The Jamaica Option? Germany’s evolving election could have immense importance for the UK

While Britain still recovers from the surprising outcome to a surprise election campaign, most of the rest of Europe will focus its attention on Germany, which is in the final stretch of a contest that will be conducted on 24 September. For the continent as a whole, the identity of the Chancellor in Berlin and the composition of the coalition administration that they lead is absolutely crucial. The campaign having taken one sharp change in direction at the beginning of the year now appears to be taking an ever more dramatic turn as polling day approaches. The consequences of this for European politics writ large, and especially for the ongoing Brexit process, are of seminal significance.
The electoral system and probable post-election coalition negotiations in Germany are complicated. In theory the Parliament has 598 members divided between 299 who are elected directly in large constituencies employing the British-style single plurality or first-past-the-post method. Electors also have a second ballot in which they choose between party lists. The remaining 299 seats are thus distributed in order to ensure that the actual numbers in the Bundestag match the percentages in this second ballot for all parties that pass the threshold.
To achieve proportional representation of any kind, a party must either win three of the directly elected seats (in which case it acquires seats to the ratio of its national vote, even if that figure is below the formal threshold) or it must win at least 5% of the vote as expressed in the party list ballot.
To make matters more challenging still, although the second ballot share is calculated at the national level, it is allocated at the regional level. This means that rounding up occurs to ensure parties get the right number of seats and this involves the creation of a number of ‘overhang’ seats. The net effect of all this along with the formula used in the calculation of representation (the Sainte-Lague method, obviously) ensured that after the last federal elections in September 2013, there were actually 629 MPs and not 598.
To make matters more fun still, the polls suggest that a record seven parties will win the seats and votes required to cross the threshold. They are the incumbent Christian Democrats (CDU) and their sister party in Bavaria the Christian Social Union (CSU, generally the more conservative, if junior, partner), the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, the Left Party (linked to the old East German Communist Party), the classically liberal Free Democrat Party (FDP, who failed to reach 5% last time) and Alternative For Deutchland (AfD), a Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant force not unlike UKIP in this country. The simple fact that so many parties will be in Parliament makes it extremely improbable that any one of them will secure an overall majority, indeed it might require three and not two parties to form a coalition.
Furthermore, two of these parties, the Left Party and the AfD, are regarded by all the others as too far from the mainstream to be allowed ministries in the federal government (and neither of them would logically want to be in or would benefit electorally from being in office). This is not, it should be noted, always seen as true elsewhere. Germany’s current political Rubik’s Cube means that there are 13 different coalition combinations in the 16 regions of the country. Despite this, there is a strong working assumption that only the CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP and Greens are viable players in Berlin.
Whatever government might eventually emerge from what could be lengthy negotiations after the votes had been counted would reflect the arithmetic of the situation, just as the circumstances and the numbers in 2013 had obliged Angela Merkel, whose former coalition allies the Free Democrats had fallen out of Parliament, to form a ‘grand coalition’ Cabinet alongside the Social Democrats.
With that in mind, the story of the past three months has been, as indicated above, characterised by sharp shifts in the opinion poll standing of the main actors and thus of the plausible post-election outcomes.
The rise and apparent fall of Martin Schultz and the Social Democrats
At the start of 2017, the Social Democrats dropped their parliamentary leader as their candidate to be Chancellor if they were in a position to form a government and recruited Martin Schultz, then the President of the European Parliament, in his place. He received a surge in support and the SPD went from 10 or more percentage points behind the CDU/CSU to virtually even with them. There seemed to be an outside chance that Mr Schultz would become Chancellor but much more of a prospect that he and his party would be a close second and that the only plausible post-election administration would again be a Christian Democrat/Social Democrat alliance, but one where the SPD would have a stronger hand in the subsequent bargaining. As a consequence, Mr Schultz could have insisted on being Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister. As he is about as hostile to Brexit as it gets, this prospect was not one to be welcomed by Theresa May.
The polls have, nonetheless, moved a lot since March. The CDU/CSU have recovered strongly. They are recording approval in the range of 37%-40%. The SPD has slumped all the way back to 23%-26%. All of the other contenders (the Greens, Left Party, FDP and AfD) are scoring in a range of 7%-9%. It appears that Mrs Merkel has shaken off the erosion in her popularity that was triggered in 2015 by her decision to open Germany’s borders and allow the better part of a million refugees to settle.
The Wasp outcome or Jamaica Option?
This in turn means that there are now credible alternative possibilities to another Grand Coalition. In Germany, coalition options are referred to by the colours of the various political parties. Were the CDU/CSU (whose colour is black) and the FDP (whose colour is yellow) both to perform at the top of their present range on 24 September then it would be mathematically possible for the ‘Wasp’ (black and yellow) combination to form an administration by themselves, as they have done after many previous elections and most recently from 2009-2013. Mrs Merkel would love that outcome.
Yet with so many parties in Parliament it may not be possible to do. The other, intriguing, possibility is the so-called Jamaica option (because the colours match the flag of that country) between the CDU/CSU, FDP and the Greens. In theory, this would seem an improbable coalition. The CDU/CSU and, particularly, the FDP are on the centre-right on economic policy whereas the Greens are not. There would be many other areas where they would not be a natural trio in government together.
Despite this, it could well happen. The Greens have long been divided between their so-called ‘watermelons’ (green on the outside, red on the inside) and the ‘avocados’ (green all the way through). At the moment, the green Greens are in the ascendant and as long as they can extract what they want on their core environmental priorities from a coalition then they would be ready to enter an administration with the CDU/CSU and the FDP, even though the SPD are closer to them ideologically. As a ‘dress rehearsal’ for what may occur in Berlin, such a Cabinet has been formed in the region of Schleswig-Holstein after an election there in May led to the previous SPD-led coalition losing office.
Why would this matter to Mrs May and the UK Government?
Either the Wasp outcome or the Jamaica option would be a huge bonus for the Government here. The FDP, the party closest to the German business community, is by far the most sympathetic to securing a soft Brexit outcome that does the least damage to Anglo-German trading relations. The Greens are very pro-EU but not inclined to pick a fight with the UK either. They would largely defer to the FDP’s instincts on the issue in return for concessions in the policy areas they truly care about. It may, therefore, be that 24 September turns out to be at least as important to Brexit as 8 June.
Tim Hames,
Director General, BVCA