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.

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.)

For much of the past year, I’ve been covering the soap opera that is GM‘s troubled European unit, Opel for pretty much every outlet I’ve worked for, including Marketplace, NPR and Deutsche Welle. Now that GM has agreed to sell a controlling stake to Magna, it looks like everything I reported would be a problem with the deal has come true.

The Antwerp factory I visited appears to be on the chopping block, despite being one of Opel’s most efficient production locations according to union leaders. In the zero-sum terms of today’s car business, axing Antwerp means saving German factories (and jobs in a German election season). Indeed, just 4,000 jobs will probably be cut in Germany, less than expected earlier this summer.

Oh right, the German government is underwriting the Magna deal and got testy about funding other bidders when it became clear that they would lay off more German workers.

Belgium, along with Spain and the UK, which all have Opel factories likely to be closed or heavily cut, are…upset. And they’re going to the European Commission and trying to sink the deal now that it’s official and the layoff negotiations are underway.

As for the workers and retirees I spoke to in Antwerp over the summer, they were sanguine then about what could happen but I suspect they’re worried now. My inbox has been getting multiple press releases a day about demonstrations and protests. Ultimately though, the only hope those workers have is if the EU puts the screws on Germany in the next few months. Otherwise, at least they have a European-style safety net to fall back on rather than wind up in the European equivalent of Detroit.

August is known as the Sommerloch in the German news business, the summer hole. Like in the US, it’s when the crazies (think of those who say health care reform will lead to toilet paper rationing) can get their 15 minutes without breaking a sweat. Here, Vera Lengsfeld, a Berlin candidate from a marginal district who belongs to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats has put up a poster that has both her and the chancellor displaying a little decolletage with the slogan “We have more to offer.”

(Lengsfeld, incidentally has a fascinating personal history. She was a Communist Party member in East Germany who was expelled for protesting the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles. She was later arrested by the Stasi, the East German secret police and sent into exile. Upon returning to Germany after the Wall fell, she found out her husband had been spying on her for the Stasi, which led to their divorce. She was active in environmental politics and was a member of the Green Party before moving to the much more conservative CDU.)

The only two reasons this story is zinging around the German press are 1) great pictures and 2) despite the fact that the election is only seven weeks ago, the conclusion seems so foregone (another Merkel-led CDU coalition) that most pundits here seem to have given up. The Social Democrat’s, the CDU’s rivals and current coalition partners, seem out of steam and out of ideas. The polling data says that even if the German public doesn’t believe the CDU’s promises to cut taxes after the election, they’d rather vote for another round of Merkel than the SDP’s hapless candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has all the charisma of a dead fish.

It’s weird to watch as an outsider because there are many legitimate questions to raise about how Merkel has governed (or punted, as in the case of rescuing the banks) but instead, the election seems destined to be fought with empty slogans and saucy posters.