For the oil and gas business, the significance of this month's voting in Germany is not the rift that developed between that country and the US, which has drawn the most attention. It is instead the widespread suspicion that devastating floods in eastern Germany before the election helped determine the outcome.
The winner, with 8.6% of the vote, is the environmentalist Green party. Of course, the Social Democratic Party, which has governed Germany in coalition with the Greens since 1998, received 38.5% of the vote. But the Social Democrats' vote share dropped by a percentage point and a half since the last election, while the Greens' share rose by about as much.
The outcome
The Greens gain edged the so-called red-green coalition past a rival combine involving the conservative Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union (CDU-CSU) joint venture and the market-oriented Free Democratic Party. The CDU-CSU captured a vote share equal to that of the Social Democrats. It was the Free Democrats who faltered, getting only 7.4% of the vote, largely because of defections following the anti-Semitic blather of a party official.
Mathematically, therefore, with the major parties tied, the race came down to a contest between junior coalition partners. The Greens decided the election by a percentage point.
In the heat of competition, a desperate Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder resorted to anti-Americanism—which is roaring back into fashion in Europe. His campaign utterances received the scant notice they deserved outside Germany until his government's justice minister likened US President George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler for his war dance over Iraq. Bush understandably resented the comparison. His administration has been advertising the displeasure.
Germans and Americans will get over this no matter what either side does or chooses not to do about Iraq. Relations between the countries have been enduringly healthy despite differences more fundamental than this one. Germans like welfare and active government. Americans prefer economic growth greater than Germany's muddling 1.4%/year average over the past decade and less interference by the state in private lives. A wonderful attribute of proliferate democracy is that not all countries must reach identical decisions on important issues.
Most important here is international recognition that the 8.6% of voters who favored the Green Party are German citizens. They are not French. They are not Italian. They are not American.
A two percentage-point advance over the prior election by Germany's Greens doesn't mean that all of Europe has raised the flame under environmentalist zeal. If anything, recent victories by conservative candidates in France, Italy, and Spain point the other way. Furthermore, new Greens influence at the margin of German politics certainly doesn't make a US characteristically less accommodating to single-issue parties more susceptible than before to charges of—the horror!—unilateralism.
This all has to be said. The collectivist tendencies of modern Europe have a way of leveraging extremism and evangelizing consequent error. Europe panicked quickly, for example, when alarmists promised the improbable worst about climate change. Then it expected the rest of the world—or at least the less tax-happy US—to join it in futile sacrifice. In the diplomatic roil over that issue, someone will try to make the Greens' triumph in Germany look far more significant than it is.
Without a cascade of just such extrapolation, climate change would be an active subject of scientific inquiry rather than the conforming political dogma it has become. Especially in Europe, politicians follow a selective sequence of uncertain conditions, ignoring a tangle of offsetting factors, to reach certain conclusions about the worst warming imaginable and the need to raise taxes. They see planetary warming in every weather change.
No mandate
So it happened that eastern Germany's preelection flooding helped keep the red-green coalition in power. The rainstorms reminded voters, including some of those fleeing Free Democrat blunders, of climate change and the supposed need to do something about it. And enough of them voted for the Greens to sway an election otherwise in deadlock.
The rest of the world must keep what happened in Germany in perspective. The floods were about weather, not climate. The Greens influenced an election; they didn't win a mandate. And it happened in Germany, not all of Europe, not anywhere else in the world.
