Germany in red, yellow and green

The Social Democrats Olaf Scholz was yesterday, Wednesday, elected Chancellor of Germany by the Bundestag, after sixteen years with governments led by conservatives Angela Merkel. A political “traffic light” will govern the Federal Republic, where red, yellow and green will experimentally shine at the same time. It can seem confusing in traffic as a policy. The internal contradictions are clear and it is the first time three parties form a government in the history of the republic.

But the government negotiations apparently went well and happened almost without tactical leaks from the meetings. The Reds of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens and the Yellows of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) agree to reform the country, although not always in the same direction. They are also open to reforms in the EU. In both arenas, Merkel has, with great political weight, been a brake. In the government platform, modernize, as a verb and adjective, are mentioned no less than 67 times. The word Europe, and then meant EU, appears 254 times in the 177-page document.

Monday Scholz had the entire team in place, eight women and eight men plus the Chancellor. Annalena Baerbock, one of the two leaders of the Greens, is Foreign Minister. Christian Lindner from FDP got the stool as finance minister. Baerbock would have liked to have had it in order to have the key to the billions in the treasury needed for the green shift. The FDP is concerned with low taxes and low expenditures. Robert Habeck, the other leader of the Greens, was given an overall stool for climate, energy and business. Herein lies the seed for conflict between the two smaller parties.

First Scholz gets an acute challenge in the lap, which can easily burn on the fingers. He has appointed Karl Lauterbach from the SPD, an epidemiologist trained at Harvard in the USA, as Minister of Health. For weeks, he has warned that with a low vaccination rate and too few infection control measures, the fourth wave of the pandemic will be catastrophic, which is about to happen, with the omicron mutation on the way in. He wants to close bars and discos throughout the country, and like Scholz and Merkel, he wants a law on vaccination. But it will lead to resistance and unrest in the streets. Vaccine opponents already hate him.

The Minister of Defense and the Minister of the Interior are both women from the SPD, Christina Lambreckt and Nancy Faeser. The country’s security is now “in the hands of strong women,” Scholz said. Lawyer Faeser has identified the far right as the biggest threat to the country’s security. A few days before she was incarcerated, about thirty vaccine opponents from the far right surrounded the house of Petra Köpping, the Minister of Health in Saxony. With torches in their hands, they shouted slogans against her infection control measures in the state with the fewest vaccinated and most infected. The fight against the virus has several fronts.

Modernize Germany is a very extensive work. First and foremost, public administration and electronic infrastructure must be overhauled. The Germans have a welfare state that is envied everywhere in Europe, with one possible exception in the Nordic countries, but it is old-fashioned. To contact public offices, you are welcome to show up or send a letter on paper by post or fax. To a very small extent, public institutions are digitized; this applies all the way from the government offices and the Bundestag down to the tax and social services offices. During the ongoing pandemic, states could not send numbers of dead and infected people through the Internet, but they had to use fax. The schools did not have equipment and the teachers did not have training for distance learning. Test results after corona test could not be sent quickly and electronically. The states and government offices do not have electronic platforms that can talk to each other. Germany is close to the bottom of the EU when it comes to the development of fiber-optic cables, and in this the gap between the states is large.

Green shift and climate is a major task that the Greens will lead. The most difficult thing will be to close power plants powered by coal and reach the goal of 80 percent renewable energy by 2030, while the last nuclear power plant will be closed next year. Lots of renewable energy must be developed.

A stern-sailed Germany

Modernization and green shift will be expensive. In addition, the SPD wants a more expensive social policy. The minimum wage will be increased to 12 euros per hour, and this applies to around ten million people. Four hundred thousand homes, of which one hundred thousand public, are to be built each year. The new Minister of Finance, Lindner, wants the state budget in balance and low taxes. But Scholz has resigned as finance minister from Merkel’s government, and he has taken with him his then secretary of state, Jörg Kukies, as his adviser at the chancellor’s office. This looks like three finance ministers. Importantly, the FDP seems to be softening its austerity policy. But the contradictions lie there.

In theory, Germany should return to its strict rules for raising debt and deficits in the state budget, which have been set aside during the pandemic. The FDP has received a promise not to increase taxes. But the pandemic continues. And it seems impossible to get this calculation to go up in light of the political goals.

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