German Politics and Society

During the summer of campaign year 2002, the election already

seemed lost for the SPD/Green government. Public opinion polls

saw the governing coalition trailing by several percentage points,

whereas the CDU/CSU, together with the FDP, looked like the sure

winner. A central reason for the malaise of the red-green government

was the ailing economy. Unemployment rates hovered at the 4

million mark and would have been even higher if governmentfunded

jobs had been added to the official unemployment rates.

Consequently, a substantial majority of citizens considered the creation

of jobs Germany’s most important problem.1 This constituted

an especially severe burden for Chancellor Schröder. In 1998 he had

promised to push unemployment rates below 3.5 million or, he

stated, he did not deserve re-election. Thus, many observers and

voters expected the September 2002 election to be a referendum on

the governments’ handling of the economy. Since the chancellor had

not delivered, voters were about to vote the incumbent government

out of office.

Picking winners in electoral contests is a popular sport in Germany,

as in many places elsewhere. During the 2002 campaign for the

Bundestag, pre-election polls tracked the horse race of party support

almost daily. Election junkies were invited to enter online sweepstakes.

They could also bet real money, albeit in limited quantity, on

the parties’ fortunes on WAHL$TREET, a mock stock market run

by Die Zeit and other media. As usual, election night witnessed the

race of the networks to project the winner the second the polls

where voters had cast their ballots closed. But in 2002, there was

also one newcomer in the business of electoral prophecy: a statistical

forecast based on insights from electoral research.

The 2002 election was a close race. The Social Democrats turned out

to be 6,027 votes ahead of the Christian Democrats. The red-green

government was returned to power only because of the so-called

overhang mandates1 for the SPD (three in the new Länder, one in

Hamburg) and the good result of the Greens, especially in the old

Länder. To put it differently, 1.2 percent (577,567 votes) was the winning

gap between the government and the opposition. Four seats

above the majority is a rather narrow margin but does not inevitably

entail a weak government. The CDU/CSU-led government in 1994

had a similar starting position, for example, and it endured in power.

The 2002 Bundestag elections demonstrate the emerging new style

of German electoral politics. Where once party competition was

built upon a stable base of Stammwähler, the catchword for 2002 was

the Wechselwähler—the changing voter. The traditional bonds to social

groups, such as class and religion, have steadily eroded across Bundestag

elections in the late twentieth century, and these bonds had a

diminished impact in 2002. Similarly, this chapter will demonstrate

that affective psychological ties that once connected citizens to their

preferred party have also weakened. Certainly some German voters

remain connected to a social milieu or a habitual party tie, but the

number of these voters is steadily decreasing.

Most explanations for the red-green victory in the 2002 election

refer to two issues that emerged in the final months of the campaign:

the Iraq crisis and the flood in eastern Germany. The surprise

announcement by President Bush to dramatically increase pressure

on Iraq, including a possible invasion, put this issue squarely into the

center of the election campaign. This issue emerged at the onset of

the hot campaign phase, taking parties and candidates by surprise.

Chancellor Schröder quickly and emphatically ruled out the participation

of German troops under any circumstances. His policy may

have attracted a considerable number of voters who favored a more

conciliatory stance towards Iraq. For instance, eastern Germans,

many of whom still remember the anti-American stances of the

socialist government, may have felt comfortable with an uncompromising

antiwar stance and thus supported the SPD in the end,

despite this party’s failure to deliver on its economic promises. And

voters who sympathize with the peace movement in postwar western

Germany may have become mobilized in support of the Green

party. In turn, the largest flood in 500 years may have also provided

Chancellor Schröder with an opportunity to shore up his support

among eastern voters. By all accounts, he met the leadership expectations

of voters by quickly promising financial aid to reconstruct

those eastern regions devastated by the flood.

Although the German constitution does not provide for the direct

election of the head of the executive branch by the people, the preeminent

position of the federal chancellor has long tempted commentators

to describe the German political system as a “chancellor

democracy.”1 Based on this characterization, one might be tempted

to assume that the German election of 2002 was therefore about

electing a chancellor. To be sure, if voters could have voted for the

chancellor directly in 2002, Gerhard Schröder would have easily

defeated Edmund Stoiber. Yet, despite public opinion polls that never

once showed the challenger outpolling the chancellor throughout the

entire election year, the election turned out to be a cliffhanger.

The issue of political finance crucially shaped German political

dynamics in the first three years of the 1998-2002 legislative period.

By the year 2000 political finance scandals were being labeled the

“dominant theme in German politics.”1 Scarcely a year into the first

red-green government, the national political mood was crucially

transformed by the repercussions of a political finance scandal that

unseated leading figures in the CDU. These scandals, and the ensuing

upheaval within the CDU, gave the faltering red-green coalition

a chance to regroup after its weak start in office, so that at one point

it seemed that the CDU’s ongoing embarrassments all but guaranteed

a victory for the red-green coalition in 2002.

According to Jürgen Habermas, the federal election in 1998 finally

“sealed” the democratic foundation of Germany and confirmed that

this country belonged to the “west.”1 Until then, the day of judgment

had left the “judges” in Germany—that is, the voters—with only limited

influence in coalition building and the formation of each government.

2 Between 1949 and 1998 no federal government has totally

been unsettled by elections. Changes in government were due to

changes in coalitions, thus based on decisions by the parties rather

than on the electorate. Insofar as the landslide victory of the Social

Democratic Party and the Alliance ‘90/Greens in the 1998 election

not only reflected important changes in the party system, but it also

could mean that the German electorate is going to play a more influential

role in the future.

Is it always the economy, or do external issues sometimes matter,

too? Consistent with the Clinton campaign slogan of 1992, political

scientists generally predict that domestic economic issues are primary

in determining election winners. This proposition, with its several

variants, rests on many years of survey data and analysis that

have consistently indicated that international conditions and foreign

policy rarely, if ever, rate highly in public concerns and therefore

seldom affect election outcomes.

Letter to the Editor