Friday, September 17, 2021
Welcome to Food for Thoughtfor the Weekend, where I give you in-depth coverage and data analysis that keeps you glued to your screens for a good reason, for once. Published on Fridays.
It’s the weekend. Already. You can binge, or you can learn. Perhaps a bit of both?
And keep an eye for The Week that Was, usually published on Sundays. The Week that Was is my curated, in the loosest sense of the word, look at what happened last week.
Today I’m publishing part two of a three-part series on the upcoming elections in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany).
Credit: Erich Lessing
But before we get started, does anyone recognize the persons in the above photograph? One was described as a “strikingly statuesque blonde” (one of the few sexist clichés in that book) by Kai Bird in The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment; the other was described as “an impassioned and gifted orator” and a very difficult person, at least from McCloy’s point of view. The answer is below.
On Sunday, September 26, Germany will vote.
It’s not a simple thing, voting in Germany.
For one thing, you vote twice, or at least you have two votes to cast at the same time. You vote for a representative of your district, and you vote for a party. The parties submit lists; and parties that clear a 5% threshold nationwide get representatives in the Bundestag (parliament) even if none of there candidates win their districts.
In other words, Sie haben 2 Stimmen. (You have two votes.)
The system is called proportional representation, and it allows for a much greater range of representation in the Bundestag. In other words, it’s more representative. It’s more democratic. It’s also more complicated, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Proportional representation also means that the largest vote getter almost invariably has to put together a coalition government. That means taking other points of view into account. The negotiations can take weeks; and the resulting agreements are detailed. And I mean detailed.
One thing that doesn’t happen is slow vote counting. Germany does have early voting; but they manage to count votes quickly efficiently. It’s not because they’re German; we could do that, too.
Some Historical Background
Before looking into the contending parties and their histories, and certainly before covering this Wahlkampf (campaign) (see Food for Thought next Friday), we need to take a look at the Weimar Republic, which casts a long and twisted shadow over the way Germany is viewed from outside, especially from the English-speaking world, and even more so from the U.S.A.
First, let’s dispel the myth that Weimar was doomed from the start. This view is that the reparations imposed by the Versailles Treaty; the hyperinflation (which lasted a year and a half, or slightly over 10% of the lifespan of the Weimar Republic; and the decadence of Weimar (c.f. Cabaret) meant the Nazis were of course going to come to power, and, then, yes, the U.S.A. would be roused from its slumber to save the world and become the greatest power in human history, the last best hope of the human race.
Fact is, the inflation ended in 1923; the Germany economy then entered a period of growth. By 1928, industrial production had recovered and surpassed peacetime pre-World War One production; exports rose 40% between 1925 and 1929; and wages rose every year, including 10% in 1928.
Even the reparations, the legacy of a war between two opposing alliances of imperialist powers, were managed, by the Dawes Plan in 1924, and then reduced 20%, with loosened payment requirements, by the Young Plan in 1929 (both sponsored by J.P. Morgan & Co.). (Full disclosure: I do my banking with Chase, where I have both a checking account and a savings account.)
Oh, by the way, if Imperial Germany had won the war, it would have imposed similar reparations on the Western Allies.
As for the decadence, well, this time was a period of great creativity and freedom; and German sexual mores have always been a bit looser in than in the Anglo-American world. So much so that it was even a propaganda point for the British in World War One.
Source: Voluptuous Panic, the Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, by Mel Gordon
There were seven free elections during the Weimar period; only three in the 1920s, spaced at decent intervals. And, as seen below, the Nazis were a tiny party (winning 12 of 491 seats in the April 1928 election) until the Great Depression struck Germany.
Chart © 2021 Franklin Mount
You will note from the legend that there were a lot of parties, some of which seem to have been remarkably specific in their orientations. But the main parties garnered the large majority of the votes and seats. Another myth of Weimar is that the large number of parties crippled the republic.
The first postwar election in Germany was in 1949.
The first of the two great contenders in that election was the SPD, the Social Democratic Party, led by Kurt Schumacher, a man who spent almost the entirety of the Third Reich in various concentration camps as a political prisoner. He emerged after the war only to lose a leg due to diabetes in 1948. That fit well with the arm he had lost in World War One. Born in 1895, Schumacher died in 1952 at age 56, although a quick glimpse of the photograph at the beginning of this newsletter (and about which I quizzed you), taken in 1951, shows a man aged well beyond his years. The woman accompanying him is Annemarie Renger, who became Schumacher’s secretary. Renger went on to become the first female President of the Bundestag.
Photo of Kurt Schumacher Speaking in the Ruins, 1947.
Schumacher was a stern opponent of the Nazis; in a speech to the Reichstag on February 23, 1932, he said that Nazism was an unrelenting appeal to “the inner swine in human beings” and that the Nazis’ great success was in organizing human stupidity. He was equally stern against the Communists before the war, and after, calling them “red-painted Nazis.” in 1946.
On the other side was the CDU, founded in 1945, and led by Konrad Adenauer.
John J. McCloy, Konrad Adenauer, Sir Brian Robertson and André François-Poncet
Just about all observers thought that Schumacher and the SPD would triumph; but the CDU and their Bavarian sister party, the CSU, gained more seats and formed the first government of postwar Germany.
There have been nineteen elections in Germany in the postwar period.
Chart © 2021 Franklin Mount
Ten parties cleared the 5% threshold and gained representation in that election, but the number of parties surmounting that barrier to gain seats in the Bundestag dwindled to three by the election of 1961. (As noted, the CDU and CSU function as one party, the Union, at the national level.)
Gradually, other parties entered the picture in the 1980s:
the Greens, focused on the environment;
the Party of Democratic Socialism, formed out of the remnants of the Social Unity Party, as the Communist Party was called in the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany;
the Left Party, formed by a merger of left-wing Social Democrats and the Party of Democratic Socialism; and
entering stage right, the Alternative for Germany, which started as an anti-Euro party and then through a series of bitter internal fights turned into hard right nationalist anti-immigrant climate change denying Trump-loving party.
Below is table listing the six major parties expected to win seats next Sunday:
Next week on Food for Thought: the latest on the German election.
If you don’t have enough to think about, I hope that this issue of Food for Thought will have alleviated that need.
Have a great weekend!