Letter from Berlin: Parties Shun Truth in German Election Race

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One of his fellow SPD members demonstrated how this is done, at a campaign appearance last Tuesday in Wülfrath in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Andrea Nahles, a member of parliament for the SPD, was sitting on a red sofa at the Haus-Luise-von-der-Heyden nursing home, seemingly prepared for a relaxed chat with her audience.

But Nahles wasn't interesting in chatting. "We want this to be a real, honest-to-goodness campaign," she said energetically. "Someone like Angela Merkel, who wants to remain in power, should show us what she's got. But she isn't doing that." Her audience of retirees, young people doing community service and a few local SPD members, seated at 30 coffee tables, pushed their water glasses from side to side. There was little sense of outrage in the room.

But then Nahles shifted into a higher gear. She painted nightmare scenarios of a Germany run by Merkel and Westerwelle. "We need €96 billion ($137 billion) a year for education," she said. "In the midst of a crisis, the FDP is promising €80 billion in tax cuts. That money will be coming out of the budgets for education and social services." Of course, Nahles and other SPD politicians are conveniently ignoring the fact that Merkel has not been some neo-liberal bogeyman in the last four years, but has actually behaved more like a Social Democrat than the Social Democrats themselves.

Semantic Differences

Another element of this secretive campaign is that some parties are completely ruling out potential post-election coalitions, even though they cannot be fully written off. While FDP leader Guido Westerwelle claims that he is discounting a "traffic-light" coalition after the election, the CDU/CSU and the Greens have an interest in making sure that no one talks about the possibility of their entering into a coalition together.

Westerwelle is justifiably concerned that many of his potential supporters could end up voting for the CDU/CSU if they believe it might be possible that the FDP could join forces with the SPD in the end, making Steinmeier chancellor after all.

This explains why the FDP leader is now doing everything possible to convince his supporters that there is absolutely no chance of a traffic-light coalition materializing after the election. In the normal world, Westerwelle would not be able to go back on such statements. But different rules apply in the world of politics, which is why it comes as no surprise that there is one sentence the FDP chairman simply refuses to utter in interviews, namely "I am categorically ruling out a traffic-light coalition." Instead, he says: "I consider a traffic-light coalition to be ruled out." The distinction between the two sentences boils down to semantics, but in the world of politics, such slight variations can mean a world of difference. For Steinmeier, it could spell the difference between being chancellor and not being chancellor.

These intricacies have prompted the SPD to carefully examine everything Westerwelle says these days. Most SPD leaders are convinced that the FDP chair will be prepared to enter into a traffic-light coalition in the end. To prove their point, they cite a remark Westerwelle made some time ago, when he said that he would not use "ink or blood" to sign his opposition to a traffic-light coalition. Even Merkel is by no means certain that Westerwelle, with whom she is on good terms, won't help the SPD secure the chancellorship, after all.

Keeping Quiet

While the traffic-light coalition is at least a subject of conversation, the black-green option remains cloaked in a veil of secrecy. For instance, when Green Party Chair Claudia Roth is asked for her opinion on the conservatives, she raises her eyebrows and berates the CDU and CSU as sinister characters of the nuclear age. Conversely, CSU General Secretary Ronald Pofalla becomes indignant when asked about the Greens, insisting that the two parties have absolutely nothing in common.

In reality, the leaders of the CDU/CSU and the Greens have long been considering how to go about building a coalition. Their efforts are spurred in part by opinion polls. For weeks, the Greens have been polling neck-and-neck with the FDP, with some pollsters even putting the Greens just one percentage point behind the FDP. In the 2009 European elections, the Greens already managed to come in third place among German voters. It is not out of the question that, if a coalition between Merkel and Westerwelle fails to materialize, the CDU and the Greens could garner enough votes to form a winning alliance on the evening of election day.

This would not necessarily be a disappointing outcome for the Green Party's two leading candidates, Jürgen Trittin and Renate Künast. Of course, Tritten and Künast would prefer to govern with the SPD, as they did from 1998 to 2005, but an alliance with the CDU/CSU would not be impossible. It would be the Greens' only chance of securing seats in the cabinet once again.

However, the Green Party's voters are not as flexible as the party leadership. For many, the CDU/CSU is still their political archenemy. For Trittin and Künast, this means that although they can dream of a black-green coalition, talking about it is absolutely forbidden. Any such plan will have to remain their secret for now, if they don't want to risk losing much of their left-leaning base shortly before the election.

The CDU has a similar problem. Politicians like parliamentary manager Norbert Röttgen and Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble have long felt that the CDU/CSU should not rely solely on the FDP as a potential coalition partner. Another benefit of an alliance with the Greens is that it would allow the CDU to finally shed its image as a stuffy provincial party.

But Röttgen and Schäuble also know that their party needs the traditionalists for election victory, and they tend to cling to their image of the Greens as pot-smoking organic gardeners. For this reason, one of Merkel's advisers sums up his approach to handling the Greens in two sentences: "First we scold them as naughty children. Then we form a coalition."

That is one of the key statements of this secretive election race. And the fact that the person who uttered these two sentences chooses to remain anonymous is perfectly consistent with the general tenor of the campaign.

PETRA BORNHÖFT, MARKUS FELDENKIRCHEN, KERSTIN KULLMANN, ROLAND NELLES, RALF NEUKIRCH, RENÉ PFISTER

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• Part 1: Parties Shun Truth in German Election Race
• Part 2: 'Merkel Should Show Us What She's Got'