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Letter from Berlin

Hesse State Elections Have a Lesson for Germany's Future

By Charles Hawley

This time around, the Sunday elections in the German state of Hesse look somewhat predictable. But the year of political chaos the state is just now emerging from contains important lessons for the country's future.

What a difference 12 months make. In January 2008, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Christian Democrats (CDU) were locked in a bitter battle for supremacy in the western German state of Hesse. SPD candidate Andrea Ypsilanti was campaigning hard on the need for a minimum wage, but the debate was largely dominated by a seemingly xenophobic offensive by CDU Governor Roland Koch. After a brutal attack against a pensioner in the Munich subway, Koch based the latter weeks of his campaign on the need to do something about "criminal young foreigners."

Once again on Sunday, after 12 months of failed attempts to build a government, voters in Hesse are being asked to go to return to their polling stations on Sunday to decide again.

This time around, though, despite long months of political chaos, the campaign has been much more subdued. SPD candidate Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel is focused primarily on introducing himself to the electorate and sweeping up the shards of his party's recent collapse in the state. And Koch, well ahead in the polls, can afford to be sanguine.

And yet, it is a calm that belies the political storm that the state, home to Germany's financial center Frankfurt, spent 2008 suffering through. It was a storm that saw the failure of repeated attempts to build a coalition. And the lessons learned from the political blockade are ones that have national implications as Germany enters a year packed with five state elections, a nationwide parliamentary vote in September, a presidential election in May and the casting of European ballots at the beginning of June.

What is the lesson? "We have to let go of our bunker mentality," said Schäfer-Gümbel during the final candidate debate on Thursday night. "One of our experiences was that there have been new connections developed among the parties," Koch concurred.

It is an important lesson. Germany in 2009 faces the kind of election year it has never before seen. Not only is the schedule packed, but so too is the political landscape. In most states that will be voting this year, five political parties have good chances to leap over the 5 percent hurdle and into parliament. The multitude of choices is something of a new phenomenon in the country, with the far-left Left Party only having developed into a nationwide political force in recent years. And it is a development that means the pieces of the parliamentary pie to be divvied up will be smaller -- and the number of alliances to choose from when forming a majority will be larger.

If, that is, the parties involved are politically willing and able. But exactly that was the problem that Hesse ran into last year.

By the end of the campaign, the two lead candidates, Ypsilanti and Koch, could barely tolerate each other. Koch's aggressive stance against violence committed by young men with foreign backgrounds quickly erupted into a nation-wide debate about youth crime and xenophobia. Ypsilanti, for the most part, spent the latter weeks of the campaign standing aside and letting Koch self-destruct.

When the votes were counted, Koch's CDU came in fully 12 percent lower than its 2004 total, but at 36.8 percent, he still -- barely -- received more votes than the 36.7 percent garnered by Ypsilanti. The CDU's search for a coalition partner, though, proved difficult. The business friendly Free Democrats were willing, but the two parties together didn't have enough seats in the state parliament for a majority. The Greens ultimately declined an invitation to join them. Ypsilanti's SPD likewise rebuffed all talk of a CDU-SPD "grand coalition" government.

An Epic Fall

But as politically challenging as it was for Koch to search for a coalition partner, it was nothing like the existential drama put on by Ypsilanti.

The stage for her epic fall had been set for years. Partially as a result of major welfare state reforms pushed through by Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder when he was chancellor earlier this decade, the SPD has suffered through years of falling membership numbers. Many of those ditching the Social Democrats have found a new political home with the far-left Left Party, a political grouping which has some roots that lead back to the communist party that ruled East Germany. Because of those roots, Germany's mainstream political parties have been wary to work together with the Left Party.

Which explains why Ypsilanti, in her campaign, promised not to form a coalition with the Left Party. After the election, though, there seemed to be no other choice -- and she began trying to cobble together a minority coalition with the Green Party that would then be helped to power with the votes of the far left. Her first attempt last spring failed after she decided that her single-vote majority was too instable -- particularly given that one SPD member of Hesse's parliament had said she would not support any cooperation with the left.

It was an attempt that attracted the attention of the entire country. Even as the SPD in the city-state of Berlin has long cooperated with the Left Party, western Germans view such an alliance with suspicion. Indeed, Ypsilanti's flirt with the far left became so controversial that it turned into a major headache for SPD leader Kurt Beck. Partially as a result of his party's lack of a clear position on cooperation with the Left Party, Beck resigned in September of last year.

Ypsilanti, though, seemed undeterred by her party's troubles and tried again last November -- and failed dramatically. In a few quick days early that month, four members of her party said they would not support her planned partnership with the Left Party, new elections were called and Ypsilanti stepped down as the party's lead candidate in favor of Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel.

The SPD disintegration has done no favors for the party's poll numbers. Schäfer-Gümbel is well behind Koch, with just 24 percent of Hesse voters saying they would vote for the SPD compared with 41 percent for the CDU, according to a recent poll. Schäfer-Gümbel, to be sure, has cut a surprisingly good figure in the campaign for a back-bench politician thrust unexpectedly into the limelight. But the hurdles placed in his path by his predecessor proved to be too high.

This time around, it is Koch who has been content to sit back and watch as his opponents self destruct. Even the fact that youth crime has actually risen substantially in Hesse in the last year, despite Koch's pledges to confront the problem head on, have done little to harm him. Polls indicate that he will be able to form a governing coalition with his preferred partners from the FDP. The Left Party, for its part, may not even manage to clear the 5 percent hurdle necessary for representation in the state parliament.

It is the kind of result that Angela Merkel will welcome -- a good omen for her CDU as she enters her own re-election campaign. The chaos of 2008, though, may end up being the real portent of Germany's political future.