Post-383: High Drama in Erfurt (German Politics; AfD breakthrough)

Comments

1. Updates as of Feb. 7 early evening Germany time, day three of the crisis.

   1.) The national CDU continued to push for a new election;

   2.) Lots of confusion. The state party is said to have refused the new election, a mutiny;

   3.) An emergency meeting was held. Mike Mohring was voted out as CDU head in Thuringia by his own party members.

   4.) The CDU national party backed down from its call for new elections. No one knows what’s going on.

   5.) A new poll (n=1000 in Thuringia, specially commissioned and conducted entirely on Feb. 6) finds the CDU support in Thuringia has cratered (it took 22% of the actual vote last year –> 12% expected vote in a fresh election), with Linke the main beneficiary (31% –> 37%), exactly as I predict above. The SPD and Greens stand to gain a seat each.

   6.) If the new poll is accurate, Bodo Ramelow is back, leading the strongest Linke government ever (if a new election is held, when smoke clears it could be his Linke party at a dominant 40%+ of seats, easily forming a majority with minor support from SPD and Greens). A dominant reformed-SED with minor Social Democrat and Green support is exactly what the East German regime wished it could have transitioned to.

   7.) The so-called villainous AfD has had its support remain firm in the new poll. These people surely resent all this fuss and want only to be respected.

   8.) Lindner remains at the head of the FDP, easily surviving a confidence vote.

   9.) Now late word comes out that the CDU in Thuringia will back Bodo’s return to power. If this was a Prisoner’s Dilemma, the CDU center finally broke and defected to the left, under great pressure from above.

   10.) People are starting to grumble about why the CDU did this; they look bad, if not quite Banana Republic-level then something on the way. Why, the grumblers ask, had they voted for the conservative CDU at all, if the latter were just going to fold it up and hand the key to the far-left? (See also point 5).

   11.) Kemmerich himself, widely reported to have resigned under pressure Feb. 6, came roaring back in the game Feb. 7 and said he would not resign at this time after all, and would need to be voted out.

   The headlines continue to be dominated by Thuringia.

   Some commentators are comparing this “east” German election to an “East” German election whereby the results were not correct so have to be adjusted to make sure the proper man stays in power. East Germany did have elections but their results were not competitive. “What is the difference here?”

2. Update as of evening (Germany time) Feb. 10.

   Grumbling continues and political attention remains focused on Thuringia, now five days after the shock.

   The head of the CDU, AKK (full name: Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer), up until now the designated Merkel successor, has now resigned as “Chancellor candidate” over the Thuringia fiasco. This was a surprise move. It’s unclear who will be the designated Chancellor candidate for the CDU in 2021 when Merkel finally steps down.

   The CDU has seen its support in two new polls in Thuringia drop like a rock, with an overall shift of -8 away from the CDU (from its already low level) and +7 to Linke, and everyone else pretty steady. This vote-preference flux again proves my analysis correct, that eastern Germans born before the mid-1970s will tend to go towards Linke as the conservative option. “Conservative,” conceptually, is always relative.

   Now they have been forced to issue another muddled statement saying they will never vote for Bodo Ramelow and prop up a Linke government, nor will they ever vote for AfD. This leaves no majority government possible.

   In the event of a new election, AfD will control twice the number of seats in Thuringia as CDU, so they are now hardly in any place to issue threats. The national CDU has taken over the matter, though, and is panicked. This all represents the disgruntled feeling people have towards the party as it exists today.

   When the smoke clears after a new election, one plausible scenario has Linke controlling as many as 41 of 90 seats, easily able to form a government with SPD, which will have perhaps 10 seats.

   It occurs to me again that this is exactly the Socialist Unity Party’s best-case scenario, and no doubt one talked about in party circles in East Berlin in late 1989 and early 1990 as an ideal. If it could have pulled it off without being annexed by West Germany and mighty NATO, which is highly questionable. A transition of the East German regime to democratic elections with the regime and ruling party surviving intact and at the helm? Impossible, many would have said. Never rush to judgment. Thirty years later and here we are.

   (There are implications here for the Korean Workers Party and North Korea, and I am sure they are watching.)

3. Feb. 11, as of early evening Germany time. The developments as I understand them.

   The withdrawal of Chancellor-successor-designate AKK remains the talk of the nation. Successor-talk is ramping up.

   Once scenario I recall had AKK taking over from Merkel as Chancellor already in 2020, ahead of the next election (set by law to be “by or before” Sept. 2021). This early succession is suddenly not to be, defeated by an AfD insurgency in the provinces.

   Disrupting the CDU and forcing it away from Merkel is an unmitigated success for the AfD, considering the political-cultural lay of the land in today’s Germany, which as I tried to described in this post is as hostile as can possibly be to a party like the AfD. (AfD activists are subject to considerable intelligence-service surveillance and whenever possible are charged with crimes, including speech-crimes; one AfD supporter with 250k subscribers on Youtube is due in court next week for allegedly insulting a Muslim lawmaker in Berlin.)

   And so it happened that the AfD has achieved its main goal when it ramped up in fall 2015. The ex-CDU man Gauland, who defected to the AfD and became a co-leader, defined the AfD’s goals simply as: “Wir werden Frau Merkel jagen,” which can translate to “We’re on the hunt for Frau Merkel.” (Jagen means hunting, as in animals; I’d propose a better translation as “We’re coming for you, Frau Merkel.”)

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   The most likely new CDU candidates for Chancellor are:

   The five plausible candidates, in rough order of pro-Merkelism to anti-Merkelism (ideologically ‘left’ to ‘right’):

   Laschet; Kretschmer; Merz; Spahn; Söder.

   The front runners are Laschet, Merz, and Söder.

   Chances are good that one of the above will be German chancellor, maybe still on the Q3Q4-2020-handover timetable, or maybe not until late 2021 with the fresh election, and then only if the CDU “wins” and can form a ruling coalition.

   In any case, all five are men. The high-brow, left-wing Spiegel ran a jokey headline, “Is Germany Ready for a Male Chancellor?”

   (Merkel’s chancellorship began in late 2005 and desginated-successor Frau AKK’s expected chancellorship was to be least some of the 2020s.)

