Berlin's Derailed Campaign
Berliners go to the polls on Sunday. The campaign was going to be spectacular -- until September 11.
When the lumbering "grand coalition" that had governed Berlin for more than a decade collapsed in June, the national and local press was ecstatic. Blistering headlines were all but guaranteed -- first, because the coalition went out with an early, unexpected bang rather than a prolonged whimper. And secondly, because the field was suddenly cleared for fresh faces and new ideas. It hasn't exactly turned that way.
The Podium
Back when the Wall was still up, becoming mayor of one of the two Berlins was quite a notch in one's political belt. In the West, great things were expected of Berlin mayors. It was Willy Brandt who stood beside John F. Kennedy when he let loose the "Ich bin ein Berliner" line on future history books. Less famous is the moment the two men first stepped up onto the podium and the crowd broke out into cheers. JFK turned to the mayor to note that they were chanting Brandt's name. Brandt went on to become the first postwar chancellor from the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
In the early 80s, Richard von Weizsäcker, a Christian Democrat (CDU), impressed even the opposition by entering occupied buildings to negotiate with squatters. Helmut Kohl tapped him for President. He was followed by the bland Eberhard Diepgen (remember that name), who was, in turn, followed five years later by Walter Momper (SPD).
Momper's mistakes were many, but one political miscalculation in particular stood out. When the Wall fell on his watch, he took a stand against the (re)unification of Germany. But the "winds of change" blew him right out of office and Diepgen (CDU) was back. Diepgen formed the "grand" CDU-SPD coalition in January 1991, and that was that until this June.
The Mess
What became known as the Berliner Filz settled in. Translating Filz into something as pleasant as "felt" would be misleading; what it really means in this context are things like "muck"; "good old boys"; "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." Want to build an international airport for Berlin? You'll spend years in court unraveling an entangled mess of backroom deals and special favors, and even then, you won't know for sure if the damn thing will ever actually get built or not.
In the meantime, nothing else of much import got done, either. Both halves of Berlin had been spoiled by enormous subsidies from their respective federal governments. This is a city with five orchestras and 123 museums (more than twice as many as in Hamburg or Munich). When those subsidies dried up, no one, least of all the mayor, bothered to take the need to seriously restructure the city's finances seriously. Questions like, "Do we really need three municipally supported opera houses?" were debated for years but even now still haven't been answered.
The result: Berlin is 70 billion marks ($32.3 billion) in debt. That's 20,725 marks (nearly $10,000) worth of debt per individual Berliner, more than twice the average of all other German states (like Hamburg, Berlin is both a city and a federal state). This doesn't exactly encourage businesses to set up shop in the city. Sure, a few companies have moved in. Sony and DaimlerChrysler all but sponsored the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz, for example.
But many companies are made conspicuous by their absence. Berlin, that proletarian city on the Spree, that hub of railroads and heavy industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, missed out on Volkswagen's shiny new high tech plant. It went to Dresden instead. BMW's? Leipzig. Just this week, Siemens slashed 400 jobs in Berlin and Reemtsma, a cigarette maker, cut 800. When the "grand coalition" was formed, unemployment in Berlin was around 10 percent. Now it hovers between 16 and 18 percent.
Hopes were high when the federal government voted to move itself to the old capital, but it's here now and Berliners are still waiting for the expected economic boost all those bureaucrats from Bonn were supposed to bring. And even though Berlin is where all the political action is, the print media in Hamburg and the broadcast media in Cologne have stayed put, making do with outpost offices in the capital. Another great hope: the cool factor. Some pretty nifty buildings can be rented dirt cheap; just the thing for those hip dotcoms. It was indeed a going scene for a while, but we all know what happened to that sector. As for what remains of Berlin's cool factor, artists and DJs are already lamenting a fading subculture as gentrification sets in.
So how did the mayor address this palette of problems? He didn't. Even the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a natural ally, wrote that Diepgen "governs by knowing everything and everybody and letting things run their course until he has to step in." All the while, everyone knew about and generally tolerated the corruption infamously rampant in Berlin. Until February of this year when it was revealed that Diepgen's right-hand man, Klaus Landowsky, had accepted a 40,000 mark ($18,500) illegal donation, traceable to the Bankgesellschaft Berlin.
Once that surface was scratched, it was discovered that this banker's haven, majority-owned by the city-state, was in the red to the tune of 6 billion marks (nearly $2.8 billion). Diepgen's enemies knew a last straw when they saw one. While the mayor scrambled to cook up a last-minute austerity program he'd never gotten around to all those years before, an upstart in Berlin's parliament spear-headed what amounted to a vote of no confidence. The "grand coalition" was over.
