In my last blog I made the point that despite Germany being a major player in the reform of the eurozone and despite federal elections taking place in the fall of 2013, Germans at the moment seem rather indifferent about the eurozone’s future direction.
I found this to be rather baffling, since the decisions taken by eurozone leaders these days are not mere technical or legal adjustments, but will determine the substance of policies in the currency union and have already done so.
But is it really true that Europe is absent in the minds of German citizens? Perhaps it is a question of weeks now.
The election campaigns haven’t got into full swing yet, as the political parties are still in the process of putting together and adopting their platforms. And it was only this week that a new party with a distinctly anti-euro profile has entered the stage (to which I will come back).
Over these past two weeks, both the leaders of the Green Party (BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN) and the Social Democrats (SPD) have presented their draft platforms to the public. The Greens will put the draft to their party congress in Berlin in late April. In June, every party member gets the chance to cast a vote on the top ten priorities for the Green campaign. As to the Social Democrats, their party congress will convene in mid-April in the southern German city of Augsburg to adopt the 2013 platform. Those seeking for “Europe controversy” in the country notorious for its “Europe consensus” are likely to eventually find some food for commentary at these gatherings.
Leafing through the 100-pages platform of the SPD and searching for “Europe”, there was a particular thing that struck me. EU matters have usually been framed as a grand thought and duty for Germany, more of a political ritual found in intros or conclusions, or in the obligatory chapter at the end in pamphlets of this kind (sometimes together with foreign policy). For voters that made the effort to read through those pamphlets, things must have quite naturally looked as something of a separate matter (“We will work for a better Germany for you, and then there is also the EU which we, good Germans as we are, want to build.”).
Today, European affairs have become much more a matter of policy substance – and with issues such as budget and banking supervision or the tax on financial transactions, quite naturally, intertwined with the domestic context. The new message, accelerated by the past years of crisis, is “We will work for a better Germany for you, and our playing field to achieve this is also Europe”. In other words, we can only preserve our freedom, prosperity and social justice in this world when taking much more responsibility for each other. My guess is that this is a line that still won’t go down naturally with traditional SPD voters.
Needless to say that for the Greens, advocating Europe in such a way is an easier argument to make. The party’s environmental agenda, one of its main pillars since entering the formal political arena in Germany thirty years ago, is by its very nature a field in which the borders of nation-states do not matter all that much.
It is too early to tell though whether the parties challenging Angela Merkel’s return to the chancellery manage to frame their agendas to really make a difference – and to portray European affairs no longer as a matter of statecraft at EU summits, but of political choices, of political drama and of majorities.
