Can Merkel dismantle the welfare state?

last updated 8 January 2015

Germany

This is “a truly historic moment” for Germany, said Lorenz Maroldt in Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel. This week, the two major parties have resolved the virtual tie in our recent elections. Gerhard Schröder is out, and conservative Angela Merkel will soon become the country’s first female chancellor. Merkel’s rise is all the more astonishing “because of her background and career trajectory.” She hails from the former communist east, yet she is as right-wing as they come. Trained as a physicist, she found a mentor in former chancellor Helmut Kohl, who folded her into his Christian Democratic Union and nurtured her political career. Even with such backing, Merkel was always an oddity in her party. Virtually every top party official is a Catholic father, still married to his first wife. Merkel is Protestant, childless, and remarried. Only toughness and sheer willpower brought her this far. Unfortunately for her, those are not the qualities she will need to govern in a grand coalition with the left-leaning Social Democratic Party. “She cannot reign the way she wants. She’ll have to moderate, compromise.”

In fact, Merkel hasn’t really won, said Stefan Reinecke in Berlin’s Die Tageszeitung. The negotiations between the two parties may have given her the chancellorship, but at the cost of the major ministries. What kind of right-wing economic changes can Merkel possibly make when her Finance Ministry and her Labor Ministry are under the Social Democrats’ control? Even her pro-U.S. foreign policy is probably doomed, since the Foreign Ministry is also going to the Social Democrats. Hemmed in on all sides, she’s been “forced to renounce all her political goals.” Merkel is “a victor in handcuffs.” And that’s a good thing. Despite her conservative views, her government will not be able to destroy Germany’s beloved welfare state.

She’d better try, said Roger Köppel in Hamburg’s Die Welt. There is simply no alternative. Germany has 5 million people unemployed. Our markets are “overregulated.” Our competitiveness is “self-limiting,” strangling itself in a “corset of consensus between management and labor.” Our social safety net, though unsustainably expensive, has become “a sacred cow.” The grand coalition will succeed in reforming this mess because it must. The danger, of course, is that without a feisty opposition, policies could “get bogged down in a squishy middle.”