Debtpocalypse

The German cartel parties are beginning to lose control of their own political system, and this is making them a little crazy.

I’ve written too much on the debt brake overhaul, and not enough on its significance.

Allow me to begin by emphasising the nature and the scale of what has happened here:

Olaf Scholz’s traffic light coalition was a resounding failure, the least popular and the most ineffectual government that the Federal Republic of Germany has ever had. Voters accordingly handed the parties of the traffic light an extreme punishment. They sent the FDP out of the Bundestag and condemned them to an indefinite political twilight. They gave the SPD their worst electoral showing in history, and they deprived the Greens of all support beyond their base of fanatical eco dead-enders.

The traffic light was bad because they tried to continue the bland self-destructive politics of the Merkel era, oblivious to the new world that was emerging around them – a world in which these politics proved unworkable even in the short-term. Thus it was Merkel’s own debt brake that strangled them to death. Voters elected a new Bundestag with a strong right-of-centre mandate, and the message was clear: No more traffic light politics, no more technocratic energy transition, no more mass migration, no more deindustrialisation to appease the weather gods. There must be a radical change.

The Union parties under the leadership of Friedrich Merz recognised this mandate. Then they moved heaven and earth to gut the debt brake that destroyed the previous government, and began charting a course to double down on the failed politics of the traffic light – only this time with piles of money that the traffic light never had. All the signs are that CDU promises to restrict migration will come to nothing. Far from ending Green climatist nonsense, the CDU have agreed to funnel billions and billions of debt into Green projects and even to inscribe the goal of climate neutrality into the constitution. As for plans to secure cheaper energy, withdraw the hated and ruinous home heating ordinances, or do anything else that CDU voters want their party to do – on these fronts the best you can hope for is a stony silence.

It is of course a myth that politicians are dependent upon such things as the popular will (or even that there is such a thing as the popular will), but the inverse thesis – that politicians can afford to govern with no regard for prevailing political mood – is equally wrong. And yet that is precisely what Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz is trying to do. The cartel parties of Germany have finally lost all alignment with their electorate. They exist in a universe populated only by themselves, pursuing wildly unpopular policies that nobody wants, towards entirely obscure ends.

That is the what, of what happened this Tuesday. It remains to clarify the why:

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