Jacob Christensen

It used to be so easy: Germany (East) had one party, Germany (West) had three. Forming a government in the GDR was an open-and-shut case, and in any event irrelevant, because what mattered was the Party. Forming a government in the FRG was a bit more complicated because either the CDU or the SPD had to convince the FDP to join the government. Actually, it was a bit more complicated on many levels, especially before 1960, but this was the established picture of West German politics.

Then came the Green Party and then unification and with it the PDS, and finally Die Linke. And now it’s almost like Denmark in the 1970s – even though the SPD looks more like the Danish Conservatives in that era.

The latest state elections make for some interesting bargaining.

Saxony is fairly straightforward: CDU and FDP have a majority and will form a government. If it wasn’t for the brown element and the fact that SPD struggles to get past 10% of the vote, a careless observer could almost mistake Saxony for a West German state. (A turn-out of 52% suggests that many voters expected the outcome and didn’t bother to go to the polling stations).

Saarland is trickier. The presence of Oskar Lafontaine¹ sure livened up proceedings as turn-out rose from 55,5 to 67,6%. Here three coalitions are numerically and ideologically possible: SPD-Linke-Grüne, CDU-FDP-Grüne or CDU-SPD. Things are made a little easier by the fact that SPD is still marginally larger than Die Linke (24,5 vs. 21.3%) and would be able to claim the position of state prime minister in a Red-Red-Green coalition. On the other hand, the presence of Oskar Lafontaine who is not exactly loved in the SPD is a complicating matter, but to a certain degree Die Grünen hold a lot of leverage in negotiations.

And then there’s Thüringen which can only be described as a nice mess. The good news is that turn-out was up slightly (from 53,8 to 56,2%) but the election did not return any likely coalition. CDU and FDP only hold 37 of 88 seats, SPD and Grüne 24. CDU-FDP-Grüne makes 43, SPD-Grüne-FDP 31. So, it is either CDU-SPD (48 seats), SPD-Linke (45 seats) or possibly SPD-Linke-Grüne (51 seats – which considering the propensity of MdLs to defect may be a very good idea to consider).

But wait: There is more! Not only does the SPD have to consider the prospect of entering a coalition with Die Linke – it has been done in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin and even a Danish-style tolerated minority government saw the light of day in Sachsen-Anhalt in the 1990s. There are two additional problems: Die Linke is larger than SPD in Thüringen (27,7 vs. 19%) and there is a controversy over Die Linke’s leading candidate, Bodo Ramelow, who should be the leader of a left-wing coalition according to normal expectations. (The question is if SPD is using the story about German intelligence services spying on Ramelow in order to strenghten their position in negotiations or if the considerations are legitimate). But effectively, the SPD has the choice between being the junior partner in a coalition with CDU or with Die Linke and Die Grünen.

Maybe everybody will be stalling negotiations and wait for the result of the federal election in a couple of weeks’ time.

Update: In Die Zeit, Andreas Wüst asks if making a Green politician (presumably Astrid Rothe-Beinlich) state prime minister couldn’t be a way out of deadlock. I think a similar model where the state PM did not come from the largest party has been tried a couple of times back in the early years of the FRG (Niedersachsen and one of the Länder which merged into Baden-Württemberg)

1. From listening to podcasts I’ve learnt that Lafontaine is pronounced ‘lafontäne, not lafon’täne despite Wikipedia’s assurances to the opposite [↩]

Selective benefits, originally uploaded by jacobchristensen.

I was intrigued by this poster. 3F only promises you an iPod Nano for joining their unemployment fund. But maybe an iPhone (plus subscription) would be too flashy?

Following last week’s announcement of a common Social Democratic-Socialist tax plan and the intention of both parties to form a government after the next election (provided of course that they win a majority with the Red-Green Alliance and Social Liberals), I couldn’t resist playing a game of ministerial chairs.

Now, to political scientists persons are less important than portfolios, so the real issue here is: Provided that S and SF form a government (I assume that the Social Liberals decide to stay out), how would the distribution of portfolios look like?

Given that we do not have any Danish examples and that red-red governments are pretty rare at a national level (Norway is the only really good case, while Gerhard Schröder’s Red-Green governments only partially fit the bill), this is not as easy as one might think. The only thing we can be certain of is that if the present balance of strength holds (25% of the vote to S, 19% to SF), then S should hold 11 or 12 portfolios and SF 8 or 9 in a government with 20 ministers. Also, S as the largest party will take the prime minister’s office.

