THEY LIKE THE STATUS QUO:

Stillstand in Deutschland: German voters choose stalemate. (Christopher Caldwell, 10/03/2005, Weekly Standard)

WHAT MADE THE ELECTION look like a safe win for the CDU opposition was the steadily worsening quality of life for median Germans. The main problem was that 11 percent of them (19 percent in Berlin) had no jobs. In February, unemployment rose to over 5 million people. That was a record high, but the jobless rate has been in or near double digits since the mid-1990s. Starting with Thatcher's Britain, almost all European countries have fought unemployment through deep and sometimes painful reforms. A quarter-century later, Germany--along with France and Italy--is still holding out.

But Germany has also spent 1.4 trillion euros to rebuild the former East Germany. As the state goes broke, its reputation for high-quality social services wanes. The country had its Sputnik moment in 2003, when the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) ranked the German education system near rock-bottom of 32 developed countries surveyed. To add to the problem, Germans are having children at half the rate they were when the socialist state was built up in the 1950s and 1960s. Since pensions and health care, the most expensive parts of the social system, are pay-as-you-go, battles over the role of the state increasingly pit the old against the young.

You had to be pretty deep inside the conventional wisdom to think the fact that Germany has so far resisted reform would help make it reformist now and that a system where young are pitted against old and there are ever fewer young was going to vote to inconvenience the old.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 24, 2005 7:12 AM