suddenly became fickle or skittish about reform. Most polls still show that a majority of voters favor moving ahead in that direction. The more basic issue was that her botched campaign projected confusion rather than clarity. Her biggest error was to tap a professor and political novice, Paul Kirchhof, to join her campaign team. Kirchhofs pet idea of a flat marginal tax rate of 25 percent for top earners contradicted her own partys platform, which called for a modest cut in the top rate (from 42 to 39 percent). Even when members of Merkels party began to openly distance themselves from Kirchhof, Merkel chose to keep him on board rather than make a clean break. Also disastrous was Kirchhofs failure to offer details on another signature proposal, the abolition of most tax deductions, to offset the costs of the flat tax. Instead, he and Merkel remained vague on the subject right up to election day, never outlining which deductions would actually go. That opened up another line of attack for Schrder, who exploited the charge that a Merkel government would end tax breaks for ordinary workers such as nurses and cleaning crews, who may now write off income earned on weekend, night, and holiday shifts.

Kirchhof was not the only gift Merkel offered to her opponents. Her party backed a 2 percentage point increase in the sales tax that neither her partys base nor the Free Democrats could warm up to. (The Free Democrats actually did well on Sunday, thanks to disaffected Christian Democratic voters.) And the Christian Democrats came close to self-destructing in Germany’s postcommunist states after some of their most prominent names dabbled in East-bashing a month ago. Perhaps most notorious was a comment by the minister-president of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber, that the frustrated voters in those stateswhere the ex-communist party has their baseshould not decide the election. These remarks not only dragged down the Christian Democrats electoral prospects, they also showed that Merkel was not really in control of her own party.

The Christian Democrats did no better tapping into new issues and new groups of voters who might be more receptive to its conservative philosophy. Germanys underinvestment in education was one long-neglected theme that the Christian Democrats could have exploited, but did not (its public spending on education ranks 20th among industrialized countries). They could have struck a chord by tying the issue to the unemployment crisis, as the bulk of Germanys jobless have a high-school education or less. Another lost opportunity was with immigrant voters, many of whom come from Turkey. This socially conservative cohort now numbers in the hundreds of thousands, thanks to an overhaul of immigration laws by Schrders government. Despite this groups potential, the Christian Democrats have long assumed that they can win more votes than they lose by playing on conservative fears of a Muslim Europe. Such rhetoric was toned down this year, but Merkels opposition to Turkeys accession to the European Union (EU)ensured that the German Turkish vote went overwhelmingly to the Social Democrats, who support Turkeys entry into the EU.

What lies ahead? The two biggest parties now face virtual parity in parliament, and both are scrambling to cobble together a workable coalition majority. Social Democrats are angling to stay in power, preferably by expanding their red-green coalition to include the Free Democrats (who could bring in enough seats for a majority) or by forming a more unwieldy grand coalition with the Christian Democrats. Meanwhile, some Christian Democrats are mulling something even more exotic: a coalition with the Free Democrats and the Greens.

Regardless of what comes out of these talks, the Christian Democrats will be either out of power or forced to deal with one or more partners at the table. With the election went their chance to recast themselves as the party of reform and renewal. Their party is now far weaker than when Schrder took the gamble on early elections in July. In this case, they followed a script that their political opponents couldnt have written any better.