   Laschet (b.1961; Catholic; Aachen origin; three children) is being called “the male Merkel.” The most left-leaning of the three front-runners. If he becomes the CDU’s Chancellor candidate, the CDU will be confirmed to no longer be, in any real sense, of the Right. The problems of the late Merkel era will continue. Easy fuel for the AfD’s fires.

   Then there is Merz (b.1955; Catholic; Rhineland ‘patrician’ origin; three children), a longtime political figure. He is “in the middle” by default among the three being talked about as front-runners. In US terms, we can compare him to Joe Biden in the US Democratic nomination race in 2019 – 2020 on: longevity of political career, decades-long insider status, unremarkable middle-road-guy-ism. Seemingly Merz is th econsensus candidate to prevent further conservative defections from the CDU.

   Finally, the conservative Söder (b.1967; Lutheran; Nuremberg origin; four children) is a conservative with populist-nationalist sympathies. Had he not inherited control of the CSU in Bavaria in 2017, he would have seriously considered defecting to the AfD, with much of the rest of the CDU, in the late-2015-to-2017 period. I think he is one of those who put or (at least appeared to be putting) pressure on Merkel from the right that caused her to reluctantly end her Muslim Migrant Open-Door Policy by Q2 2016 and not bring it back it in 2017 or later. The “Merkel migrant crisis” was a profound, one-time demographic shock in Germany and likewise shocked European politics, giving birth to the AfD as a desperate nationalist opposition; it never would have happened as it did had Söder been in. Still, Söder is a party-machine person and not a self-conscious insurgent as all the heads of the AfD are.

   That takes care of the three front-runners, from left-most to right-most. There are two other possible candidates: Spahn and Kretschmer.

   The youngest candidate Spahn (b.1980; another Catholic, Westphalian origin), like Söder a consistent critic of the Merkel Migrant policy. The surprising thing here, maybe, is that Spahn is Gay and married to a man. He is also a lifelong political figure, with a major rank in the CDU youth wing already by the end of the 1990s and in the Bundestag from 2002. A formal-politics ‘lifer.’ So involved was he that he only finally took university degrees at age 28 (BA) and 37 (MA). Both in political science, naturally.

   Last is Kretschmer (b.1975; East German origin and upbringing; Lutheran; two sons). I have interest in this man for a very specific reason: Kretschmer (appearing in spelling variants Kretchmer, Kretchmar, Kretzschmar) is one my mother’s ancestral surnames. Her great-grandmother was born a Kretchmar in Saxony in the third quarter of the 19th century, also Lutheran. (Saxony had a very large Lutheran majority since the era of the Wittenberg revolt.)

   As for the present-day politician Kretschmer, he has distinguished himself by following the diktats of the national party in refusing to cooperate with the AfD, which is strongest in Saxony. As of Sept. 2019, the AfD controls a full one-third of the seats in the Saxony state government (Landtag). Kretschmer, the head of the Saxony state government, refuses to work with the AfD, making him another enforcer of the old cordon-santiatre. He goes out of his way to regularly denounce the AfD. I would explain this in part by saying that he owes too much to the CDU as a party-apparatus to do much else.

   As an East German teenager, Kretschmer joined the youth wing of the CDU already at the end of 1989, among its first members in Saxony, as the communist regime was suddenly no longer able restrict such political activity after the breach of the Wall. Still in his twenties, in 2002 he entered the Bundestag (along with Spahn), but has been back full-time in Saxony politics since 2017. The reason for the refocus back home? He lost his Bundestag seat, in a direct election to an obscure figure out of the AfD. The AfD now holds the seat in Berlin. A humiliation for the CDU.

   In the Sept. 2019 state election, Kretschmer led the Saxony CDU to its worst result locally in post-1990 history (45 seats), and was forced to rule in a shaky and illogical coalition with the SPD and Greens (22 seats combined), just enough to exclude both the AfD (38 seats) and Linke (14 seats; much of previous strength locally lost to AfD). The strange coalition of CDU-SPD-Green holds 67 of 119 seats, and either of the junior partners could derail the government any time if eight of its Landtag members decide to. This is not a good position for the CDU or Kretschmer, its leader, and presaged the Thuringia drama of this past week.

   A poll of CDU members was conducted. Who do you want to see as Chancellor candidate for the CDU next year?

   Among CDU members born between 1960 and 1990, the age-cohorts seen as the core activist group of the party for the 2020s and 2030s, Laschet has 34% support; Soder, 28%; Merz, 19%; Spahn and Kretschmer each at 4%; all other specific people, <10% combined.

   Spahn and Kretschmer do better among other age-groups and regions. Unsurprisingly, Spahn (b.1980) does best among the youngest CDU members (23%). Kretschmer’s strength is that he is the logical choice if the CDU wants to try to take back the east from the AfD. Polls have more East Germans today supporting the AfD than the CDU.

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   (Three of the four ‘West German’ candidates are Catholics. AKK is also described as an ‘active’ Catholic, making four of five by that count. Why so many Catholics? What’s going on, one might wonder.

   There are multiple layers of identity to every party, which shift over time. An early layer to the CDU, which as a party was only formed in 1949, is the Catholic layer. Germany had just been cut in three large pieces, roughly speaking. Two had very large Protestant majorities, while the third was something close to half-and-half Protestant–Catholic. Moving east to west, the first large piece of Germany was entirely de-Germanized and its people scattered [an Australian I knew in Korea, Elise S., a Lutheran, told me she has ancestral origins several generations ago in this unfortunate portion of the old Germany, and that her parents once made a trip to the ancestral hometown, now no longer in Germany, gravesites untended]; the second piece remained German but became communist; the last piece became a NATO-occupied, partially-sovereign entity called the Federal Republic or West Germany. The first two of the pieces of the old Germany, with their centuries-long, large Protestant majorities, had their cultural-political traditions ruptured by these developments, and had little influence on the new CDU.