But as a true dare-devil, I will make a guess:

S will almost certainly take employment/labour, defence and justice, while SF will go for economic planning, environment and at least one of the education portfolios. (If SF takes education, then S takes science or vice versa).

If S takes the foreign ministry, then SF will get development.

If environment is a separate portfolio, then S will take energy and likely transport.

Social affairs and health will be split, with local government attached to either of the portfolios.

SF will need one serious economic ministry, but it could be finance, taxes or possibly business. S will take the two remaining.

Culture and ecclesiastics could go to SF, integration to S.

The 64.000$ question is: Will Villy Søvndal take a separate portfolio (like Bendt Bendtsen and Lene Espersen) or will he have learnt from their difficulties and stick to economic planning and general coordination? My advice would probably be to take economics and leave the dirty business to somebody else. He may want to take Kristin Halvorsen’s advice before deciding.

Oh, and what about Ole Sohn? My guess is that he is too useful to Søvndal in the parliamentary arena, so I can imagine him staying as chairman of the group.

PS: Here is Jens Ringberg’s attempt at forming a S-SF government.

The combined forces of Flashblock and Adblock (?) got the better of the new homepage of the Danish Social Democrats and the Socialists:

It is always a bit annoying when somebody else comes up with a good formulation in a topic I find particularly interesting. Like: Is there a centre in the Danish party system and if so what defines it? So Kristian Madsen annoys be a bit tonight.

Madsen asks an important question: Can a party choose to be at the centre or does it occupy the centre because other parties decide that it is an essential partner? Ask the Social Liberals and they will say that centrism is a part of the party’s identity, ask anybody else and the answer may be slightly different. The difference is of course a question of what level of analysis “centre” or “centrism” refers to.

But Madsen is right: The main reason why the Social Liberals have been able to hold a central position in Danish politics is that other parties generally have preferred cooperating with the party to bypassing it parliamentary or trying to snatch its voters – if only because RV used to be a major second preference party.

These days things are more complicated. Aided by the Danish People’s Party, the Liberals and the Conservatives managed to snatch the parliamentary majority from under the Social Liberals’ nose in 2001. Even worse: The three parties did so by appealing to voters (skilled and unskilled workers) who would not – no: never – vote for the Social Liberals in an election. Conversely, the Social Democrats and the Socialists have realised that winning the parliamentary majority is a question of pulling voters directly from DF and the Liberals, not of making a parliamentary coalition with RV possible.

RV faces a further problem: These days the party shares its voter base with the Social Democrats and SF which means that if it tries to block or defect from a left-wing alliance, disgruntled voters have only one way to go. On the one hand, the party is likely to be necessary for the S-SF alliance in order for the left to win a majority, on the other hand there are a number of disagreements in economic and immigration policy which can make coalition negotiations blow up.

So, are S and SF repeating Poul Sørensen and Erik Eriksen’s old strategy from the 1950s and 1960s – trying to blast RV into oblivion – or do they have a plan B (sorry…) in case of a left-wing win in the next general election?

(If you have institutional access to Jstor, you might find Hans Daalder’s article from – euh – 1983 a fascinating read)

Hey, this was post #2500!

FC Copenhagen crashes to Cypriot team and misses group play in Champions League.

All those who didn’t see it coming, please raise your hands.

Bad photoshop, baaad photoshop.

Considering that Microsoft has a more than reasonable reputation with regard to diversity, the blunder is pretty amazing.

I realised that the Autumn semester will be the first since 1995 where I do not have classes. Weird. But then I have deadlines on two major chapters and I also need to turn a conference paper into something like an article.

All in all something like 125 pages of empirical studies. Plus a bit of free-lance work.

Unless you happen to be the Danish finance minister who has to present the budget proposal for 2010. One problem is that fiscal policy has been too lenient during the boom years according to the government’s own economic advisors. Add the risk of creating a massive public debt during the crisis and … well…

Indications are that the relations between the government and the opposition parties (?) are strained. To say the least.

Ingrid Henriksen and Niels Kærgaard on the 1930s and the present crisis (in Danish).

