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Christian Democrats party leader Angela
Angela Merkel 's popularity could count for more than the party factor in the German elections. Photograph: Oliver Lang/AFP/Getty Images
Angela Merkel 's popularity could count for more than the party factor in the German elections. Photograph: Oliver Lang/AFP/Getty Images

German general election 2013: an open race in an open field

This article is more than 11 years old
Angela Merkel may well retain her crown – but there are new challengers in a crowded, complex political system

If Angela Merkel wins next year's elections, she will become Germany's second-longest-serving postwar chancellor after Helmut Kohl – and be heading towards becoming Europe's longest-serving female head of government, eclipsing Margaret Thatcher.

Such a political triumph is not about to get any easier. Merkel could yet fall foul of the euroszone turmoil. And then there is also the fact that Germany's political landscape has become more fragmented than at any time since the end of the second world war.

"Germany is not becoming ungovernable, but it's definitely becoming harder to form governments," said Hans Kundnani, a Germany analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Five to six parties have been competing for seats in the Bundestag since East and West Germany were reunited in 1990, including the Christian Democrats; their Bavarian sister party, the CSU; the pro-business FDP; the Greens; and the PDS or Party of Democratic Socialism – later to become Die Linke, (the Left). Next year, a new force will try to join the mix, an upstart party called the Pirates, which has made striking gains in four state elections so far.

The Freie Wähler, (free voters), a campaign group of Eurosceptic, anti-bailout campaigners is also trying to establish itself and while it has yet to enjoy the sort of poll successes of the Pirates, it is being tipped as a future player on the political scene, particularly if anti-European sentiment increases.

"There is a very considerable potential for dissatisfaction in Germany right now," said Gunnar Beck, a German reader in EU law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas), University of London.

The quiet revolution in German politics is being prepared in a small office space in Berlin's Mitte district, where the Pirates' head, Bernd Schlömer, a criminologist by training, sits at a table surrounded by crates of Club-Mate energy drinks and shelves of computer equipment.

"There is a mood change taking place in Germany," he said. "The other parties are suffering from the fact that they are not seen as innovative forces and we're benefiting from that."

Germans, he said, want to be "far more involved" in the decision-making process. Though he admitted the difficulty faced by his party, whose main campaign issue is to push for more internet freedom, of "trying to develop a political style from nothing".

He said it is unfair to criticise the party for its vague stance on major issues. It is developing them, he said, arguing that other more established parties are often no clearer.

"We have no answers to the euro crisis, but neither do the other parties."

Yet just as his party is benefiting from the crisis drawing in an anti-establishment crowd, so the crisis should be seen as an opportunity.

"We should use the crisis to redefine Europe, to redefine Germany's political landscape. This crisis is a chance," he said, adding something you do not expect to hear from the mouth of a politician. "My party's greatest ambition would be to become obsolete because everyone else copied us."

The question is whether the party will be strong enough to change the system or whether, as many analysts rather suspect, it will become subsumed by it.

"The more the Pirates are involved in the parliamentary process, the more they'll have to play within the rules," said Gerd Languth, professor of political science at the University of Bonn. "It cannot be ruled out that they'll enter the Bundestag, but there's still quite a lot of doubt."

While the three-party traffic-light coalition (Greens, Liberals, SPD) is a possibility, or even a minority government, most experts predict a return to the grand coalition between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats last seen in 2005. While at the outset it can seem unwieldy, general consensus seems to be that it can work more effectively in challenging times.

While branding German voters highly traditionalist, and preferring to vote for a party rather than a personality, Languth, said that Merkel's own personality ratings had been so consistently high that "it's hard to imagine that the Merkel factor won't play a role" in the election outcome.

He said there was no sign that Germany was in danger of becoming ungovernable. "Because Germany's system is representative that means that six or more parties can still get into the Bundestag, which in theory might lead to a lack of stability, but it is also Germany's democratic advantage, above, say, Great Britain."

The German system is also supported by the high degree to which Germans desire political consensus, he added. "It's amazing how consensus-oriented the Germans are, in part due to the collective trauma of the 1920s and 30s. Add to that the fact they're also overwhelmingly pro-European and that simply increases the sense of consensus, which say, is greater than the will to topple Merkel."

Many are fearful though of that consensus and its potentially stultifying consequences. The leftwing political commentator Jakob Augstein has said a Grand Coalition between the CDU and SPD would cause a "German paralysis".

"A Grand Coalition is not a symbol of our democracy but of a long and lingering illness ... It would feel like Germans had given up on their political system ... It amounts to a resignation. A silence," he recently commented.

Kundnani said that what's happened in Germany is merely a reflection on what's happened elsewhere. "Politics has become less tribal," he said. In other words, people are no longer voting for the same party for life and your party affiliations no longer determine the job you do.

"The big game-changer was the arrival of Die Linke, as a belated consequence of German unification, which led to the fragmentation of German politics and make it harder to have a two-party coalition," he said. "When the Grand Coalition was formed in 2005 it was the only option left – largely because the Linke had eaten into the SPD vote so much that they could no longer head a government. Many said that there would be no more two-party coalitions, but it seems we're back to that situation."

Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior transatlantic fellow with the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, said she did not believe a Grand Coalition would be damaging to Germany: "Though we know from experience it could be boring and painful, and that boredom and pain will be more or less depending on who the challenger is." Despite their current poor standing in the polls, neither would she exclude, she said, the scenario of a Social Democrat chancellor in the event of an economic downturn.

What makes Germany complicated to govern is the federal parliamentary democracy structure put in place by the allies after the second world war – consisting of the two-chamber legislature, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, plus the constitutional court that in effect polices it – which aimed to make the political landscape as inclusive as possible, said Wolfgang Nowak, director of Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society and a former adviser to the Social Democrat chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

"The German system works on the basis that it's better to have the opposition in parliament than on the street," he said. "Whether that makes sense or not is another question, but what we have is a very complex electoral system which tries to bind all currents into one parliament. The executive in Germany is very, very tightly controlled. Is Germany weakened by that? Yes, of course. But is Britain stronger with a two-party government?"

David McAllister, the CDU prime minister of Lower Saxony, said stability was a relative concept. "If you look at other countries with a proportional representation system, the German political system has been very stable over the last 65 to 70 years. Compare it to Italy, where political parties like the Christian Democrats have completely disappeared, or you look at the Netherlands or Denmark, it's quite clear that Germany has quite a stable system. And I'm not sure we will have a six-party system in the long term – the Linke seem to have reached their peak, and the Pirates? Well, they just have to grow up and start working on their programme if they want to have a chance but in the meantime they've taught us that we've got to explain more about what we're doing at all stages of the political process."

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