Brett Neely

I haven't seen this one around Berlin, but I've seen plenty like it. Image by skep via Flickr

So Germany had an election. You might have heard. The words “boring” and “uninspiring” were overused. The Social Democrats got thrashed, there’s four more years of Angie and Germany’s new foreign minister is a free-marketeer named Guido. What was missing from the analysis was the observation that parties catering to affluent, well-educated, socially-liberal voters collared nearly 30 percent of the vote. The yuppie block in German politics has gotten some electoral clout. Where can this possibly lead? State-subsidized lattes?

First off, Guido Westerewelle’s Free Democratic Party. They’ve always been the odd one out in German party politics but under Westerwelle, they’ve pushed their low tax-loving, environmentally friendly (though they’re for nuclear power), vaguely pacifistic message toward younger voters (Westerwelle also unsuccessfully tried to rebrand the FDP as the ‘fun’ party a few years ago…which went down as well as you can imagine). While the big parties are hemorrhaging members, the FDP has been picking up new ones (an important source of funding in Germany as campaign contributions play a smaller role than in the US). The ideal new FDP member is a 30-something urban dweller who makes well over the median income, is highly educated and owns their own small, vaguely creative business. The FDP brought in a record 15 percent of the vote last night.

Then there’s the Greens. While they may still have a hairshirt brigade on hand, plenty of the Greens’ members and supporters mostly differ from the FDP yuppie set in that they work at non-profits or vaguely intellectual enterprises rather than own businesses. My favorite quote from the Local’s blog last night by the excellent Ben Knight who as at the CDU mothership captures the difference:

“The Greens are going to have to think hard about who they are. Sooner or later, they are going to admit they are basically the same as the FDP. I’m from Cologne, you see them all the time, they drive around in Porsches and buy €2 Eco-bread.”

Though the Greens ran a totally lame campaign and saw their party’s most charismatic and promising member lose his Bundestag seat, they still also managed a record-breaking share of the voting, getting 10 percent.

Last, there’s the brand new and rapidly-growing Pirate Party. I met their Swedish counterparts a few months ago and while I may be stretching the yuppie thing slightly, the Pirates also bring up a (mostly male) young, well-educated and presumably somewhat affluent demographic. They’re single-mindedly focused on online freedom in the same way that the Greens were about the environment in the 80s. But you can only be that concentrated on a single-issue if you’re not so worried about unemployment or other issues. Though they’ve been around for just a few months, they pulled in two percent of the national vote, which is crazy by German standards. By comparison, the neo-Nazi NPD, which has been around much, much longer, got 1.5 percent…Germany has more nerds than Nazis.

So how does a sizable yuppie block bend the political order? I’m not sure because though yuppies may share affluence and education, there are plenty of ways in which they differ. It probably means less support for old-line blue collar jobs. It’s hard for me to imagine an FDP/Green/Pirate government giving two squats about the plight of auto workers. All three parties are heavily focused on privacy issues. Still, it’s fascinating to see three yuppie-friendly parties doing well because Germany’s population is aging fast and I would have thought that the parties would be courting older voters instead. But since party identification used to happen early in Germany and last for life, the newer and smaller parties figure there’s no sense hunting Germany’s retirement homes for voters.

(As a parenthetical aside, there actually are plenty of yuppie types inside the big parties, too. But both the CDU/CSU and the SPD have been losing supporters in droves over the past decade. The SPD had over 40 percent of the vote in 1998, now it’s 23 percent. Similar, but less dramatic story with the CDU/CSU.)