German Lessons
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2021
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David and Helen are joined by Politico’s chief Europe correspondent Matthew Karnitschnig to explore the consequences of the German elections. Who were the real winners and losers? Are there lessons for centre-left parties in other countries, including the Labour Party in Britain? And what are the choices facing Germany as it decides on its place in an increasingly unstable world? Plus we ask whether this was a Covid election. If not, why not?
Talking Points:
What was surprising about the German elections?
- To expect something is different from seeing it actually happen.
Do campaigns make a difference to election outcomes?
- In this case, it looks like it did. It was pretty clear that Laschet was a poor candidate.
- Laschet’s response to the floods was a turning point.
Scholz prevailed because of his experience—he isn’t perceived as a change candidate.
- The SPD base has moved to the left, but Scholz is more of a centrist.
- The CDU, on the other hand, was much less stable.
Most German voters wanted change, and yet it is the continuity Merkel candidate who is most likely to become the next chancellor.
- This reflects grand coalition politics. Merkel pushed the Christian Democrats into the space of the Social Democrats.
- But the initiative to form this government is coming from the change parties: the Greens and the FDP.
The parties seem to believe that their differences are bridgeable.
- The two smaller parties are more popular among younger people.
- Change might be driven from below.
- The larger party only has about 26 percent; this gives the other parties more leverage.
- What kind of change would be embraced by both the FDP and the Greens?
Mentioned in this Episode:
- Peter Tiede on German schadenfreude in the Times
- The German election results
- What are the coalition options after Germany’s election?
Further Learning:
- Matthew Karnitschnig on Olaf Scholz, the ‘teflon candidate’
- More on Merkel’s legacy for the FT
- More on Germany policy towards China
- Background on the Scholz money-laundering scandal
- Our most recent episode on Germany
Hear more of Matthew on Politico's podcast on European politics, EU Confidential, which he hosts.
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is Talking Politics. We've had a little more than a week to try and digest the results of the German election. |
| 0:12.1 | And today, Helen and I are joined by Matthew Karnichnig to try to make sense of what these elections mean for Germany, for Europe and for the world. |
| 0:23.9 | Talking politics. these elections mean for Germany, for Europe and for the world. Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, |
| 0:28.7 | which has its own weekly podcast. Recent episodes include Dominic West, reading Patrick |
| 0:34.8 | Lee Furmore, a mini series of encounters with the lives and voices of women in medieval literature and an interview with me about Peter Thiel, the subject of my latest LRB piece. Just search for the LRB podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 1:08.7 | Matt Karnitschnik is the chief European correspondent for Politico, and he's based in Berlin, |
| 1:11.4 | where he's been covering German politics for more than 20 years. He was in Berlin when we spoke to him on Wednesday morning, and we're going to try and make |
| 1:16.2 | sense of all the different coalition permutations that might come out of this election. |
| 1:20.5 | But we thought we should start by reminding all of us what actually happened. |
| 1:26.0 | Maybe we should start because we are taking advantage of the benefit of |
| 1:29.3 | a week and a bit's hindsight by just reminding ourselves and people listening what happened in the |
| 1:34.9 | election, Matt, and did anything about the result 10 days ago surprise you? There was a lot of |
| 1:40.6 | speculation beforehand, as there always is, and lots of polling analysis. |
| 1:45.5 | When the final result came through, was it what you were expecting? |
| 1:48.3 | The result was what I was expecting, given the polls, but I think I and a lot of other people |
| 1:53.0 | were still surprised. |
| 1:54.4 | It was one of these moments where when you actually see what has just happened, it really |
| 2:00.0 | hits you. |
| 2:00.6 | And what hit me was that the |
| 2:03.3 | CDU, Angler-Mircles Party that's obviously been running Germany for the past 16 years, |
| 2:10.1 | suffered this historically poor result, its worst result since World War II and I think that has been |
| 2:19.4 | reverberating ever since so it was something that we knew was was coming but |
... |
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