LIFE IS A CABARET:

Germany's parties adrift (Richard Bernstein, October 10, 2004, NY Times)

[O]nly soccer is left these days in Gelsenkirchen. The last coal mine closed four years ago, taking about 3,000 jobs with it, another step toward turning Gelsenkirchen, population 273,000, into a microcosm of the broader condition of Germany, which faces difficult choices in its effort to revitalize its economy.

The stakes are high, nothing less than Germany's ability to regain the self-confidence that has been damaged by years of a sort of political-economic malaise.

The two major political parties and several minor ones agree on the basics - that there needs to be less state and more individual enterprise - even as no party offers a vision that excites the imaginations of the electorate.

"People are very skeptical about the two major parties and their competence," said Peter Lösche, a professor of political science at Göttingen University and a prominent political commentator.

Or, as Walter Knosowski, a retired miner waiting at Gelsenkirchen's new sports arena to watch the Schalke players practice, bluntly put it, "The politicians all babble the same nonsense, and the voters are confused."

The recent local elections, including one here, have brought this sense of political drift into focus. In parliamentary elections in two states of the former East Germany - Saxony and Brandenburg - turnout for the traditional parties was very low, and far-right parties did well enough to gain representation in the state parliaments.

"The number of people who do not believe in any of the big parties is growing rapidly," Wolfgang Bosbach, vice chairman of the conservative Christian Democratic Union's group in the federal Parliament, said in a recent interview in his office in Berlin. "And, you know, this is how it developed in the Third Reich, when people didn't believe in democracy any more and the extremes on both sides grew stronger.

"It's not the same now, of course," he continued. "But if more and more people run away from the main parties, there's a danger that the nationalist parties could get stronger."

For want of Republicans Europe was lost.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 11, 2004 8:48 AM