   The East German regime in the 1950s accused the CDU of being a Washington-Vatican conspiracy against the German nation, reflecting the classic German-Protestant wariness of any hint of political Catholicism. The East Germans’ characterization of the CDU was a lot more accurate than most would probably think today, since the CDU was a partial successor to the Zentrum party, the German Catholic party of the early 20th century that locked-in at times half or more of the votes of all Catholics in Germany. Zentrum has always looked to me like a gang of malcontents nursing and deliberately promoting a sense of grievance alargely on religion lines against the large [Protestant] majority of their nominal nation, and in political terms against Prussia, against Berlin and its the Hohenzollern monarchy and all successors thereof. Chancellor Adenauer was a lifelong Zentrum apparatchik out of the Rhineland and a confirmed anti-Prussian bigot; After Zentrum’s remnants blended into the new CDU with the setting up of the new regime in 1949, he became CDU chancellor.

   In any case, this means that a Protestant in West Germany when the new party system emerged was more likely, all else held basically equal, political views held equal, to vote FDP or even SPD, or to not vote, or to vote CDU one day and switch the next, wavering and highly conditional CDU voters, in general a much less stable constituency to draw from. This has, in important ways, continued to the present, even if on the surface religion seems so much less important.

   Thinking about the CDU’s ultimate origin, their zeal even in the present day for enforcing the cordon-sanitaire against any even moderate populist-nationalist force is not as hard to understand.

   There has been flux in the party system, especially in the 2010s with the decline of both the SPD and CDU, but these are the historical influences and explain why so many top CDU people are Catholics. I would propose that the rise of the AfD in the late 2010s is in part the correction of this long-term misalignment of Catholics disproportionately controlling the main party of the ‘right.’ This was a domestic political situation that was long enforced by the NATO bayonet, even if not consciously or deliberately.)

4. Update, as of Feb. 18, evening Germany time.

   Bodo Ramelow has proposed a unity government to be headed by Christine Lieberknecht, a CDU politician and former Minister-President of the state (2009-2014).

   The deal would be: the CDU gets the Minister-President slot and a few minor ministerial positions; all parties except the AfD get real roles in government. This is a bold play and seems likely to work, but it does not look good for the CDU.

   Ramelow’s proposed consensus-candidate, Lieberknecht (which means Dear Servant), is not even in the Landtag anymore.

   Christine Lieberknecht is b.1958, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor active in the area around Weimar during the communist era. Unlike Merkel’s father who was also a Lutheran pastor (and was called in his time The Red Pastor for left-wing beliefs and for ‘defecting’ to East Germany), Lieberknecht herself grew up a kind of conservative-religious dissident and by her own free will limited her own advancement opportunities by not taking part in communist youth groups (of which Merkel was an active member). With the church in East Germany opening the way to women pastors in her time, she became one, active from 1984 to 1990, and married another Lutheran pastor; they have two sons.

   Had the East German regime survived, she probably would have stayed non-political, but her ‘political’ fortunes turned with the fall of the regime. The movement that brought down the regime in the way it went down was, in no small part, famously led by the same conservative-religious-dissident faction to which she and her family belonged (the church-organized marches beginning in Leipzig). This political energy, long dormant, was soon absorbed into the West German CDU after early attempts at creating a separate political party.

   Lieberknecht’s first real political act was co-writing and signing a letter dated Sept. 10, 1989, with four other church leaders in Weimar, calling for the withdrawal of support from the East Berlin regime. The movement was just beginning. She was therefore positioned perfectly to scoop up the benefits of 1989, and became a Thuringia Landtag member by 1991, and her prestige allowed her several early state positions, finally rising to the highest position, Minister-President, in late 2009. She retired from the Landtag in 2019.

   Bodo Ramelow’s gambit to create a huge anti-AfD unity government that incorporates his Linke party ruling in coalition with the CDU and FDP would itself be a kind of unsung political revolution for the reasons I write about above in this now very long series of observations and political and historical tangents.

   Bodo’s proposed coalition is:

   Thuringia Landtag: 90 seats total
   — Linke: 29 seats
   — CDU: 21 seats (offered head of the state government)
   — SPD: 8 seats
   — Greens: 5 seats
   — FDP: 5 seats
   = New government coalition (all parties excerpt AfD [22 seats]): 68 seats, 75% of seats.

   This seems like a likely scenario now, and the CDU would be foolish not to take it, from a purely immediate-self-interest standpoint, because they stand to lose half their seats in fresh election in spring 2020.

   I am also sure, and I have seen some signs of this in news coverage, that some of the key 21 CDUers (those holding Landtag seats and thus votes for Minister-President) would be personally morally opposed to this deal and could even defect and leave the party. But all Bodo needs is just 46 of the 90 votes. For all Bodo Ramelow and the others care, most of the CDU representatives could defect, as long as at least four vote for the new government, he’s got his working majority.

   Thuringia remains the flashpoint and the shock waves have not abated. It’s totally unclear who will lead the CDU and be its Kanzlerkandidat in 2021.

5. It’s totally unclear who will lead the CDU and be its Kanzlerkandidat in 2021.

   The latest candidate is Norbert Röttgen, announced yesterday. He is a longtime CDU figure and chairman of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee (Auswärtige Ausschuss).

   Röttgen in brief: b.1965; Rhineland origin; another Catholic; a CDU ‘lifer,’ having joined the party in 1982, active as head of the NorthRhine-Westfalia youth wing of the CDU in the 1990s (an important and serious organization in Germany oriented to under-35s; it often gets serious attention, unlike whatever the equivalent might be in the US, which I seldom see mentioned and never see taken seriously), during which time he was first elected to the Bundestag, holding a seat there from 1994 to present.

   In the 2000s he rose to first-tier roles in his state’s politics and second-tier roles in the national CDU, as of 2014 chaired the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee. In the Foreign Affairs Committee he looks to have lobbied for a more independent and assertive role for Germany, and for the EU (though his role doesn’t set the policy). It is unclear if the EU can ever get out from under the parallel security layer that is NATO, and thus out from under US influence and (what many would see as) defacto control of its foreign policy. Röttgen is not foolish enough to say this is the idea too directly, but it seems it is likely the idea.

   On the ideological sliding 1-to-10 scale within the CDU proposed above, with Merkel at 0 and the right-most in the CDU at 10 (with those former-CDUers defecting to the AfD mainly being drawn from, say, 7 to 15 on the ten-point scale), I think this new guy Röttgen is at 5 or 6, if the the establishment guy “Mini Merkel” Laschet is at 1 and Söder is at 9 on the pro-to-anti-Merkelism scale, as proposed above.

