The state election results last weekend in North Rhine Westphalia only confirmed what has been apparent for some time: Germany must now face a five-party reality. The days when we had alternating SPD or CDU/CSU governments with the FDP playing king-maker are now over for good. The major parties (Volksparteien) can no longer muster enough votes to form a government with the FDP. Benjamin Presser has a good explanation over at The Monkey Cage:
"In the years leading up to Schröder’s election in 1998, German politics had been dominated by the two major all-encompassing parties, the CDU/CSU and the SPD, and the small FDP which served as a junior partner to either. The arrival of the Greens and their stabilization as a parliamentary presence during the 1980s and 1990s in turn created a two-block system with the conservative-liberal model opposing the social democratic-green one. While the latter won twice (in 1998 and 2002) its infamous social reforms (Hartz IV) brought about a fundamental change in German politics; opposition to these policies brought about a merger between the erstwhile communist governing party of the GDR (the PDS) and disappointed social-democrats, unionists, and a wide array of other left-wing splinter groups (the WASG) under the leadership of a former SPD-president, Oskar Lafontaine. The PDS had never succeeded electorally in West Germany even while playing on the same level as the CDU and the SPD in East Germany, since the Left (Die Linke) has become a fixture in German parliaments.
Germany has thus now moved away from its post-war system of a three-party parliamentary democracy allowing for clear majorities towards a five party system posing a variety of coalition building problems. The election results in North Rhine-Westphalia exemplify this problematic. CDU and SPD are even in the Landtag (regional parliament) both having 67 parliamentarians. The Green party boasts of the third-biggest fraction with 23, followed by the FDP and the Left with 13 and 11 parliamentarians respectively."
Die LINKE is anathema to the SPD, but, in the end, the Social Democrats have no choice to but work with both Die LINKE and the Greens in a Red-Red-Green coalition. The rise of the Die LINKE and the relative stability of the Greens show that the majority of the German electorate favors progressive policies. The SPD will continue to hemorrhage votes as long as it flirts with the free market fundamentalists FDP. Now it appears that the FDP will issue threats and ultimatums in an attempt to keep the SPD from even talking to the "communists". So what choice do the Social Democrats have if they want to govern?
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