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A general view of the German lower house of parliament, in Berlin, Germany.
Germany to hold early elections
Under a plan agreed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the opposition, Europe’s largest economy is now headed toward early elections in February.
The move comes after weeks of fraying ties among the so-called “traffic light” coalition, an unwieldy tie-up of Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats (red), the business-friendly Free Democrats (yellow), and the environment-oriented Greens (you guessed it).
The final straw, last week, was a spat over Germany’s budget. Scholz and the Greens wanted to relax Germany’s strict fiscal rules to create room to invest in infrastructure, defense, and Ukraine aid. The Free Democrats rejected that and proposed a more austerity-oriented budget of their own. Scholz, in turn, sacked Free Democrat Finance Minister Christian Lindner, which led to his party leaving the governing coalition altogether.
What happens now: Under the current deal, Scholz will hold a confidence vote in his government in mid-December, which – assuming he loses as expected – will pave the way for February elections, which the parties want to hold on Feb. 23, 2025.
At the moment, polls show the opposition Christian Democratic Union as the clear frontrunner with 32% support, twice that of Scholz’s Social Democrats. The far-right Alternative For Germany polls second, at 17%.
Germany faces political uncertainty after coalition collapse
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from Stockholm, Sweden.
What does Germany's coalition collapse mean for Chancellor Scholz, the country, and Europe as a whole? Well, the collapse of the coalition government was, to some extent, expected. There had been speculations for weeks on how long it was going to hold together, and finally, the Chancellor himself pulled the plug in a rather vicious personal attack against the finance minister. Then he sacked him and then the government went up in flames. Now, what he wants to do is strangely enough to stay in power until January 15th and vote for the confidence, lose vote the confidence in parliament then, and have elections in March. I doubt that will be the case. I think there is now very heavy pressure by the opposition, needless to say.There's pressure by business, there are pressure by others saying that we can't have this uncertainty going on for months and months, particularly in a situation where other things are happening in the world, mildly speaking. So I wouldn't be surprised if we have, for example, a vote of confidence or he has to put himself a vote of confidence by mid-next week or something like that, and Germany is heading for election perhaps very early next year. Then of course, the other question will arise, what kind of government could possibly arise out of that particular election? That's a later, somewhat complicated issue. I guess we will have reason to return to it.
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) attends the wreath-laying ceremony at Fronhof in memory of the victims of the knife attack at the Solingen town festival. I
What do East German elections mean for next year’s national election?
The far right prevailed in East Germany over the weekend, with the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, winning its first-ever election in Thuringia and nearly winning in Saxony. The outcome dealt a blow to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-right coalition government and boosted the far right and left ahead of the 2025 federal election.
The far-left BSW party secured third place in both states, making it a key player in upcoming government formation negotiations. Scholz’s SPD party – which barely managed to retain parliamentary representation in both states – is pushing the CDU, the only centrist party to perform strongly on Sunday, to partner with the left to box out the AfD. “In both states, the core of such alliances would be the CDU and BSW,” says Eurasia Group’s Europe Director Jan Techau, “which all by itself is a curious formation given that these two are at opposite ends of the political spectrum.”
What does this mean for the 2025 election? While the far right and left are much weaker on the national level, this election foreshadowed growing division in Germany – as well as Scholz’s rising unpopularity. It also showed that migration and Germany’s support for Ukraine will be the main campaign issues next year. “The AfD will mercilessly exploit these topics, and so will the BSW,” says Techau.
“[Scholz’s] ability to instill discipline in a very diverse coalition was never great and is now further diminished,” Techau adds. “He needs to deliver meaningful migration reform and a halfway solid budget for 2025. These are the two benchmarks. If he can’t do this … his position as the party’s candidate for 2025 will be at risk.”Migrants on board a ship which disembarked in Salerno, Italy.
Olaf Scholz gets tough on asylum-seekers
The German government on Wednesday announced that authorities will start conducting “flexible spot checks” on border crossings from Poland and the Czech Republic to address an influx of asylum-seekers who have sought to enter the country in recent months.
This comes after Berlin recently joined Italy’s right-wing government in declaring that both countries had reached the “limits of [their] capacity” to take in migrants.
For context, around 204,00 migrants – mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, and across Africa – requested asylum in Germany within the first eight months of this year, a 77% jump from the same period in 2022.
But why is the center-left government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz toughening its stance?
This comes just weeks before Germans in Bavaria and Hesse head to the polls in regional elections, and polls show that tough-on-migrant messages are resonating with voters.
In Bavaria, for instance, Germany’s second most populous state, Scholz’s Social Democratic Party is polling at just 9%. Meanwhile, nationally, messaging about border safeguarding has been a boon for the far-right Alternative for Germany Party, now second in an average of national polls.
Facing growing pressure to crack down on asylum-seekers has also brought Berlin head-to-head with Warsaw: At a rally in Bavaria over the weekend, Scholz took aim at Polish officials who had allegedly issued EU visas to Asian and African nationals in exchange for bribes.
