THE SHEPHERD LOSING HIS SHEEP
Andrew Gimson says the reason for the
German crisis is that politicians, as well as voters, are cushioned by welfare
Berlin THE atmosphere in Bonn grows more hys- terical by the day. More than a regime, a whole system of government is collapsing, and those at the heart of events have as lit- tle notion of what is going on as soldiers staggering across a smoke-covered battle- field.
East Germany fell in 1989, long after most experts had forgotten it was unsus- tainable. West Germany sailed tri- umphantly forwards, unchanged in all essentials, though paying a vast amount of money to the East Germans to try to per- suade them to stay where they were. In 1991 the political class in Bonn voted by a narrow margin to move to Berlin, but they have put off the evil day of doing so until 1999 at the earliest, and have meanwhile forgotten — if they ever realised — that a revolution awaits them too.
The West German consensus has become unsustainable. It lasted 20 years longer than the post-war British consensus, because it was based on firmer economic foundations. In the late 1940s Ludwig Erhard founded a strong currency, abol- ished rationing and price controls, and set the Germans (including 12 million hungry exiles from the east) free to create their economic miracle — about which, as he said, there was nothing in the slightest bit miraculous.
The story of the West German people since those days is the familiar tale of the craving for absolute security leading to a welfare state so costly and all-embracing that it reduces the people — or a sizable Proportion of them — to a condition of degrading passivity. But the condition of the country's political elite is even worse. Its personal version of the welfare state is astoundingly lavish, an object of envy and mockery to the rest of the Germans, who know that most of their MPs would other- wise have had no better hope than to rise to a lowly level in the civil service.
This is not just an economic problem, though it saps Germany's economic vitali- ty. The most severe danger is that it has Produced a race of politicians with no more capacity for independent thought than a flock of sheep. They must all move together or they will not move at all. That is one of the things that makes Bonn such an outstandingly boring place. Even if someone has an original thought, he dare not express it for fear of being ostracised by the rest of the flock.
Above them stands the great shepherd, Chancellor Helmut Kohl. His career goes back to the very start of the new era in Germany. He has been a member of the Christian Democratic Union for over half a century, since December 1946, its leader for nearly a quarter of a century, since June 1973, and Chancellor for over 14 years, since October 1982. He is the virtu- oso of West German politics, the man who can play the system better than anyone ever has, a political opportunist with a penetrating instinct for power. In the autumn of 1989 he saw quicker than almost everyone that reunification was there for the taking, and took it.
But he is a supremely gifted operator, not a thinker, and even more than most leaders he discourages thought in his vicinity. The Chancellor's office is stuffed with very able men, but they are not allowed to think — much less speak — about any subject barred by their master. Their brainpower is directed at technical tasks, often of great difficulty, rather than at considering whether those tasks are worth performing, or even possible. At the very centre of power in Bonn, there is often an eerie silence, hard to distinguish from a mental vacuum. Not that Mr Kohl, though the dominant figure, possesses absolute power. He is obliged to satisfy different interest groups, and he does it by a process of seemingly interminable talks behind closed doors, where compromise is only reached after the weapon of boredom has been ruthlessly deployed to wear the different parties down. Money and time are the two other great lubricants of this system: agreement is always easier to reach if you can pay the other side to give ground, and postpone the remaining sticking-points until yet another round of talks.
But now money and time are running Out, and Bonn has at last become interest- ing. The West German social contract — a continually rising standard of living for the people, who in return allowed an elite of technocrats to run the show — was already showing signs of strain in the 1980s, and is buckling in the 1990s under the extra cost of extending the welfare state to 18 million East Germans.
And Mr Kohl, inadvisedly, has said that the German budget deficit must be under 3 per cent this year, to allow membership of the single currency. That target will almost certainly not be met, and attempt- ing to reach it with the help of the Bundes- bank's gold has inflicted immense damage on the government's credibility. The trou- ble with all this is that it is not merely a technical problem, which Mr Kohl can send his minions away to solve. It is a question of whether the people will make economic sacrifices for the sake of a policy — trading in the mark for the euro — which fills them with deep abhorrence.
The Germans were prepared, though reluctantly, to make sacrifices for German monetary union. They are not prepared to do so for European monetary union, and that is why Chancellor Kohl's European policy is built on sand. The people — whose wishes in this question are much more accurately reflected by the Bundes- bank than by Bonn — will not tolerate it. The Bonn sheep are starting to be worried by a very rough democratic dog. They are understandably panic-stricken.
Andrew Gimson is the Daily Telegraph's German correspondent.
'I've lost my reason for living. Have you seen it anywhere?'
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