How the German Government Collapsed and What Will Happen Now
The German traffic light coalition – named for the red Social Democrats (SPD), the yellow market-liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the green Greens – is history. It collapsed three days ago, late in the evening on 6 November, when Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) fired his Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who is also the head of the FDP. The Free Democrats left the government, leaving the SPD and the Greens to limp along until new elections. Nobody knows quite when these will happen.
Scholz said that the FDP had “Too often shouted down the necessary compromises with publicly staged disputes and loud ideological demands.” He said that Lindner specifically had “broken his trust” by “too often blocking laws for the wrong reasons” and “engaging in small-minded party political tactics.”
Lindner responded that Scholz himself had staged the crisis, pleading that the budgetary concessions Scholz demanded of him would have violated his oath of office.
Thus the most unpopular, ineffective and openly ridiculous government ever to disgrace the Federal Republic of Germany meets its ignominious end. I would love to say that this happened because of Donald Trump’s election or the failure of the energy transition or the migration crisis. That would make this post more exciting. While those things did not help, what crushed these incompetent clowns in the end was something much more mundane: They ran out of money.
The traffic light has been a dysfunctional monstrosity from its inception. It is emblematic of post-Merkel German politics, in which the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) have triangulated their way to the left, leaving a great part of their conservative constituents out in the cold. Alternative für Deutschland grew to fill the vacuum, but as the establishment parties refuse to work with them, parliamentary majorities have become an ever scarcer commodity. As long as the cordon sanitaire stands, Germany will have one government after the other like the traffic light, in which politicians with diametrically opposed political philosophies form coalitions for the sh
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
