Germans prove Kim Campbell was right
One thing is totally and unequivocally clear about the results of this weekend’s election in Germany: Kim Campbell was absolutely right. Back at the start of the 1993 Canadian federal election, Campbell got herself and her Progressive Conservative party slaughtered by musing out loud that elections were no time to discuss “ serious issues.”
Shock, horror, off with her head — almost literally so, by the voters. In fact, one of the “ serious” issues Campbell mentioned before her advisers got her to shut up was that unemployment was likely to remain high for the rest of the decade — which is, of course, exactly what it did. The contemporary German equivalent to Campbell is Paul Kirchoff.
He’s unknown outside the country, unlike the two leading candidates, Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder, the incumbent chancellor, and Christian Democrat leader Angela Merkel.
Inside Germany, he was almost as unknown until this election. Then Merkel, to whom he’s a key adviser, started quoting his ideas. And Schroeder, who’s a very adroit politician, also started quoting Kirchoff, if in a rather different way.
Kirchoff is a professor of economics at Heidelberg University. He’s tall, brainy and with a distinct taste for attracting the attention of the media.
Kirchoff’s Big Idea is a flat rate ( 25 per cent) income tax. He describes German tax law as a weed that has “ covered the garden of freedom.” Scythe it down and all kinds of entrepreneurial flowers will bloom. Germany does need something drastic like this. It’s become the economic sick man of Europe. Unemployment is stuck above 10 per cent. The annual budget deficit is more than $100 billion. The economy hasn’t grown in any of the past five years.
At least one German economic expert, Thomas Strubhaar, president of the Institute for International Economics in Hamburg, says that Germany has enough in the bank to maintain a European standard of living for the next five or 10 years. After that, though, its decline may become irreversible, “ like it did in Latin America, in Argentina.”
At the start of the election, polls gave Merkel a 30 per cent lead. On election night, Sunday, she finished just 1 per cent ahead.
Kirchoff didn’t account for all that difference, but for a large part of it. The economist — he was a leading candidate to be finance minister in a Merkel government — made the fatal mistake of trying to talk about serious issues in an election.
Aflat rate tax may or may not be the way to jolt Germany out of its stagnation. Beyond any question, something radical is needed. But talking about a possible actual policy — good or bad — creates the obvious political problem that it gives the other side something to talk back about.
This is exactly what Schroeder did. From mid-campaign on, he talked constantly about “this professor from Heidelberg” who was going to apply the same tax “ to millionaires and charwomen.”
Merkel told Kirchoff to shut up, then let it be known he wasn’t going to be her finance minister. Now she may not have any finance minister or any ministers at all. An election in Dresden delayed to Oct. 2 because of a candidate’s death may decide whether she or Schroeder gets to be the next chancellor. The result of the bungled attempt to actually discuss issues wasn’t just to divide German voters evenly between rightist Merkel and leftist Schroeder. It was to totally confuse them. The far- left, new, Left party came from nowhere to win 54 seats. The far right, libertarian, Free Democrats, won 51 seats, their best showing in a quarter- century.
For those worried where this key country of 85 million and with the world’s thirdlargest economy ( until now) is likely to go from now on, the election results offered some substantial reasons for optimism.
While, as the election makes pretty clear, Germans have no idea where they want to go today , they do, in the very strangeness of the results, know that they need somehow to go somewhere new and different.
In some way, Campbell was wrong. Serious issues can get talked about in elections. The process is so novel, though, it takes time, maybe two or three elections. Richard Gwyn’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. gwynR@sympatico.ca.