The event of the season in political Berlin is the publication of the memoirs of ex-foreign minister and über-Green Joschka Fischer. The Red-Green Years: German Foreign Policy from Kosovo to September 11 covers the first part of Fischer's seven-year term, so the 430-page book is only a first instalment. Back in Berlin after teaching in Princeton for a year, Fischer had fun at October's launch, making digs at the latest pacifist outbursts from his less-than-beloved Green party, but also promising Berlin's political class that he was not planning a comeback.
The book itself has received broadly positive reviews, at least compared with the turgid memoirs of Gerhard Schröder and Helmut Kohl. Funny anecdotes are few, although he does recall watching football on television (with the sound off) while holding a teleconference with other foreign ministers. When Fischer suddenly cheered for his team, Madeleine Albright asked if he was okay.
While Fischer admits some (minor) mistakes, the theme is mainly the self-regarding one of how the lowly taxi driver rose to the task of mastering German foreign policy while battling the conservative forces in his own ministry. Reflecting on the roots of the foreign disputes he was trying to solve, he asks why "history had to hit back so hard" just when he and Schröder were in power. Was life really so much easier for previous German foreign ministers?
Oskar's revenge
After four years of belt-tightening and, by German standards, tough economic reforms, the country seems to be shifting to the left again. Most immediately, leftish ideas are on the ascendancy within the Social Democrats, the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition. It was of course the SPD, under Schröder, that in 2003 launched the painful labour and welfare reforms that helped spur the country towards its current economic recovery and cut the jobless queues by over 1m.
Despite such success, the current SPD leadership, under Kurt Beck, is now leading the charge to unwind some of these reforms. Beck has proposed more generous jobless benefits for older workers (after these were cut by Schröder) and more opportunities to retire early (after a decision to lift the pension age from 65 to 67). With several big regional elections in early 2008, Beck is on the hunt for populist issues to reverse his party's poor poll ratings (the SPD trails the centre- right CDU 30 per cent to 41 per cent). He is also under pressure from the newish Left party, led by the maverick Oskar Lafontaine, who resigned as Schröder's finance minister back in 1999. The Left party gets a respectable 10 per cent in the polls, eating into SPD support.
Merkel herself seems to be shedding the more neoliberal positions she adopted at the 2005 election, when she won a slender victory over the SPD. Although she still talks about keeping spending under control and lowering costs for business, she happily presides over a government that this year has approved new tax handouts, minimum wages in several sectors and higher benefits for working parents.
This is something of a paradox, a conservative-led government acting in a more left-wing way than its social democrat-led predecessor. (Perhaps the reverse is happening in Britain, where a centre-left government has just stolen a policy jewel from its centre-right opponents.)
So what is going on? A recent poll in Die Zeit, a weekly newspaper, found that ideas associated with the left—such as a universal minimum wage and a preference for keeping industries such as railways and energy utilities under state control—have strong support across the political spectrum. Indeed, according to the poll, more members of Merkel's Christian Democrats define themselves as "left-wing" than "right-wing."
Merkel's long game
As Die Zeit commented, much of this is no more than "sentimental social conservatism." And Germany's rather small band of free-marketeers still have high hopes of Merkel. They believe that she is plotting her best path to a more convincing election victory in 2009 than in 2005, and thereby a route to a coalition with her first-choice partner, the liberal Free Democrats. Merkel has evidently decided that, given the public mood, further substantial economic reforms will not be possible before 2009. Better to speak up on areas like Germany's international role, where she can build on her already high popularity ratings.
Merkel rarely talks about the challenges of being a woman in politics, but few doubt that her modest-but-determined female style was important in broking important deals in the EU and G8 this year. And on a recent trip to Africa, she effectively highlighted Germany's anxieties about climate change.
As one of her top lieutenants confided during the trip, such issues are important to counter the domestic stasis. Of course reversing Schröder's reforms is a bad idea. "But what can we do when the Social Democrats are in such a state?"
