There's a Con-Dem coalition in Germany, and it's creaking ominously

Over in Germany for a few days, to see what happens in a land where Con-Dem coalitions are a chronic condition. Helmut Kohl led one for about 15 years, and now Frau Merkel is having a go. But she has reached that tricky mid-term stage where things begin to go pear-shaped, and I thought it might be a good idea to look into the precise form and composition of the pear.

Actually the situation in Berlin appears reasonably stable: the permanent tensions run along different lines to our own, with the Free Democrats imbued with the spirit (or virus) of Thatcherism pitted against the more staid, don’t-frighten-the-horses approach of Frau Merkel’s lot. (Could she be Ted Heath in drag?) But in the country at large, ominous creaks are audible.

We have by-elections to demonstrate how a mid-term Government’s performance is perceived. The federalist Germans, by contrast, have state elections, which are rather more sweeping in their scope. Especially when the state in question is North Rhine/Westphalia (NRW), which covers about a quarter of the German population. Until last week NRW had the same Con-Dem coalition as the Federal Republic; but now the voters, as voters will, have stuck a great clumping foot through the carefully constructive edifice. Not only was the general preference unclear (the Merkelite CDU beat the Labourish SPD by a mere 0.1 per cent), but the arithmetic is such that either of the two main parties will need not one but two coalition partners to form a government. Oh, the joys of PR and five-party politics!

The Free Democrats want to remain true to Frau Angela and the CDU, but that would only work if one of the left-wing parties, the Greens or the Left Party, come in to make up the numbers. And the same would apply if they tried to set up a coalition with the SPD. But the Free Dems, who run more to smooth suits and Friedmanite economics than to beards and sandals, have a big problem with lefties. They cut them dead in the street, and give the impression that they’d rather form a coalition with Al-Qa’eda. The central party in Berlin is trying to make the NRW branch see sense, but trying to talk sense into liberals is rather like trying it with a 15-year-old.

So it would seem that Con-Dem coalitions can be addictive, withdrawal symptoms and all. But what’s the likely result of the NRW hissy-fit? There are two possibilities. One involves the SPD and Greens bringing the Left Party (a sort of independent Old Labour) into a Western state government for the first time, an idea to make German conservatives choke on their Bratwurst. Of course it would not be easy to form a government with two parties with a distinctly ambivalent attitude to governmental responsibility; however, if it worked, it could lay a platform for a revived German Left, strengthened by moving leftwards.

However, that isn’t the sort of thing one bets the ranch on. So NRW may retreat to what in Britain would be unthinkable but what in Germany is the tried and trusted: the “grand” or Con-Lab coalition. This, of course, is a tried and trusted recipe for institutional stagnation, cosy carve-ups and general evasion of responsibility. But, hardly surprising given their recent history, the Germans have no objection to the odd bit of stagnation. They’ve had it for years, and the place still seems to function.

But we’re not Germans, you may say; and we aren’t. But it does seem that Germany provides a glimpse of what political life might become under PR. It should at least induce us to ask the question: is this a price we are prepared to pay just for the sake of being “fair” to Nick Clegg and his band of dozy students?