Two months after the collapse of
Germany’s ruling coalition in the Bundestag, which problematically left a
minority government in place, Chancellor Olaf Scholtz lost a vote of confidence
on December 16, 2024 394 to 207, with 116 state representatives in the Bundestag
abstaining. The result triggered an early election for February 23, 2024. I
contend that two months is reasonable for a campaign season and that the claim
of catastrophe since the coalition fell apart is overblown due to the
continuing functioning of the E.U. even as one of its states would have a minority
government until the triggered election.
With just over two months being
deemed sufficient time in which to campaign, the hyperextended U.S. federal election
season of more than a year and the specific claim that Kamala Harris didn’t
have enough time to run for U.S. president from the third week of July to the
end of October in 2024. To be sure, it takes longer to fit enough campaign rallies
in during about three-and-a-half months in a union of states that in a state of
a union, though the political need to campaign only in several “battleground”
states mitigates the difference. Even so, that Germany is a large state in the
E.U. and has territory equivalent to Montana and population equivalent to the
15 Midwestern states in the U.S. may mean that something like six months, well
short of a year, is enough of a campaign season for U.S. presidential
candidates.
Another way in which Germany
being a state in the E.U. impacts the significance of the fall of the SDP-led
coalition government is that the E.U. federal level was still functioning; all
was not lost in terms of functioning government even on the state’s territory,
for in a federal system, two governments have authority to govern in a given
territory. Roughly a month before the vote, Axel Klausmeier, director of the
Berlin Wall Foundation, had spoken at Harvard. He said that the collapse of the
coalition in Germany had come at a particularly bad time, as Russia’s President
Putin was pushing his military to make further inroads in the invasion of
Ukraine. To have a paralyzed Bundestag with an invasion occurring nearby was something
that Klausmeier believed Germany could not afford. However, he completely
ignored the fact that the E.U. was supplying the Ukrainian government with more
military aid, including equipment, than the U.S. was doing at the time. Therefore,
the collapse of the government of the E.U. state of Germany did not evince a
catastrophe concerning pushing Putin back militarily; the E.U. was still fully
functional and Van der Leyen’s administration was lazar-set on pushing Putin’s
army off Ukrainian territory. The “two systems of government” feature of
federalism means that citizens are not completely dependent on either of those
two systems—state or federal—so the E.U. could pick up the slack should the
conservative party refuse to join with the SPD to pass legislation during the
period before the state election in February, 2025.
Therefore, we can contest as
exaggerated the following claim by the BBC: “Given Germany’s stalled economy
and the global crises facing the West, staggering on until the [originally]
scheduled election date of September 2025 [instead of the two-month trigger due
to the no-confidence vote in December of 2024] risked being seen as irresponsible
by the [state’s] electorate.”[1]
I submit that the downside of both the coalition’s collapse and the two-month
campaign season following the no-confidence vote is mitigated by the fact that
the E.U. was still functioning unimpaired. For even with the two official
direct-access institutions for state governments at the federal level—in the
European Council and the Council of the E.U.—that the vast majority of state
governments were fully functional means that even those two federal institutions
could continue to function.
Indeed, recognition that Germany was
at the time a semi-sovereign state in a semi-sovereign union would have the
virtue of calming nervous Germans who thought catastrophe was just around the
corner, as if the E.U. would allow Putin to invade Germany during its two
months between majority governments and that the E.U. without a strong German
state government would be paralyzed or even fall apart.
1. Damien McGuinness, “German
Chancellor Olaf Scholz Loses Confidence Vote,” BBC.com, December 16, 2024.
