Zombie Traffic Light: The German government teeters once again on the brink of collapse, but in truth it is already dead

The government that rules Germany is colloquially called the “traffic light.” This is because it is a coalition of three parties that are represented by the colours red, yellow and green.

Red is for the Social Democrats, or the SPD – the party of the welfare state and once upon a time of the working man. With the realignment of the left in our brave new era of open-borders internationalism, the SPD has been reduced to a directionless and decaying husk of its former self. As they circle the drain, the Social Democrats have accumulated a great gaggle of strange and disturbing personalities, like our eccentrically-toothed Health Minister Karl Lauterbach and our Marshmallow Interior Minister Nancy Faeser. When they are not retweeting Eric Feigl-Ding and hyperventilating about the ExTReME RigHT, SPD politicians are hard at work spending as much money as they possibly can on entitlements, even as their working-class voters abandon them in droves.

Karl Lauterbach (SPD): a living metaphor for the health and vitality of his party.

Green is naturally for the Greens. The Greens are not a decaying corpse party like the SPD; instead, they represent the worldview of German elites. This is another way of saying that they are totally crazy. They hate nuclear power more than any other thing in existence, and as a close second they also hate carbon dioxide and those activities that emit carbon dioxide, such as industrial production and most economic activity. They are above all an urbanite party interested in performative self-abnegation, especially if mandating this abnegation also hurts their political enemies in the great unwashed middle of society. As an added crazy bonus, the Greens are rabid Atlanticists, particularly when this Atlanticism is contrary to the interests of ordinary Germans. Only about 8–10% of the population are hardcore Greens, but these are overwhelmingly influential people with well-endowed bank accounts. A lot of wealth must yet be destroyed before their convictions will bring them any personal pain.

This leaves the depressing yellow in the middle of the traffic light, which represents the Free Democrats, or the FDP. The FDP is a party of the centre-right that once advocated for free markets, privatisation and lower taxes. Now they no longer appear to stand for anything at all. Thus the FDP had no problem joining their ostensible red and green ideological opponents to round out the traffic light coalition in 2021, and they’ve spent the three years since happily waving through every last insane traffic light idea. They presided over the latter stages of Covid madness and even collaborated with Karl Lauterbach to extend mask mandates, they voted through the ruinous Green home heating ordinances, they stood by during the nuclear phase-out, they rubber-stamped the ludicrous Self-Determination Act so that transsexuals can change their official gender once every year …

The cheerful Tessa Ganserer (Greens), in many ways the public face of the Self-Determination Act.

… they presided over the ongoing mass migration catastrophe, they helped make it easier to get German citizenship than a university degree, and the whole time they said we should be grateful to them because if they weren’t in government things would be even worse. This is exactly like how the Covidians told us we should be happy for lockdowns and vaccines or even more of us would’ve died from the Covid supercold. People have grown very tired of arguments like this, which is why the FDP is well on its way to becoming a political curiosity of no importance. In East Germany, the Free Democrats are a total nonentity, and nationally they are polling at 3.9%. There is a very big chance they will disappear from the Bundestag entirely when we are allowed to vote again.

The traffic light, in short, is the most dysfunctional government ever to beset the Federal Republic. They may be one of the most dysfunctional governments ever to preside over a major Western industrial power at all. The red SPD are an undead political corpse on autopilot, the yellow FDP will support anything so long as they get to govern, and all of this has given the Green crazy maximum freedom to manifest itself. This is not good even for the Greens, who do best when they are confined to the opposition and prevented from inflicting their full insanity upon real people.

Lacking all imagination and initiative, the traffic light merely continued the disastrous policies of the Merkel era, if in a more rhetorically unhinged and imprudent way. They gave us more Merkelian open borders, they gave us more Merkelian climatist hocus pocus, and they gave us more Merkelian spending on everything except those things we should be spending money on, like infrastructure and defence. Merkel got away with all of this, because throughout her chancellorship money was cheap, there was not yet war in the Ukraine, and the problems caused by years of underinvestment in things like railway and bridges had not yet reached the point of acute catastrophe.

The collapsed Carolabrücke in Dresden.

You can spend on credit for a long time before the bills come due and bridges start to fall down. In their perfidious stupidity, Merkel’s successors just walked blindly down the path she had chosen and ended up following it right off the cliff.

