THE CURSE OF TONY
The German Chancellor's desire to follow Mr Blair's Third Way has led to his recent electoral defeats, says Andrew Gimson
Berlin WHEN I hear a man talk of Sound Finance, I know him for an enemy of the people. Earlier this century a Hyde Park orator used this jibe against a heckler, but the same line of thought can be found today among German Social Democrats. When they hear one of their number talk of New Labour, they know him for an enemy of the people. Chancellor Gerhard SchrOder is reckoned by the bulk of his own activists to have suffered a string of crushing electoral defeats in recent weeks because of his mistaken desire to follow the path blazed by Tony Blair — a path said to lead back to a capitalist hell in which the welfare state has been abolished and millions of people are reduced to poverty, while a small class of grotesquely rich entrepreneurs preside over dark satanic mills or Internet companies.
Herr Schroder did himself great harm with his own comrades by allowing his name to be placed alongside Mr Blair's on the title page of 'Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mine', the manifesto launched by the two leaders only a few days before they were defeated in the European elections. The French socialists took the huff not only because this docu- ment pours scorn on their own kind of social democracy, but also because they rightly saw its publication as an attempt by the British to supplant them as Germany's closest ally. But the anger felt in Paris was as nothing to the reaction with which the German Social Democrats reacted.
If you a somnolent, stick-in-the-mud Social Democrat, who reckons most of the big questions were settled at Bad Godes- berg in 1959, the manifesto poses a direct and merciless threat. It insists that 'social conscience cannot be measured by the level of public expenditure', wants a wel- fare system that acts as 'a springboard to personal responsibility', says 'the taxation of hard work and enterprise should be reduced', calls for 'a society that celebrates successful entrepreneurs just as it does artists and footballers' and, to add insult to injury, informs us that 'sound public finance should be a badge of pride for social democrats'. These remarks may be old hat in New Labour's Britain, but hardly anyone says this sort of thing in Germany, let alone practises it. In his domestic policy Helmut Kohl spent 16 years being more social democratic than the Social Democrats; for the second half of that period he bought the East Germans' support with such huge quantities of money that the national debt doubled: a service possibly to German reunification, but a debauching of his party's intellectual inheritance from Lud- wig Erhard. Nor have the Social Democrats conducted sound public finan- ces within living memory and they fear that anyone who makes the attempt now will lose the succeeding general election.
Herr SchrOder is nevertheless making the attempt. Never mind why he wants to achieve a balanced budget: in my opinion it is because the European Central Bank told him to, but even my closest friends laugh when I say that, as at a Eurosceptic who is parodying himself. So let us just agree that Herr Schroder has, for some reason, set himself a target which in Ger- man terms is highly ambitious, and which he cannot now abandon without destroying his credibility.
It is conceivable that his policy of a bal- anced budget by 2006 will come good for him, and he will get the credit for doing what everyone else knew must be done but nobody else dared. He can rely on a large measure of support from the opposition Christian Democrats, who do not want to start dealing from scratch with the budget problem if they return to power at the gen- eral election in 2002. But he has a severe problem with the German people, whom he neglected to warn of the public spend- ing cuts he is now implementing, and an even more severe problem with his own party.
The Social Democrats came to power a year ago under a double leadership: Herr Schroder called for modernisation while Oskar Lafontaine, party chairman as well as finance minister, stood for social justice.
In March Herr Lafontaine found the strain had become too great, resigned from both offices and went home to write a vengeful book which is about to appear. Herr SchrOder succeeded him as party chairman, but has failed to persuade his comrades that he, too, is a warm-hearted defender of social justice instead of a cold-blooded pro- business Blairite.
The German Social Democrats do not actually know very much about Mr Blair.
As one of them said to me, 'Most of my party know much more about the Queen Mother than about Tony Blair. They have a completely wrong judgment about British politicians, dividing them into two cate- gories, homosexuals and heterosexuals, with the homosexuals sometimes having to resign very quickly. They think Peter Man- delson is the head of the homosexual Mafia that has taken over the Labour party and undermined it.'
Such frivolity aside, most of the German Social Democrats regard the Schroder- Blair paper, which Herr SchrOder probably did not read before it came out, as an intol- erably 'neo-liberal' document. 'Neo-liberal' is one of the rudest terms in the German Political vocabulary — it means abandon- ing the poor to market forces — and Herr SchrOder's small band of defenders have been unable to convey that the paper calls for 'a market economy, not a market soci- ety'.
Professor Hans Joas of the Free Universi- ty in Berlin has written one of the most lucid defences of the manifesto, which he says has had a disastrously distorted reception in Germany because of the inability to under- stand the Anglo-Saxon political debate, and especially the recent work on communitari- anism done in the United States, from which stems the paper's insistence on 'the individual's responsibility to his or her fami- ly, neighbourhood and society'. Prof. Joas traces the reluctance to accept this idea of responsibility back to the student revolt of 1968, a defining event in post-war Germany and one that was supposed to lead to more democracy, but which instead, he says, `in unfortunate alliance with currents of cultur- al permissiveness' very often ended in 'organised irresponsibility'.
Herr SchrOder's own party is full of Sixty-eighters. Most of them have spent lives of organised irresponsibility and very few of them intend to grow up now.
Andrew Gimson is the Daily Telegraph's Berlin correspondent.
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