The stalemate election: can Germany move beyond Merkel?

Germany’s election campaign has taken many unexpected turns. In January, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), were leading by about 20 percentage points. By April, the Greens were ahead. By July, the CDU/CSU had bounced back, and then all of a sudden, the Social Democrats (SPD) came out of nowhere to a solid lead by last weekend. The gap has since closed a little ahead of Sunday’s election — and the joyride is still not over.

What is also different about these elections is that, based on current polling, four, five or even six coalitions might be arithmetically possible. So the real battle will likely start only after the election. One plausible scenario to watch out for is a majority for the three parties of the left — the SPD, the Greens and the Left party, the successor of the former East German Communist party, in which case, Olaf Scholz, German finance minister and the SPD’s candidate, will have a good chance of succeeding Angela Merkel as the next German chancellor.

Even stranger than the mind-bogglingly complex election arithmetic is the almost total lack of ideas. In the TV debates between the three leading candidates, there was no mention of Afghanistan or any other foreign policy issue — not even of the EU. This tells you that Merkel’s strategy of benign neglect towards Brussels will likely continue under her successor.

Nothing intelligent has been said about the single most important subject of all: how to get Germany, with its cash mountains, savings banks, fax machines and mobile-phone-free zones, into the digital 21st century. It was Merkel herself who summed up Germany’s attitude towards the digital era: ‘Internet is new territory, uncharted territory to all of us.’ That was as recently as 2013, about the time when elsewhere in the world Web 3.0