Meet Martin Schulz, the Europhile “populist” shaking up Germany’s elections
Constanze Stelzenmüller is Robert Bosch senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a contributing writer for The Post.
They
say we Germans are predictable and boring. Yet, seven months ahead of
the Sept. 24 national elections, we are rubbing our eyes as a bearded
and bespectacled former bookseller without a high-school diploma appears
to have a serious chance at wresting Germany’s top political office
from Chancellor Angela Merkel — hailed by some as the leader of the free world and the last bastion of the liberal international order.
What
with the Trump White House expressing — how do we put this politely? —
reservations about the whole NATO and E.U. thing (not to mention Germany
itself), plus expected Russian interference in
our vote, we Germans had honestly felt we were not missing out on
political titillation. But here we are with an election that is actually
becoming a choice. It’s enough to make one reach thoughtfully for a
beer.
Martin Schulz,
the former European Parliament president who was nominated as the
Social Democratic (SPD) candidate for chancellor in late January, has
been enjoying a remarkable run in the polls ever since. His party, which
had been languishing in poll Siberia around 20 percent for many months,
shot up by more than 10 percentage points, landing ahead of Merkel’s
Christian Democrats in three voter surveys for the first time in a decade. According to the latest monthly Deutschlandtrendpoll, if the election were held today, Schulz would win with 50 percent of the vote as opposed to Merkel’s 34 percent.
So
who is the man who is generating all this euphoria? Unlike the last
Social Democrat in the Chancellery, Gerhard Schroeder, with his fondness
for Brioni suits and Cuban cigars, or the wine and chess aficionado
Peer Steinbrück, the grizzled and rumpled 61-year-old Schulz looks
exactly like what he is: a classic Social Democrat, a throwback to the
days when the SPD was a working-class party led by people who knew what
manual labor was — and routinely got between 30 percent and 40 percent
of the popular vote.
The
Schulz story is one likely to appeal to many ordinary Germans. Born in a
village on the westernmost border of Germany, just a milk run from both
Belgium and the Netherlands, he has relatives in all three countries —
which makes him a natural European. His father was a local policeman and
a Social Democrat. After a professional soccer career was foiled by an
injury, he became an alcoholic, but managed to become sober and turn his
life around. He joined the SPD youth organization at 19 and worked his
way up the ladder in local politics. He is a rousing speaker and a
sincerely passionate Europhile; the liberal daily Süddeutsche Zeitung recently called him
a “politically correct populist.” One of his campaign slogans — one not
likely to endear him to the White House — is MEGA, or Make Europe Great
Again. Since his nomination, the SPD has acquired an unprecedented
6,000 new members. “The Schulz” has become a viral Twitter meme.
All
this is like Viagra to a SPD badly demoralized by a decade of stinging
election defeats, polls in free fall and a hemorrhaging membership.
Worse, as the junior partner to the CDU in two grand coalitions
(2005-2009 and 2013-now), the SPD watched helplessly as Merkel
modernized her party and triangulated it towards the middle with
policies that appealed to broad swathes of the left as well: scrapping
nuclear power, introducing the minimum wage and more equal rights for
gays, and eliminating conscription.
Killjoys
are noting that Merkel’s last SPD opponent, Steinbrück, enjoyed
similarly high popular support when he was nominated in 2012. He is now a
former politician. In fact, Merkel’s extraordinary quarter-century
trajectory from being an unknown East German scientist in 1989 to
three-term chancellor of a unified Germany is littered with the
carcasses of dozens of competitors, many of them seasoned party
operators. The only office ever held by Schulz in Germany was that of
councilor and then mayor of the town of Würselen (pop. 38.962), a job he left in 1994 to become a member of the European Parliament.
Whether
Schulz can break the curse of the SPD and become a genuine danger to
Merkel’s bid for a fourth term hinges on the answer to one simple
question: Do Germans want a choice — or actual change?
Both Schulz and his party are clearly betting on the latter. Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel challenged Germany’s NATO commitment to
spend 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense at the Munich
Security Conference. Schulz gave a speech Sunday in the East German town
of Leipzig (birthplace of social democracy in 1863) in which he
reiterated his criticism of the Agenda 2010 labor market and welfare reforms—which have enabled German growth, but also made the labor market more fragile.
It
is an irony lost on no one in Germany that Merkel, who had already been
taking a much more aggressive line on law and order, is now also
fiercely defending Agenda 2010 — which was implemented by Schroeder and
ultimately caused his party to break faith with him.
Seven
months in politics is a long time. But one thing is clear: Germans are
going to see a genuine fight for their votes this time, and they like
it. An extra bonus: Support for the right-wing Alternative for Germany/AfD has been nearly halved to 8 percent.
To be continued. And now for that beer...