Harold Macmillan is rumoured to have answered a question about what causes governments to get blown off course with “events“. Maybe the Danish Conservatives will take some solace from this as one sentence (or rather two sentences, to be precise) in the party’s paper on integration policy blasted everything else the party tried to present into oblivion and opened a very fascinating brawl between Conservatives, Liberals and the Danish People’s Party.

The sentences (part of the section “countering religious pressure”) were these:

Vi vil arbejde for et forbud imod burkaer. Familierne skal give pigerne og kvinderne frihed til selv at bestemme. Det skal også stå klart for familien, hvilke signaler en burka sender til det omgivne (sic!) samfund.

Or in English:

We want to work for a prohibition on burqas. Families must give girls and women the freedom to decide for themselves. It must also be made clear for families what signals a burqa sends to the surrounding society.

So, what went wrong here?

The first point is that the burqa ban was only a minor part of the party’s initiative.¹ If you bother to check the published paper, you will find a lot of proposals covering (sorry!) education policy, labour market policy and some parts of civil law. An immediate impression is that some proposals are very interesting (how do we make certain types of careers interesting for people with an immigrant background) while others are politically uncontroversial but technically complicated (housing) – and then there was the minefield of religion. So, somehow the party and its spokesman on integration policy Naser Khader (ex-Social Liberal, ex-New Alliance, ex-Liberal Alliance) failed to communicate exactly what place the proposal had in the general policy and exactly what the party meant by “work for a prohibition”.

It was also obvious that the party leadership hadn’t made sure that the government would be able to react to the proposal. The integration minister is a Liberal, in case anybody should have forgotten. Finally, nobody among the Conservatives apparently remembered the brouhaha surrounding last year’s headscarf brawl which led to the adoption of a law banning judges from wearing “religious symbols”. Anything touching on Islam and Danish values was and is bound to trigger the Danish People’s Party – and sure enough: The party reacted by opening a chicken game and calling the Conservatives’ bluff on the burqa. Note by the way, that DF writes that it wants “a ban on religious dressing up (udklædning) in the public sector” in its press release. Needless to say, DF concentrates on bans and punishments as the instruments of integration policy, deliberately ignoring the softer proposals and instruments.

Actually, things took a nasty turn when the party leader and deputy prime minister Lene Espersen had to formally disown the proposal – if DF presents a bill banning the wearing of burqas and niqabs in public spaces, the government will vote against it – while a Conservative MP announced her opposition to the proposal. Laurel and Hardy couldn’t have made a finer mess.

But what about the issue? The paper places the burqa/niqab ban in the context of family policy and the underlying assumption seems to be that families (men) pressure women into wearing burqas or niqabs. This may be the wrong approach in this case (forced marriages is another matter – we have sufficient examples of “honour killings” to prove that families with a Middle Eastern or Pakistani background can be very oppressive): We should remember that the Arab world and to some extent Pakistan during the last century has gone through a transition from traditional societies via nationalism (failed)² and socialism (failed) to some kind of Islamist revival, so Islamism (and the corresponding dress) is a much a political as a religious or social phenomenon. It is perfectly possible that women who adopt a more or less extreme form of “Islamic” dress do this as a conscious political and religious statement. In Western Europe women used to be more, not less socially conservative than men – it is only in the last forty or so years that European women have turned left. Why should women with a Middle Eastern or Pakistani background be less susceptible to religious influences than their European counterparts? We shouldn’t rule out the role played by peer pressure by groups of (female) friends, either.

It would be reasonable to see the adoption of extreme forms of clothing as an expression of extreme religious or political views, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a legal ban or even direct political intervention is the right instrument to choose. With regard to the legal aspects, I will point to Jacob Mchangana’s blog (in Danish, not sure how it survives the translation in Google Translate or Babelfish). His argument is pretty close to the one, I would make.

By the way: I have met a woman (?) wearing a niqab once. In a supermarket in UmeÃ¥ of all unlikely places. There are a lot of hijab-wearing women in Odense, but I can’t recall seeing anyone completely covered in the central part of Odense or on SDU’s campus. Still, they seem to exist and there was a political fight over the handling of veiled persons with personal bus cards earlier this year.

1. The burqa has been the symbol for extreme Islamic dress but we have been told that the niqab which covers the head and face completely would also be included in such a ban. [↩]
2. Here we may make an exception for Turkey [↩]