   Single sliding scales are never necessarily useful, though, as they eliminate nuance, such as Röttgen’s stated foreign policy preferences.

   This makes six plausible candidates now, and other possible dark-horses in the wings, but I am skeptical that any can turn around the CDU’s fortunes.

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   The co-head of the AfD, Gauland, a 2016 defector from the CDU and anti-Merkel crusader, gave a rousing speech on the floor of the Bundestag on Feb. 13 (by coincidence the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden), in which he slammed the CDU’s interference in Thuringia and said it is quickly becoming mired in Bedeutungslosigkeit, or meaninglessness.

   Gauland compared the overturning of the Thuringia result to something the Walter Ulbricht would do, the first East German communist leader who once said, “He need to keep it [power] all in our hands, but it has to look democratic,” and compared it to Ministry of State Security (“Stasi”) intervention in West German elections.

6. Update, as of Feb. 22.

   The CDU caves in, will elected Bodo, a historic moment in German politics which was bound to happen sooner or later.

   Yesterday, reports began coming out that the CDU of Thuringia, having been strong-armed from above, had now agreed to elect Bodo Ramelow in what they are calling a Unity Government, and (2) for a fresh election to be held in April 2021.

   The new minister-president election, in which it has now been announced that Bodo will be elected in a fait accompli, will be held on March 4.

   This looks to be an abandonment of the compromise around electing Christine Lieberkencht, who has personally, as of today, endorsed the Ramelow-for-13-more-months-until-new-election solution.

   Press reports have the CDU grumbling about this, but as my analysis above has it, all the Ramelow-backers need are four votes from them; their unity now almost totally broken, leaderless at the state level, and under a hostile microscope from above, the wedge-gambit worked.

   How did it happen? The sudden turn of events in favor of the Linke, and in favor of the forces that would have the CDU either wedged-apart into meaninglessness a party, may have been propelled by a Feb. 19 mass shooting by a paranoid schizophrenic in a place called Hanau in western Germany, exactly the kind of politicization of a criminal incident one would think one does not want to politicize for fear of encouraging more political-action-through-the-bullet thinking and actions.

   The paranoid schizophrenic who did the shooting believed he was being monitored by extra-terrestrials and sinister Earth-based secret agencies who used brain-control devices against him. He shot and killed nine people and then killed himself, also releasing a manifesto to warn others about the secret agencies and the aliens and also satanic rituals and child sacrifice that believed one or both groups were involved in.

   The Hanau shooting was a sad, worst-case-scenario outcome for a sick individual who needed help.

   But the site of the shooting was a “hookah” bar frequented by Muslim immigrants. Enter German politic sand politicization.

   Why he chose that site is unknown, and he didn’t seem to say why he chose that site; his manifesto is said to have been about the secret-agencies that had been terrorizing him for years and stealing some of his best ideas (among other acts, the secret-agency or agencies had manipulated his life to guarantee he had never had a girlfriend by age 43). But because he did choose the hookah bar, the entire weight of the entire system of German culture and politics could not resist the reflexive urge to blame the AfD pretty directly, even if, by the schizophrenic’s own manifesto, race or immigrants or Islam played no major role in his ostensible grievances against the secret-agencies.

   I have written on this phenomenon on these pages before. It is one I have long observed in Germany, and I’d like to think I can see what’s going on fairly more clearly than the average, as an outsider. Here was my summary-version, especially as related to the AfD, above:

   Given the AfD’s dissident right-wing and ethnonationalist tendencies, it occupies exactly the kind of place in politics and culture that the German ruling apparatus (state; media; academia, the big church bodies; really all of mainstream culture) love to bash, and from which bashing it gains a form of what political-science people call negative legitimacy (= They’re bad; we’re not them; we’re against them; so you have to support us.)

   When something like this happens, they cannot resist starting a mini war panic, and a lot gets lost in translation as the drumbeat goes on.

   In practical terms, this UFO- and secret-agency-believer (he also claims the secret agencies had been tormenting him since birth, when an agent of the agencies inserted a device in his brain at the hospital, which he claims in his manifesto to remember happening, on day one of his life) may have one lasting impact, at least; he may have re-elected Bodo Ramelow in Thuringia, and by extension dealt a blow to the CDU nationally, one which I cannot imagine will be easily forgotten in the next 18 months leading up to the next national election.

7. Update, late evening, Ash Wednesday, Feb. 26 (pre-dawn Feb. 27 Germany time). A few developments, since last writing, that I have noticed and want to record.

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   Hamburg city council elections. The winner in the Feb. 23 elections for Hamburg city council, as expected, was the Social Democrats (SPD), which will easily be able to form the government again, probably continuing with the Greens.

   The Greens sponged-up a lot of centrist voters, the same curious pattern seen across Germany the past two years. The SPD has ceded a lot of voters to the Greens across the board but they are also peeling off some marginal CDU’ers and others. The Greens are the hottest new thing and are now the main left-wing party in Germany. The radicals of yesterday become the centrists of today.

   Despite the intense barrage of the anti-AfD media campaign, the AfD held its vote total in Hamburg better than did the CDU or FDP; the FDP lost enough that when the smoke cleared it was a few hundred votes shy of qualifying for seats on the 5%-Hurdle rule (it finished with 4.96%; disqualifying it from seats). The last time the Hamburg city council held an election, it was Feb. 2015, before the AfD really emerged as a strong and here-to-stay party, which definitely dates to Q4-2015 and Q1-2016. So the voting bloc they had five years ago was different than the one they had this time. The AfD’s re-entering the Hamburg city council confirms that the party has cemented its place in German politics. That it can win seats even in such unfavorable territory as Hamburg means it is not going anywhere.

   I recall now, in graduate school in about spring 2017, having as a professor a decades-long expert on German politics, who predicted the AfD would soon disappear. He said in effect it would be a coin-flip whether they would even qualify for seats in the Bundestag in the Sept. 2017 election (no seats if under 5%; they ended up with 13%). He misread the situation on the ground. The AfD is still here, and Hamburg shows it.

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   The CDU Chancellor-candidate race is ongoing.