2021: Groundhog Day in a G-Zero world
Did 2021 actually happen, or are we still stuck in 2020? So many things seem to have barely changed this year. After all, we’re entering yet another holiday season worried about a fresh wave of the pandemic, and uncertain about what comes next for our economies and our politics.
In a lot of ways, the past 365 days feel like a year of unfulfilled promise. Let’s have a look back at what did, and did not happen in 2021.
The year kicked off with US democracy in deep trouble: first the Capitol insurrection, and later Donald Trump's second impeachment over it. After Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, he told the world: America is back. (Spoiler: the world is still waiting.)
Global attention soon turned to the COVID vaccine rollout. It sputtered at first, but even when it got better it exposed deep divisions over things like health passes, vaccine mandates, and patent waivers. The vaccination gap between the rich world and everyone else was hard to ignore. Still, to have inoculated half the world’s population in under a year is no mean feat.
Middle East politics got hot again with a brief war between Israel and Hamas, Iran's presidential "election," and Bibi Netanyahu ousted as Israeli PM after 12 tumultuous years.
Then came a series of extreme weather events that focused everyone’s attention on climate change just months ahead of the COP26 climate summit. But first, the world watched in disbelief as the US chaotically withdrew from Afghanistan, and then the Taliban reclaimed power virtually overnight — right before the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Like in 2020, global cooperation was hard to come by, as we saw a bit at UNGA but much more at COP26. The fact that even faced with such an existential problem, the world’s top polluters failed to agree on the same deadline for net zero emissions revealed again how fragmented global politics have become. Forget G20 or G7 — we live in a rudderless, G-Zero world.
In such crazy times, arguably the smoothest political transition came after the German election, with Angela Merkel handing over the reins after 16 years as chancellor — and Europe’s de-facto leader — to Olaf Scholz.
And now, as the end of the year approaches, we are about to mark the 30th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s collapse worrying about whether Vladimir Putin actually intends to invade Ukraine.
More broadly, there are three things that didn't really play out as many people expected they would at the start of the year.
First, US-China ties didn't get quite as bad as many feared. With Biden in the White House, the world’s two largest economies didn't exactly bury the hatchet. They remain at odds over trade, technology, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Xinjiang. But they did find some common ground on climate — and domestic distractions for both countries helped quiet the rumblings of a new Cold War. (Not to mention a hot war, which as retired US Adm. James Stavridis told us, could start over Taiwan.)
The arrested development of deteriorating relations wasn't the product of anybody's grand design. Biden began his presidency with big foreign-policy ambitions, but he soon got bogged down at home by squabbling among Democrats over his domestic agenda, and later by Afghanistan. Xi Jinping, for his part, showed more interest in further consolidating his own power over tech giants, the Chinese economy, and the ruling Communist Party than in picking fights with Biden.
Whether the Cold Peace will hold in 2022 will likely depend on what happens inside each country, especially if they really start to recover from the pandemic.
Second, 2021 was the year of the vaccine, but the jabs on their own didn't end COVID. The good news is that vaccines were successful at bringing down deaths and severe illnesses. The bad news is that distribution was unequal, and hesitancy higher than expected in some places.
Where access to jabs was lacking, the delta variant brought a more deadly wave, like the one that ravaged India for weeks. (We spoke to Indian journalist Barkha Dutt the day after her own father had succumbed to the virus.) Now we are waiting to see how effective the current jabs are the face of omicron.
Finally, the post-pandemic recovery was not what we hoped for — mainly because we never made it to the “post-pandemic” at all. Even where economic growth rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, the lingering virus messed up supply chains (check out Ian Bremmer's explainer), drove up the prices of food, energy, and pretty much everything else.
US economist Larry Summers told us why he sounded the alarm bell on inflation earlier in the year. We also learned from LSE's Minouche Shafik about how women bore the brunt of the unequal pandemic recovery.
It’s been a disappointing year, but one way in which 2020 mirrors 2021 is that we end the year with fresh hope. Last year we looked forward to the arrival of the vaccine to change things. This year we look ahead to 2022 hoping that the current pandemic wave may be the last major one. Let’s see how our optimism fares this time around.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz attends a news conference in the Federal Chancellery following the video conference with the country's 16 state leaders on the surge in the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases, in Berlin, Germany, December 9, 2021.
Enter Olaf — can he keep Germany’s traffic light blinking?
As of this week, for the first time since Gwen Stefani was topping the charts with Hollaback Girl, Germany is not run by a person named Angela.
Olaf Scholz — the pragmatic, robotic, determined leader of the center-left SPD party — now holds the reins of Europe’s largest economy.
But he also leads a three-party coalition, the first in Germany’s modern history, with the progressively, climate conscious Greens and the business-friendly fiscal hawks of the Free Democrats party. The coalition is known as the “traffic light” owing to the colors of its three members.
Here are a few immediate and longer-term challenges for Scholz.