The Contenders
That upstart was Klaus Wowereit (SPD). On June 16, with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's (SPD) blessing, Wowereit was sworn in as Berlin's "governing mayor," that is, he'd be keeping the seat warm until new elections could be held. It was then that he delivered the only "Where's the beef?"-like instant catch-phrase of the campaign. Yes, Wowereit said, as the papers were reporting, he was indeed gay, "und das ist auch gut so."
No English translation can capture the punch of that line, but it goes something like, "and that's a good thing, too." All summer long, "und das ist auch gut so" was suddenly to 2001 what "Have a nice day" had been to all the 70s. In clubs, Berliners would order, "I'll have a beer, und das ist auch gut so." The weather folk on the radio or on TV would announce clear skies, "und das ist auch gut so."
But Wowereit wasn't just lucky enough to stumble upon the jingle of the year. He had the power of the office behind him when it suddenly counted. On September 11, all citizens of all countries that could in any way be construed as allies of the US rallied around whoever held whatever office at that moment. From here on in, all Wowereit would have to do would be to assure that all leads were being pursued, that the police were posted wherever they needed to be posted, that wreathes would be laid at the US embassy and wherever else was appropriate and so on and on and on.
All the debates that had suddenly, finally come to the fore in the summer were off. For example, could Wowereit imagine a red-red coalition? In the 1999 election, Berlin had split right down the middle. The western half of the city had gone all four feet for the CDU, but thanks to the eastern half, the Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS), the reformed communists who had governed East Germany and East Berlin, scored over 17 percent, hot on the heels of the SPD's miserable 22 percent showing that year.
Yes, Wowereit, the pragmatist, said, he could imagine such a thing. Like anyone else, he could do the math. The papers and newsweeklies went wild over the prospect of a red-red government in the nation's capital. Helmut Kohl, the dinosaur Cold Warrior, was so infuriated by the prospect, he came out of retirement once again to denounce even former communists as "fascists painted red" and to campaign for the CDU until his own party's leadership begged him not to and, snubbed, he crouched back home again.
The campaign was splashed with a generous dose of drama when Gregor Gysi decided, after an evidently tortured session with himself and his son, to run for mayor as the PDS candidate. Gysi, probably the finest rhetorician in Germany today, had only recently been embroiled in a love-hate relationship with his own party. He'd just abandoned his post as federal parliamentary faction leader. As the Berliner Zeitung put it, he had not only come to terms with capitalism as a socialist, he had "fallen in love" with it. When the local paper presented its findings to the candidate, he couldn't bring himself to deny it. As an "outsider," Gysi explained, he knew more than any other candidate how to attract companies to his hometown.
But the PDS was having none of that. Not only had the party not come to terms with the enemy, much less sparked a romantic relationship with The Other, once the US bombing of Afghanistan began, it became the only party in Germany to outright disapprove -- even as Gysi, who had once struck up a personal rapport with Milosevic during the Kosovo war, submitted that well-planned and well-aimed military action on the part of the US and its allies was justified.
At this point, Gysi's only shot at the mayor's office is a constitutional impossibility. When Berliners are asked if they were allowed to vote for mayoral candidates directly rather than via their parties, Gysi leads the PDS by seven points. As it is, the PDS, with its 18 percentage points trails the SPD (35) and the CDU (26).
Frank Steffel, Diepgen's heir, is the mirror image of Gysi. Western Berliners, in particular, who favor the CDU, disdain the 35-year-old entrepreneur who trails in popularity a full eight points behind his own party. His first goof was to launch his campaign on Alexanderplatz, the focal point of what was once East Berlin, with such conservative luminaries as Bavaria's Edmund Stoiber, an anathema to all Berliners. A photo op gone haywire, the misplaced party was pictured in the national press cowering beneath a rain of rotten eggs and vegetables. Things simply got worse from there.
The Prospects
No poll denies Wowereit the mandate to do whatever it is he decides to do after Sunday. There'll certainly be no absolute majority, but the SPD will pull in a percentage -- perhaps 35 or so -- hefty enough to call the shots. At the same time, with federal elections less than a year away, Wowereit will most certainly not be acting alone. The SPD leadership on the federal level will want to strike a certain tone 11 months away from national elections.
Wowereit could conceivably go for red-red and form a majority government, and that would have been possible before 9/11, but post-9/11, with the PDS ostracized to the raw pacifist corner, this seems mighty unlikely. Instead, a "traffic light coalition" of red (SPD), Greens and the Liberals (FDP, Liberal) seems more likely. It's an all-embracing sort of sentiment the public is in the mood for these days. Nothing radical, please. And definitely no mention of any sort of mess specific to Berlin. How petty Berlin's crisis is when set next to the world's.