   The candidates I list above, roughly from ‘left’ to ‘right’ and sorted into two tiers on how much support they have, are:

   [Left-most]
   — Laschet (first tier) [ideol.: Merkelist];
   — Kretschmer (second tier);
   — Merz (first tier);
   — Röttgen (second tier);
   — Spahn (second tier) [ideol.: begin the fade into AfD support zone either with Spahn or to Spahn’s right];
   — Söder (first tier).
   [Right-most]

   The CDU has set April 25 as the date it will choose a new party head. All attention in German politics, in coming weeks, will be on this process because there are no other elections going on. The new party head may or may not be the new chancellor-candidate, but the one will at least influence the other.

   Spahn drops out, cuts deal with Laschet. In my mini-bio of second-tier candidate Spahn, above (see “The youngest candidate Spahn, b.1980…”), I called him “a formal-politics ‘lifer.’” It now comes out that he has been up to that old politician’s stock-in-trade of backroom deals; he had been in private negotiations with first-tier-candidate Laschet‘s camp over the past week or two. The result is now public:

   On Feb. 25, Spahn announced he was dropping out of the Chancellor-candidate race in the CDU deal to back Laschet’s chancellor bid. In exchange, Spahn will get to be “second-in-command” (zweiter starker Mann) and deputy party head; Laschet would be head of the party and chancellor candidate.

   Ideologically, this might be a little puzzling, given that Spahn was considered a plausible candidate of the ‘right-wing’ within the CDU, and how the CDU has been hurt so bad by its right-flank being so wide open.

   Meanwhile, Laschet, in interviews the past two weeks, has been confirming the validity of his nickname, “the Male Merkel.” He has been saying everything was done right under the Merkel chancellorship and says he would continue on the same course. This deal cut by Spahn, a Merkel critic, on its face seems a cynical political move, but does (alas) greatly boosts Laschet’s chances of being the CDU nominee. Whether he can actually win in 2021 in a general election is another matter.

   (Spahn, meanwhile, is busy dealing with the panic around the COVID-19 “coronavirus;” though a lifelong politician by inclination, experience, and profession, his current title [since March 2018] is Federal Health Minister.)

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   FAZ calls on Söder to not go on “suicide-mission.” The center-right, agenda-setting newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), published an editorial addressed directly to Söder (who is head of the Bavarian CSU, the “sister-party” of the CDU; and who is, by my analysis above, the most right-leaning of the plausible candidates). FAZ has a distinguished history in the politics of the Federal Republic of Germany. A sign that something had seriously gone wrong was that FAZ broke with Merkel in 2015 over the lighting-rod of Merkel’s Migrant Crisis.

   The Merkel-critical FAZ has now called on Söder, another strong Merkel critic, to stand down and not run for chancellor-candidate of the CDU. The surprising thing here is not that it has called for hi to step back but how they did it. It seems they called for him to step back not because they are against him, but because they are for him. From the editorial, “Söder should stay in Bavaria” (Söder muss in Bayern bleiben):

   “In a situation as bad as the CDU’s is, for the CSU head to be chancellor-candidate would be a suicide mission.” (Bei einer CDU in diesem Zustand wäre die Kanzlerkandidatur für den CSU-Vorsitzenden ein Himmelfahrtskommando).

   The editorial argues that Söder is best able to help the party as head of the Bavarian government, not in a bid for power in Berlin (“Dort [in Bayern] hilft er auch der ganzen Union am meisten“). But saying this in the way they did would appear to mean that the (influential and agenda-setting) center-right FAZ believes that the CDU will not (or, is it should not?) win the 2021 election. Is there any other way to read this? it is truly an amazing thing to have happened, as I expect FAZ has supported every CDU candidate since 1949; formally, they will probably still make the motions of supporting whoever it is in 2021, even Laschet, the Male-Merkel (though if it is him, there is a higher chance they break with the CDU), but it’s clear their heart is not in it.

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   Historian and commentator Hubertus Knabe publishes analysis remarkably similar to my own. I have made an effort in my life to follow German politics since about the mid-2000s, and while I did live there for a time (less than a year) and have made an effort to learn and keep up with the language to a fairly good level (which this post and series of long comments are partly an exercise in) (I was certified “proficient” in graduate school, if that means anything) (In terms of the news and politics, I can still handle German a lot better than Korean [which has an unfortunate legacy of making anything ‘news’-like be crammed full of obscure Chinese words, among other problems; Korean news-language feels something like the former Western tradition of putting serious writing in Latin], though in conversation I am better at Korean.)

   This post and this series of extended comments are running commentary on what I am observing, as a language-capable and informed foreigner who feels some degree of fraternal kinship and cultural ties with Germany. What I’ve written here is not quite what I see in commentaries from anything like the “median German” of today. But that’s expected. There is always a fish-in-the-fishbowl problem. The fish might know the fishbowl really well, but they also cannot see it from the outside. Perspective can yield insight, or allow a freer hand, at least sometimes. Anyway, I am recording my own observations and thoughts in a basically open-journal-like fashion here.

   A real expert is Hubertus Knabe. He has just published a 2800-word essay on the Thuringia political crisis, “How Thuringia will change Germany” (“Wie Thüringen Deutschland verändern wird“), dated Feb. 23. I read through it and while Knabe, as a lifelong German (b.1959; East German birth, West German upbringing, family ties to the Green movement in the ’80s; historian), certainly knows more than I do, I patted myself on the back that he came to all the same conclusions I have in this post and comments.

   The one-sentence summary of Knabe’s essay on the Thuringia crisis that played out to such high-drama in Feb. 2020: “It accelerates the self-destruction of the Christian Democrats and strengthens a party [Linke] that wants wants change of the entire system in Germany.” (Sie beschleunigt die Selbstzerstörung der Christdemokraten und stärkt eine Partei, die in Deutschland den Systemwechsel will.)

8. Update, events of the first week of March 2020.

   The denouement of the immediate Thuringia crisis. Bodo back in, for thirteen-month interregnum.

   As expected, Bodo Ramelow was elected Minister-President for the state of Thuringia on March 4, with the CDU abstaining, as per their agreement.

   Scattered grumbling from various corners continued at this spectacle of an election result “overturned.” This event confirmed all the worst of cynicism about German politics that many have had for years.

