Germany: Feeling unwelle

The Economist

NORMALLY, it takes a scandal to cause a political humbling as abrupt as the one that has befallen Guido Westerwelle. In September 2009 he led his Free Democratic Party (FDP) to its best-ever result, 14.6% of the vote, in Germany’s federal elections. The party re-entered government, after 11 years in opposition, as a cocky junior partner to Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Mr Westerwelle became foreign minister and Mrs Merkel’s deputy as vice-chancellor.

Things look far bleaker today. The FDP’s support in polls has plunged below 5%, the level needed to win seats in the Bundestag (see chart). Mr Westerwelle is Germany’s least-loved politician. He is a “millstone” around the party’s neck, laments the top FDP candidate in Rhineland-Palatinate, one of seven German states that will hold elections in 2011. Pressure is building on Mr Westerwelle to quit, as party leader if not as foreign minister. At the FDP’s annual “three kings meeting” in Stuttgart on January 6th he will be fighting for his political life.

Mr Westerwelle’s skills as a political battering-ram did not equip him for statesmanship. The FDP was expected to bring a liberal backbone and economic nous to the coalition, correcting the CDU’s leftward drift during its earlier partnership with the Social Democrats. Instead, it presented a caricature of these virtues. Mr Westerwelle demanded tax cuts when Germans were more worried about the budget deficit. He issued strident pronouncements on the welfare state (it puts Germany in peril of “late Roman decadence,” he said) but seemed adrift in the nuanced world of diplomacy. Americans’ unflattering verdict was WikiLeaked, as was the news that an FDP mole had kept them abreast of coalition negotiations with the CDU. Mr Westerwelle’s handling of that affair did not impress the party.

The FDP’s travails are not an immediate threat to the coalition. Up to a point, Mrs Merkel may welcome them: the FDP’s 2009 triumph came largely at the CDU’s expense. But she worries about what her coalition partner may do to avoid parliamentary extinction. “Stronger parties are readier to make compromises,” said the CDU’s general secretary, Hermann Gröhe.

Dumping Mr Westerwelle looks like a way out but may not be. Credible successors are few. Rainer Brüderle, the 65-year-old economy minister, earned kudos for defending liberal principles (by opposing a rescue of carmaker Opel, for example). But his election would hardly look like rejuvenation. Christian Lindner, the clever general secretary, is young for the top job and does not look ready to commit parricide. The top national leaders still back Mr Westerwelle. He has “shaped the party so closely around himself that it has an identity problem,” says Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University.

Mr Westerwelle hopes to rehabilitate himself. He led Germany’s successful campaign to win a seat on the UN Security Council, earning praise for his ministerial work, and has taken the lead in calling for the withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan beginning in 2011. A new party programme, due in 2012, may give supporters a firmer sense of what the FDP stands for. “I’m not the sort who leaves the deck in a storm,” Mr Westerwelle has declared. He is up for re-election as party chairman in May. By then four state elections will have taken place. If they are disastrous for the FDP, he could be tossed overboard.