Politically, the traffic light have been finished for an entire year now. The death blow came in November 2023, when the Federal Constitutional Court ruled their budgetary manoeuvring unconstitutional. Just like that, they ran out of money, and running out of money is a very bad thing for a government whose very existence is premised on the spending of money. Suddenly the SPD had problems paying for their social entitlements and the Greens had trouble paying their industrial subsidies to selectively mitigate deindustrialisation. The Greens and the Social Democrats and the Free Democrats got hammered in the European elections, and then the Greens and the Social Democrats and the Free Democrats got hammered even harder in the East German elections. It was so embarrassing that the entire federal leadership of the Green Party resigned. The leadership of some of their youth organisations followed suit, and then one-upped their elders by leaving the Green Party entirely.

Still, the traffic light limped on – a zombie unkillable coalition that nobody wants. Here I mean “nobody” very literally: According to a ZDF September poll, 0% of those surveyed said they would prefer a red-yellow-green traffic light coalition over other possibilities. 85% of Germans now believe that the government has no “coherent concepts for dealing with … the current crises,” and 54% want new elections. The government is plainly demoralised and the coalition partners have all but stopped talking to each other. Again, I mean this very literally. Earlier this week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the SPD and Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the FDP accidentally scheduled competing “economic summits” on the same day. The impression you get from the outside is one of chaos, resignation and bewilderment.

Then, yesterday, came perhaps the worst shock yet for the battered traffic light. FDP chief Lindner wrote an 18-page paper attacking the failures of his coalition partners and saying many things he should’ve said years ago. In this document, he demands comprehensive de-bureaucratisation to unburden businesses. He demands tax reductions, including the phase-out of our odious “solidarity surcharge.” In a direct swipe at the SPD, he calls for a comprehensive reining in of entitlement spending, and in a claw to the face of the Greens, he requires an end to Green industrial subsidies and a reconsideration of our plans to achieve carbon neutrality five years ahead of the EU schedule. If all that sounds relatively milquetoast to you, you do not understand how extreme German politics have become. This is not a simple economic policy paper. It reads more like a manifesto – an attack on the entire policy of the traffic light if not an outright ultimatum.

Lindner’s paper reminds many of a similar moment in 1982, when Germany was likewise mired in an economic downturn and the FDP were also ruling in a coalition with the SPD under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Back then, the FDP Economics Minister presented the SPD with a manifesto demanding comprehensive liberalising reforms, and their revolt ultimately brought down Schmidt’s government.

This time, however, there is one important difference: Lindner’s manifesto was not supposed to be public. It was an internal document that somebody leaked to the press. Lindner claims that he gave copies only to the Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck and to Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Now that we have all read it, though, Lindner and his yellow FDP are in a very awkward position: These demands are plainly crafted to be maximally unpalatable for the Greens and the SPD, and there is no way the other two lights of our traffic control device can agree to any of this. Lindner will thus have to accept the public humiliation and continue to support the ruinous policies that he is now on record as bitterly opposing, or he and his FDP will have to leave the coalition, in which case the government is done and we will probably have new elections in March.

The traffic light, long broken, is swaying on its foundations, and there is some chance it will collapse. I said as much last night. After sleeping on it, though, I now doubt that this monstrous zombie government can be killed by anything. If the Free Democrats wanted to save themselves, they are two years too late. Unlike Schmidt before him, our present Chancellor Scholz will ignore the provocation, and Lindner will bend the knee. New elections, whether they come early or as scheduled, will just chase the piss-yellow FDP out of the Bundestag entirely. Either way, whether it happens in the spring or the autumn, we will get a new coalition. The Christian Democrats will form a government, and probably they will need both the Social Democrats and the Greens for a majority. The party of Angela Merkel that put us on this cliffward path will take charge, in other words, with an assist from the two parties that have spent the past three years helping us over the precipice. Everything will continue as before, with perhaps a few more symbolic deportations of dangerous migrant criminals to Afghanistan and a few less wind turbines.

The internal political decay will continue. The pale and desolate ghosts who rule us now will be succeeded by still paler and more desolate ones. The AfD will accrue ever more popular support. We will have to hear all over again, and at greater length, about how the real problem is with the extreme right. Don’t mistake me, this is not all pessimism. There will be a correction, sooner or later, but the later it is, the more drastic and unpredictable it will be.