   This is how the March 4 “re-vote” for Minister-President went. Björn Höcke of the AfD got 22 votes, exactly the number of seats the AfD holds, so he has the full confidence of his own side; Bodo Ramelow got 42 votes, exactly the number of Linke+SPD+Green seats; 21 voted ‘Abstain,’ exactly the number of CDU seats, a party now in full disarray. We see therefore very tight discipline, unlike in early February. (It is a case of the kids getting into the cookie jar hile the adults were away, and, when found out, getting scolded severely and hit, then shaping up and on their best behavior while adults were around.)

   The FDP (5 seats) did not vote at all in this “re-vote,” neither ‘Yes’ nor ‘No’ nor ‘Abstain’; one of the five of them didn’t even show up. I can only interpret this to be a strong protest from the FDP. If the CDU is in disarray, one wonders what those five FDP’ers must feel — a media firestorm has just cast them all as villains and humiliated them. I would boycott the process too.

   In any case, Bodo was in, given that the laws of the Landtag, it turns out, specify the person with the majority of votes cast excluding abstentions wins. The abstention-strategy was a compromise by the CDU to try maintain some dignity of its own and head off the “the CDU voted for a communist” criticism.

   A surprising side-development was that the AfD’s Michael Kaufmann (b.1964; East German origin; Protestant; married, two children; an engineer and AfD-Thuringia founding member) was elected Vice President of the Landtag, on a vote of 45 ‘Yes,’ 35 ‘No,’ 9 ‘Abstain,’ and one member not present. This means he got almost all the votes of the AfD, CDU, and FDP.

   ________________________

   US politics takes a similar turn. Biden as Bodo.

   In the USA’s Democratic “primary season” (a tiringly long affair and kind of an embarrassment, if you ask me), at about the same time as Bodo was put back in the top spot in Thuringia, all the other main candidates except Bernie Sanders suddenly withdrew in unison and endorsed Biden. Biden had, before this remarkable turn of events, looked pretty mediocre. The move guaranteed that Biden would win and shut out the main rival Sanders. The now-all-but-over long Democratic primary process was wrapped up in a few days with the sudden withdrawal-endorsements.

   I’d make a comparison here. The first week of March 2020 in both the US and Germany was one of cordon-sanitaire-enforcement work.

   In Germany’s case, the AfD had breached the cordon-sanitaire. The breach was plugged, and things set right, though some damage was done. In the US Democrats’ case, the real threat of Sanders taking the nomination as a left-wing insurgent (as he was in 2016), which was a strong possibility, was ended almost as by fiat. I was following this process reasonably closely (though was annoyed by it; the primaries are a strange process that waste time and energy and are of unclear value). I can say with certainty that none predicted the Biden win, even days before it happened.

   A main difference with the Biden Bonanza vs. the Bodo Blitz affairs is procedural. German law allows a do-over, a re-vote. This is what they did. There would be no re-vote if Sanders had won the majority of delegates and had somehow been successfully nominated in the summer. As such, the US Democrats, engaged in an obvious and in-your-face cordon-sanitaire police action, killed off Sanders in early March. (Ironically for this analogy, Bodo and Bernie are close politically.)

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   The Thuringia Crisis at “one month,” and its place in history

   As the immediate Thuringia crisis (which began in the first week of February) is now over, maybe this will be the last comment-update I make here. The original post, and my (now) eight comments, are up to 12,000 words of running commentary. I am happy with it, as it constitutes a political-observational diary.

   A month on, I still feel that the Thuringia shock was a historic moment, and is among the most significant single moments I have seen in observing German politics since about 2004. The time and energy I have spent on this over the past month, reflected in the quantity of writing here, is testament enough.

   The “High Drama in Erfurt” (as the original post here was titled) in early February 2020 was really not a stand-alone, of course. It was part of the broader story of the rise of the AfD that started in Q3 2015 with the “Merkel Migrant Crisis.” Something like this was bound to happen, eventually, and it was bound to happen first in the east. If I had to have guessed, I’d have guessed Saxony, but Thuringia it was.

   Thuringia should count as surprising (and one reason it became as big a story as it did) because of how much the Establishment loathes AfD-Thuringia frontman Björn Höcke, even subjecting him to harassment from the domestic intelligence service and leaking their operations against him to the media. A man who leads a political party that controls one-quarter of the seats in a state legislature! This would again be comparable, I think, to a campaign of FBI harassment against Bernie Sanders. It came as no surprise that Bodo refused the customary handshake when offered by Höcke. Video of the handshake refusal circulated widely.

   Thuringia is set for fresh elections now, by agreement, in April 2021, just a few months ahead of the expected nationwide general election (probably Sept. 2021). This means Thuringia is going to stay in the news. It will be an important contest next spring that foreshadows the general Bundestag election that fall.

   _________________________

   Erdogan catapults migrants at the EU

   Given a major theme of this running commentary I have done over the past month, this cannot escape mention here:

   The Migrant Crisis is back.

   Turkey aims to coerce Europe related to its byzantine disputes with Syria and/or Kurds, and has begun the extremely cynical policy of busing-in migrants from the Mideast to the land border with Greece. It would seem a bid to intimidate Europe. These migrants (mainly) want to go to Germany to take advantage of all the free goodies they’ve heard about. So they say in their own testimonials to journalists who have assembled at the Greek border.

   This looks like a close repeat of 2015, except with the difference that (1) this time Turkey’s Erdogan is very directly the orchestrater of events, flagrantly reneging on the multi-billion-dollar agreement to help close the border with the EU, having the impudence to bus-in migrants from hundreds of miles away and drop them off at the border, to demand entry into the EU; and (2) Merkel is so badly damaged that it is all-but-impossible to see her ordering an open border for six months or more, like last time, and demanding the EU/Germany take in anyone who calls himself a refugee, “without limit.”

   Another difference is how strong a resistance Greece itself is mobilizing. It has strengthened its border defense forces and its Prime Minister has announced that no migrants who storm the border will be allowed in, and for good measure Greece will be ending its asylum program indefinitely until the migrants stop trying to storm the border.