His first big test is COVID. Germany is currently in the throes of its worst surge since the onset of the pandemic. Between the upcoming Christmas holiday and uncertainty about the omicron variant, Scholz has his work cut out for him. So far he has not announced any new society-wide lockdowns or restrictions. But with Germany’s vaccination rate of 70 percent now an EU laggard, he’s embraced a broad vaccine mandate and wants to get 30 million jabs done by the end of the year.
Foreign policy: Russia on day one. Scholz comes into office right as tensions around Ukraine are soaring again. He will quickly have to stake out a position towards Moscow that satisfies German industries, which rely on Russian markets and energy, but that also reflects the views of the Greens, Russia hawks who see the Kremlin as a menace both to the climate and to democracy. With the Greens’ leader Annalena Baerbock as foreign minister, this is going to be a tough balance to strike.
A crucial near-term decision for Scholz is whether he is willing to include suspension of the Nord Stream 2 Russian gas pipeline project as part of a package of German sanctions meant to deter Russian aggression against Ukraine… at a time of sky-high gas prices.
Going green without getting into the red. Scholz’s government has pledged a massive push on the climate front, promising to phase out coal entirely by 2030, eight years earlier than originally planned, and to double the renewable share of electricity generation to 80 percent by then as well.
These goals are practically existential for the Greens, but getting there will require massive investment — where’s the money going to come from? Scholz has already pledged to reimpose constitutional limits on debt, and the Free Democrats, who control his finance ministry, are opposed to raising taxes.
A bigger question: Can Scholz make social democrats cool again? The SDP victory was something of a stunner for a party that had seemed, just months ago, like it was on the brink of extinction. What’s more, across Europe traditional labor-oriented parties have suffered in recent years.
Now Scholz has a chance to prove that the traditional European center left has some fight in it, at a time when the right — in both its centrist and populist versions — has been defining the landscape for the last decade. Scholz believes the SPD can reconnect with working-class voters — and his coalition’s pledge to raise Germany’s minimum wage for about 10 million people is an immediate part of that.
About a third of EU member states are currently run by social democrats of one stripe or another. They will be watching to see if Scholz can use the bloc’s largest economy as a showcase for the center-left’s bonafides after a long time in the wilderness.
The unknown unknown: the next crisis. Will it be immigration? A terror attack? A financial meltdown? A political scandal? Scholz’s predecessor didn’t come into office as a crisis manager, but she sure left as one. How the new German chancellor holds together his somewhat oddball coalition under unforeseen pressures could prove decisive.What We're Watching: Germany's next government taking shape
Who's going to run Germany? With coalition negotiations now reportedly in the home stretch, we could know what the next German government looks like as soon as Monday or Tuesday. Following elections that were held back in September, the center-left SPD, headed by Chancellor-in-waiting Olaf Scholz, has been hammering together a three-way coalition with the progressive Greens and the fiscal hawks of the Free Democrats Party. One big question mark is whether the spendthrift Greens or the tighter-pursestrings FDP will get the powerful finance ministry portfolio. Meanwhile, Green Party leader Annalena Baerbock is expected to become Germany's first female foreign minister, part of Scholz's larger pledge to ensure that the cabinet is split 50:50 between men and women.
What We’re Watching: German coalition talks, India’s power woes, Oz closes PNG migrant facility
German kingmakers make their pick: Despite fears of a drawn-out process that could take months like in 2017, the Greens and the pro-business FDP have taken less than two weeks to decide whom they want to team up with in a three-way coalition government. The two parties are now talking to the left-of-center SPD, which narrowly won the September 26 federal election. Good news for those hoping to have a new government in place before Christmas, since it'll be easier for the SPD to agree on stuff with its two junior partners than for the Greens and the FDP to find common ground themselves. Bad news for the conservative CSU/CDU, which has governed Germany for 16 years under Chancellor Angela Merkel but is likely headed to the opposition after achieving its worst election result ever.
India's energy crunch: While Europe is short on gas and China is suffering blackouts, India is now on the brink of its own energy crisis these days as supplies of coal — the country's main fuel for power generation — are dwindling fast. Monsoons and flooding have shut down major coal mines and delivery routes, right as seasonal demand picks up around several major holidays. Delhi is warning that some coal plants have just four days worth of supplies left. Rationing and imported coal are two likely solutions, but both would drive up prices for energy, stoking inflation at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is already facing criticism for failing to deliver strong economic growth and job creation.
Australia to close migrant detention facility: After eight years, Australia will finally shutter a controversial detention facility for asylum-seekers and refugees in Papua New Guinea. But the roughly 100 migrants still there will soon have to choose between two bad options: settle in the violence-ridden streets of Port Moresby, the most violent capital you've never heard of, or transfer to Australia's last remaining offshore processing center in Nauru, an inhospitable Pacific island that's even farther away from Australian shores. But otherwise little will change — Canberra won't relax its 2013 policy of automatically turning down asylum-seekers who arrive by boat, because doing so remains popular. Back in 2017, when the government was forced to close down another facility on the PNG island of Manus over human rights abuses, almost half of Australians still supported keeping the "boat people" away.