A few days ago, Roger Cohen at the New York Times wrote a column entitled “The Miracle of Dullness” regarding the upcoming elections in Germany. It said more about the author  than the country he was writing about. Cohen begins by describing how his plane thumps down placidly and reliably in Frankfurt, whereby what he really does is thump himself down in a swamp of the silly and ignorant stereotypes of Germans that he could have picked up in a late 1940s comic book or radio thriller.  Cohen, who is usually a pleasant columnist as a rule, really loads up the shovel, speaking of the rare sunshine in Germany – it’s not that rare, my landlord has planted a palm tree in the garden and I get lemons from a neighbor – and bringing in German romanticism by a specious mention of the painter Caspar Friedrich David – why not speak of the Expressionists, or the Blue Rider? – all, perhaps, to prove how erudite he is. He then casually mentions meeting Joschka Fischer, former vice-chancellor and foreign minister of Germany under Gerhard Schroeder, who greets him with a “Welcome to the most boring German election ever.”  Having dropped names and attempted to prove his credentials, Cohen then produces an embarrassingly semi-journalistic column that freely mixes the past, the present, and shibboleths he has heard regarding East Germany.

Who are the Germans 

I do not wish to just pounce on one column. Rather, Cohen's views have obviously been shaped by his need to sell the obvious to people expecting the same drivel over and over again. Germany is not made up of men and women who go about their daily lives staring at their navel, droopy-shouldered like the downtrodden denizen of Fritz Lang's Metropolis and ready to rise up and turn into bloodthirsty Nazis at the drop of a hat. Cohen seems to find the calm  both disquieting and yet comforting (at least as he speaks for Europeans). It’s really a shame that Cohen, rather than fire up his synapses and ask his good buddy some serious questions, gave Fischer with that single, inane and unsubtle quote. Fischer is an extremely savvy politician with a lot to say and a wealth of facts at the tip of his fingers and a brain to put those facts in a logical sequence. But for Cohen, the elections were simply dull. And that has been what the chorus of pundits have been saying, so apparently it must have been.

Where's the beef?

The question is: Dull at what level? Rhetorically? Admittedly, there were no great salvos, nor prickly issues, simply because the two major parties, the CDU and the SPD, as partners in a coalition, could not fire at each other without catching the ricochets. As for the smaller parties, notably the Greens and the FDP, they were also vying to a certain extent for power. In addition, as consumers of the news, we have become frightfully used to judging elections not by their content, but rather by the über-hype that they engender, because if they don't get the spectators' gizzards riled up, said spectator will click to the channel where some tenth-rate MC is asking a 16 year old to say in public why she slept with her best friend's boyfriend. Our society can't get enough superficial uplift, from violent elections, purple fingers, blue fingers, mutilated voters, suicide bombs, orange revolutions, to prurient shows and Hollywood movies that are the very epitome of dullness, namely formulaic. The American elections, for example, leave most Americans and the world begging for a few years relief, there is so much drama, bathos, pathos, noise. That is life in the early 21st century... either the event is blaring outrageously (see the radio jocks), or it will sink below the surface into a deep and muddy tarn.

Quantum shift 

In fact, the elections last Sunday had their own quiet fascination given the number of parties and the fact that they all had to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.... all except for The Left, which mixes pariah appeal these days with genuine soreness at the SPD’s embracing neo-liberalism in the days of Schroeder (like renaming the Unemployment Office “Agency for Work”). To dismiss the party as a mere product of post-Communist Communism is to misunderstand the German political scene and the subtle shifts that took place. Cohen, like so many pundits, sees The Left as being populated by disgruntled East Germans. It’s far more than that, of course. And even if the Easterners are going for The Left, it is definitely a sign that they are not happy with the other parties. The rise of The Left --- which I suspect will remain limited and perhaps even temporary --- is an important signal, though, that not everyone is enjoying the ride on the careening train of laissez-faire capitalism.

Winners and losers 

The most obvious winner, of course, is the FDP. Greater prominence, however, means greater responsibility and more care. Today, already, Westerwelle refused to answer a BBC reporter, in English saying "We are in Germany." Yes, Guido, we all know that. But what about all this globalization business? That is the kind of remark I used to hear from obtuse SPD bureaucrats I would interview occasionally in the 80s in Hessen (as a radio reporter, you try to get as much info in the original language, because using a voiceover is cumbersome and wastes time) or gas station attendants in Greece. Westerwelle is associated with old FDP stand-behinds like Hans-Dietrich Genscher, but he is of a very different stamp. Men like Genscher and Gerhard Baum were the good soul of the party and had statesman-like stature. They did their political activity at a time when there was a genuine danger of war, when Germany was divided and caught between two alleged superpowers who were threatening everyone. Westerwelle has not earned his stripes yet, he is still too much of the pol, man about town, and he and his party are having a hard time shaking off their yuppiness, their love of free-flowing cash, easily earned, lavishly spent. As self-professed economics experts, the FDP must prove that reducing taxes and red tape is possible without threatening the country's fairly effective welfare system.

As for the CDU, its solid, stolid candidate is often seen as a Helmut Kohl redux, who ran the country for about 16 years with a fairly heavy hand. But Kohl steered Germany through unification and he managed by dint of amnesia to rescue his party from very spicy scandals – in which he was deeply involved. He also had the cantankerous CSU in Bavaria to deal with under the bizarrely charismatic and venal Franz Josef Strauss.  For her part, Merkel has the task of pulling the country out of a hole that some of her most fervent constituents actually dug. A task that might prove very tough. She must steer a very careful course here. Monday, she was quoted as saying that campaign promises had to be kept, i.e., protecting families from the hardships of the recession, and not cutting back on spending. By the same token, Monday morning, the Süddeutsche daily announced that the funding for support of shorter working hours has come to an end and companies can finally start kicking out employees.

Squabbles ahoy 

Perhaps Fischer thought the election boring, because the local elections in Saxony, Thuringia and Saarland nearly a month earlier had pretty much forecast what the national tally would look like. But the elections were in fact like a run-off of the 2005 elections, which had produced a fairly stable coalition government. Now, after four years, Germany once again has an opposition, even though it has not yet opened its parachute. The SPD was been taught a serious lesson: If you're going to be on the left, be on the left and don't pal around with the right. They also need new leadership, though for the moment, Steinmeier has made it to the top again. The Greens will have to resume fighting nuclear power, because the big energy companies are already rubbing their hands at the thought of dumping the program to make Germany nuclear-free by 2020.

When Merkel, Westerwelle and Seehofer from the CSU (the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria) get over their election night highs, they will have to be very careful. After the grand coalition, people decided. But unlike the old CDU-Kohl voters, Germans today, I suspect, are far more elastic with their voice. The new center-right coalition will have a grace period, but not a terribly long one. There are some very tough issues to be dealt with, such as Afghanistan and Germany’s role there. The Greens will be fighting nuclear power again, because the big energy producers are already rubbing their hands. They will be aided by the scandalous leaks at the Asse nuclear waste dump, a story that has not really made it outside Germany's borders. Germany's political scene will become more confrontational, that is sure, and now, the SPD is free to roll out the views it has had to keep inside during the years of the grand coalition. The last election, in this light, was anything but dull.