   Erdogan is not at all popular in Germany. He seems to think blackmail-via-sending-in-migrants is a winning policy and will definitely cause Europe to fold quickly and give in to his demands. Sadly, I’m not sure that he is wrong, as outrageous as it is to use migrants as ‘weapons’ in this way.

   The migrants that Turkey has bused in, again overwhelmingly young males from the looks of it, are now massed at the border and skirmishing with Greek police and border security personnel daily; unclear how many have broken through. A few have tried to land on EU territory by sea, again, and the Greek Coast Guard has been active in refusing the boats. Some reports have the Turkish Coast Guard escorting the migrants’ boats, again a shockingly cynical, quasi-Act of War.

   Journalists have shown up, on cue, and in interviews most of these new migrants say they want to go to “Germany,” which again proves my analysis in this running-commentary correct, I would say.

   The head of the Greens played to character and issued a call for Germany to airlift-in some of these migrants, which to me is just laughably naive and dangerous talk. I mean, have they learned nothing? Any encouragement of this from the top, like Merkel’s 2015 blunder, is going to (1) encourage a lot more to come, (2) cause serious political seismic waves you cannot predict.

   Naturally this was front-page news in Germany, and for a while pushed the sensationalist COVID19 coronavirus coverage off the front pages. It has since competed with the saturation-coverage of the COVID19 virus. On which, by the way…:

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   COVID19 coronavirus and Migrant-Politik

   In virus-panic news, the Italian media has reported that one of the early infected persons in their large outbreak was a Pakistani migrant, possibly even one of the 2015-16 Merkel Migrants, who was working as delivery guy for a Chinese takeout in Milan. Perhaps it was even untaxed, cash-in-hand work. The delivery guy tested positive and was asked to self-quarantine but ignored the order and continued working for days, zipping all around delivering food which he handled.

   Ignoring a quarantine is a serious offense. If you’re used to ignoring social rules, such as by entering Europe illegally and also working illegally for cash-in-hand employers in the first place, you’re less likely to follow a quarantine order.

   It seems to me that following quarantine orders in an early outbreak requires reasonably strong social trust. Tossing in migrants who forced their way in and live on the margins (as in this Pakistani doing cash work delivering food for a Chinese takeout in Milan) inevitably reduces social capital. Some would react negatively to this statement, I know. But it seems obvious to me, and so I was not too surprised to hear of the Italian media’s report on this. (Just as I wasn’t surprised to hear that Shinchonji, a religious cult in S.Korea that I grew to fear and intensely dislike from experiences with them. Shinchonji are highly evangelistic, international-focused, and aso deceptive very willing to break social conventions, and distrustful of the government. They were the source of the outbreak in South Korea; there are similarities between their siege mentality and that of an Islamic migrant living on the margins in Europe in the key ways here that would lead to breaking quarantine with impunity.)

   The Pakistani migrant who so flagrantly broken quarantine for so long was finally detained by the army; they say he will spend three months in prison for his crime, which is the maximum sentence. Who knows how many of the elderly who have died got it through chains of transmission that he started?

   Well-intentioned people, including the head of the German Green Party — who could plausibly be Germany’s next Chancellor, given that her party will probably have the most seats of any party — believe, or want to believe, that there are no real ill effects of scattering thousands and millions of Muslim migrant men in Europe every few years. I know plenty of people like this among the older generation of Western people. I think they believe we are invincible and that charity is limitless. I have never seen it that way myself. Just from a political-analysis point of view, encouraging Islamic and African migrants to come into Europe in force, waving them in (in the terminology I used in the original post here, I think) can cause, has caused, and will cause serious disruptions. With 100% certainty, the Merkel Migrant Crisis caused the AfD to grow into a national party, one competitive with the CDU itself in much of Germany, one that has displaced the CDU in most of the east. The Migrant Crisis of 2015-16 very likely pushed other populist movements in the next few years over the top, including Brexit, and maybe even Trump.

   The lesson here is one of microcosm. A mutual-appreciation-society of do-gooder politicians who call for more migrants and refugees so we have show our virtue to the world, these are actually real people. They are not pets. They are real people who will lead real lives, very likely on the margins; social cohesion will go down, and native reaction will go up, especially once the government begins its inevitable policies of setting right the fact that many of these people are “marginalized” by handing them things, free this, free that; the natives’ reaction is going to be, what? I guess you need a team of the best rocket-scientists to figure this puzzle out.

   The Pakistani food delivery guy story is just a microcosm, a symbol. In some ways it is a signpost to the AfD story, and to Thuringia story, really, and therefore to German politics as it exists in observable reality in the 2020s.

   ____________________

   The state of the Race for CDU Chancellor-candidate

   Little new is going on with the CDU Kanzlerkandidat race. It may end up lost in the noise, the passing of time, and forgotten, but the chaos in the CDU and the resignation of the head of the party, who doubled as the presumptive Chancellor-candidate, was a direct result of the Thuringia crisis of February 2020. Thuringia was a lot bigger than its own provincial assembly. It was a flashpoint for all Germany.

   Germany’s most reliable political pollster DeutschlandTrend normally releases comprehensive polls on a lot of subjects in the middle of every month. A new one is due in the coming days. I am sure it will include another question on favored Chancellor-candidate.

   The main people still in the running who are actively seeking the position are Laschet, Merz, and Röttgen, with Söder and other figures keeping their hats out of the ring.

   Reactions to the new migrant crisis have been drowned out a bit by the media feeding-frenzy over the COVID19 flu virus, but I did manage to see Laschet playing to character and saying the new migrants should be helped. Merz is strongly against opening the door to new migrant waves from Syria, Afghanistan, Africa, and where-ever. Merz was quoted in the media telling migrants directly, Do not come to Germany; Germany will not take you. He made headlines for the bluntness of it.

   Röttgen surprised me by seeming to be okay with taking in lots of new Islamic male migrants, waffling around saying, We’ve got to help these people, whether it be in Turkey or here, we need to negotiate a new support-deal with Turkey.

   If one is keeping score, that is Laschet positioning himself on the left, Merz on the right, and Röttgen in the middle. I haven’t seen Söder say anything, but he would be to the ‘right’ of Merz. Now that I think of it, I believe Merz’ hard-line may be a bid to get Söder’s backing in the upcoming leadership contest. I don’t think Merz is a committed ‘borders’ guy. It’s so often hard to say with career politicians. But we do have him taking a hard rhetorical line.

