Brett Neely

Angela Merkel officially got sworn in today for a second term as Chancellor. Instead of the hapless Frank Walter Steinmeier of the Social Democrats at her side as Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor (as is traditional for the smaller coalition partner), she now has Free Democrat Guido Westerwelle (or, WesterWave as fans of his English skills would like him to be known as).

Yay Guido, right? I don’t think so. Despite a record share of the vote last month, I think Westerwelle and the Free Democrats played their hand terribly in the coalition negotiations. They probably could have gotten the Finance Ministry if they had been stubborn, but Westerwelle followed tradition and took the Foreign Ministry, even though he has little background or interest in foreign affairs (favorite WesterWave word so far: the “outland”). Not that I necessarily think their program of massive tax cuts and slashing social services would have been particularly sound policy, but I think that if you’re as fanatically devoted to these things as the FDP is, you might have fought a bit harder to make sure you control all the levers of government that will allow you to attain your goals instead of handing them off to another political party. Plus, the Chancellor traditionally sets the foreign policy agenda enough as it already is, so if Westerwelle turns into a weak foreign minister, as I believe he will, the important parts of the portfolio simply become assimilated into Merkel’s office.

Going back to the Finance Ministry (the building itself being the single biggest point of continuity between the sweet, soft lovey-duddy Germany of today and the Nazis), Wolfgang Schaeuble, elder spokesman, dark knight and illegal campaign contribution bagman extraordinaire of the Christian Democrats is Finance Minister instead of Westerwelle or another FDP member. Why this matters is that even though the CDU signed onto tax cuts, Schaeuble’s the kind of guy who’s likely to lock up the national credit card and sic the dogs on anyone who tries to spend more than Schaeuble thinks is possible.

The FDP’s weakness shows elsewhere too. Philip Rösler, the new FDP Health Minister may be a photogenic 36 year-old but he’s barely been in politics and now he holds what’s likely to be one of the more contentious ministries in government (though the health care system is way better here than in the US, there are big financing holes right now that are going to have to be fixed). It’s not clear to me that Rösler is going to be able to unite the FDP and CDU on some kind of common health policy that’s going to make anyone happy. In which case the status quo will hold, which Merkel by temperament probably prefers.

In other words, even though Merkel’s CDU (and their Bavarian CSU allies) holds the smallest share of seats ever in the Bundestag, she seems to have managed to concentrate power even further in her hands and rather than assert themselves, the FDP simply rolled over and asked to have its tummy scratched with some tax cuts that may not even happen. Nice work, Angie.