As Germany goes to the polls this weekend, I am reminded of a slogan used by Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany, in his 1957 re-election campaign: Keine Experimente! (“No Experiments!”). It was his way of cautioning the electorate to avoid taking risks on untested parties and politicians and to stick with the steady postwar stability Adenauer and his party were offering.
Adenaeur’s admonition seems to be animating almost all of the major parties involved in this year’s German election—not only those that are usually lumped into the “conservative” camp, but also the two largest parties of the left.
This election represents a major turning point in German politics: Chancellor Angela Merkel is retiring after almost 16 years at the helm. She has remained unflappable and inscrutable over that time, and earned a reputation for competence, calmness, and pragmatism. While her handling of the refugee crisis in 2015 was probably the most controversial policymaking in Germany since 1989, she sold it in the same composed, understated manner you would expect of a regulation on the Leber content of Leberwurst. This levelheaded attitude toward policymaking, irrespective of its import or topic, has been one of Merkel’s great strengths, and Germans have become accustomed to it. Even when there have been experiments—such as the emphasis on renewable energy and the decommissioning of coal-fired and nuclear power stations, or the way the Merkel government has dealt with 2.5 million asylum claims in the past decade, officially accepting 1.15 million of them—those experiments have generally been presented not as proactive changes but common-sense reactions or moderate progress.
For most of her tenure, Merkel’s favorability ratings have been high, which is why—unlike every previous postwar chancellor—she is leaving office by retiring at a time of her choosing. But her favorability does not guarantee success for her party, the Christian Democrats. Her attempt to handpick a successor failed, and going into Sunday’s election the CDU is in second place in the polls.