   As for that upcoming leadership contest. There will be a CDU party congress on April 25 to decide the matter. Seven weeks remain. I’d give it “50-35-15 Laschet-Merz-AllOthers” odds at this point.

9. Updates, mid-January 2021:

   ________________

   Mini-Merkel wins

   Nine months delayed, Armin “The Male Merkel” Laschet was finally selected, yesterday, against rivals Merz and Röttgen, all three first mentioned and profiled here last year (see comment above).

   The vote was close: 1,001 CDU party delegates had the right to vote at their party congress, 99% cast votes, Merz took 385 votes, Laschet 380 votes, Röttgen 224 votes. With centrist Röttgen eliminated, his supporters split roughly half and half, but slightly more for Laschet. Laschet won the nomination in the second round, 52%-47%, and is now officially the head of the CDU. It is assumed, by default, that Laschet will be the Chancellor-candidate for the CDU in the late September 2021 national Bundestag election.

   As mentioned in this series of comments (running commentary summarizing what I was reading at the time), Laschet was the left-most figure of the candidates being talked about. This appears to mean that the CDU did NOT learn the lesson of the Thuringia political crisis of 2019-20, as so many urged them to at the time. Instead they have chosen, or enough of them have chosen, to “double down.”

   _____________

   Is the CDU now unambiguously Centrist, not Center-Right? Potential Beneficiaries.

   I take this election of Laschet, despite it being so close, to mean the CDU is now committed to being fully of the ‘Center’ (as its own rhetoric now has it), which means dropped and excluding its conservatives and Rightists. There are still considerable numbers of basically conservative Christians, or conservative cultural-Christians, in Germany, and the CDU is turning its back on them, people who formed the core of the party from the 1950s to the 2000s.

   The now-unmistakably-open space on the Right side of the spectrum is there for the taking. The two major, national-level parties that will vie for these hypothetical “ex-CDU votes” will be the FDP and AfD.

   The FDP has a hard base of 5% and at best could plausibly get as high as 15% if it takes enough CDU defectors from the CDU’s crumbling right-wing.

   The AfD has a hard-base of 10% and could, if all stars absolutely aligned for it (which probably would be if some kind of new Migrant Crisis started), hit 20% in a national vote and cause Thuringia-2020-like crises across the eastern states throughout the 2020s.

   Other destinations for ex-CDU voters would be localist parties, such as that under the Free Voters paragroup, or going into nonvoting.

   Something like this process was already ongoing in the past few years, but was interrupted by the Corona-Panic.

   _________________

   The Thuringia crisis, one year later

   Thuringia was a political earthquake in its time and may be a signal of what the 2020s will be in eastern states; the AfD seems bound to run a government in some state in the 2020s, just as the LINKE party was bound eventually to get in, and did.

   Thuringia was part of the much-larger process of the CDU falling apart and losing much of its Right flank (as mentioned above), which defected primarily to the AfD in the latter half of the 2010s. The CDU lost this battle, if it was even fighting it, already in the mid-2010s (specifically the fallout from the 2015-16 Migrant Crisis) and failed to recover it in the late-2010s despite signs of people trying to do so, including Soeder among others. If anything they lost more ground in the late 2010s, though not necessarily to the AfD.

   Thuringia itself could not properly form a stable government and had a fresh election scheduled for April 2021. It recently rescheduled this to align with the Bundestag election, Sept. 26, 2021. Polling suggests the same split as before, but a few seats will probably shake around so who knows if any drama will repeat itself. The Thuringia CDU could again have to choose between crowning the LINKE party of reformed-Communists just to keep the AfD out of government, the exact same dilemma as before. (It is no wonder they wanted to delay the election so it wouldn’t dominate political news again before the Bundestag election.)

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   The Virus Panic Lifts the CDUs Fortunes

   2020 brought the surprise that was the international social phenomenon of the Corona-Panic, demoagogued upon (and hard) by governments, politicians, and others all around the world.

   In Germany, all data indicates that the CDU was and is the primary political beneficiary of the Panic. It is now riding high again in opinion polls, its highest support-level in years. The Corona-Panic shifted lots of people from tentative support for dissident parties back to the “regime.” It happens in a crisis, or a perceived crisis. The “regime” is not the CDU, but the CDU is the ruling party. Leaders throughout time have found war-footings convenient for this reason. (Unfortunately this also creates a perverse incentive against easing the endless disruptions which are unambiguously negative on any fair measure of their net effects. But those with the power to stop the madness are also benefiting from it.)

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   Personalities

   Merz, losing the leadership vote, has an unclear future but all the talk is on him. He’s been a major figure in the CDU since the 1990s, and actually led the CDU for a time in the early 2000s, pre-Merkel. There is now talk that Merz, the more conservative choice against Laschet, could defect to the FDP now. This would be a bold move, but there is clearly not much hope for him in the CDU. The FDP, as of the late 2010s and presumably continuing in the 2020s, while still loyal to its freemarketeer principles, has also had one foot in dissident-Right politics, often cautiously taking the same line as the AfD. Merz coming on board would be a major tilt towards the center, making the FDP a plausible center-right rival to the CDU, which drifts ever leftward.

   They chose Laschet, as I see it, by don’t-rock-the-boat people and Merkel loyalists. He is not a particularly exciting candidate, and the chatter is exactly that: Boring. Apparently one poll shows the percentage of the general public that could “see him as chancellor” is frighteningly low.

   The Laschet selection will also empower Soeder, the head of the Bavarian sister party to the CDU. As far as I understand it, Soeder (as head of the sister-party CSU of Bavaria) could be the Chancellor-candidate for the CDU-CSU Union in the Bundestag election. Soeder has however, really discredited himself by caving into the most fanatical and deranged kind of Lockdown-ism and Virus-Demagoguery, thinking that reality-detached, Lockdown-fanatic virus-demagoguery is good for his popularity (and it seems to be with large sections of the frightened public, driven into a haze of confusion by the media drumbeat; the demagogue is always popular, by definition). Laschet, for his part, has reacted to the crisis by urging moderation (less severe Lockdowns or maybe even no Lockdowns).

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