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      Germany’s ‘Invisible’ Chancellor Heads to Washington Amid Fierce Criticism

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      Olaf Scholz will try to repair Germany’s credibility in the Ukraine crisis when he meets President Biden on Monday. Next on his agenda: Kyiv and Moscow.BERLIN — One headline asked, “Where is Olaf Scholz?” A popular magazine mocked the German chancellor’s “art of disappearance.” And his ambassador in Washington wrote home that Germany was increasingly seen as an unreliable ally in a leaked memo that was all the buzz this past week and began with the words: “Berlin, we have a problem.”With the threat of war hanging over Europe and rising tensions in the standoff with Russia over Ukraine, Mr. Scholz is headed to Washington on Monday for his first meeting with President Biden since taking over as chancellor in December. Foremost on his agenda: Show the world that Berlin is committed to the Western alliance — and, well, show his face.Less than two months after taking over from Angela Merkel, his towering and long-serving predecessor, Mr. Scholz is drawing sharp criticism at home and abroad for his lack of leadership in one of the most serious security crises in Europe since the end of the Cold War.His Social Democrat-led government, an untested three-way coalition with the Greens and Free Democrats, has refused to send arms to Ukraine, most recently offering 5,000 helmets instead. And it has been cagey about the type of sanctions that could be imposed in the event of a Russian invasion.As for the chancellor, he has made himself conspicuously scarce in recent weeks — so scarce that the newsmagazine Der Spiegel described him as “nearly invisible, inaudible.”While President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy have been busy calling President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Scholz has so far neither picked up the phone to Moscow nor visited. He has not gone to Kyiv, Ukraine, yet, either, and his visit to Washington, some note, took almost two months to organize.Ukrainian soldiers on Saturday on the front line in eastern Ukraine. While the United States and other NATO countries rushed military aid to Ukraine, Germany offered 5,000 helmets.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesLast week, Emily Haber, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, sent a memo to Berlin, warning of “immense” damage to Germany’s reputation. It was not just the news media but many in the U.S. Congress who questioned Germany’s reliability, she reported. In the view of many Republicans, she wrote, Berlin is “in bed with Putin” in order to keep the gas flowing.It has not helped that since then, Gerhard Schröder, a former German chancellor from Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats, accused Ukraine of “saber rattling” and just on Friday announced that he would join the board of Gazprom, Russia’s most prominent energy company.“Scholz’s central mission for his Washington visit has to be restoring German credibility,” said Thorsten Benner, a founder and the director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin.“It’s not how Mr. Scholz envisaged his first U.S. trip as chancellor,” Mr. Benner added. “But international security was never near the top of his agenda.”Mr. Scholz, 63, has been a familiar figure in German politics for more than two decades. He was general secretary of his party and mayor of the northern port city of Hamburg before serving in two governments led by Ms. Merkel’s conservatives, most recently as her finance minister.A labor lawyer and lifelong Social Democrat, Mr. Scholz narrowly won the election last fall on a platform promising workers “respect” and a higher minimum wage, while nudging Germany on a path to a carbon-neutral future.Foreign policy barely featured in his election campaign, but it has come to dominate the first weeks of the new administration. Rarely has a German leader come into office with so many burning crises. As soon as Mr. Scholz took over from Ms. Merkel in early December, he had to deal not just with a resurgent pandemic but with a Russian president mobilizing troops on Ukraine’s borders.Russian infantry vehicles during drills in January in the Rostov region of Russia. The standoff with Russia over Ukraine has proved particularly vexing for Mr. Scholz.Sergey Pivovarov/Reuters“It wasn’t the plan,” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, the vice president of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund. “This is a government that has huddled around an ambitious plan of industrial transformation, but the reality of a crisis-ridden world has interfered with their plans.”Of all of the crises, the standoff with Russia has proved particularly uncomfortable for Mr. Scholz. His Social Democrats have traditionally favored a policy of working with Moscow. During the Cold War, Chancellor Willy Brandt engineered “Ostpolitik,” a policy of rapprochement with Russia.The last Social Democratic chancellor, Mr. Schröder, is not just a close friend of Mr. Putin’s, he has also been on the payroll of various Russian energy companies since 2005, notably Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, the two gas pipelines connecting Russia directly with Germany under the Baltic Sea.It was not until last week, after Mr. Schröder’s comments about Ukraine, that Mr. Scholz felt compelled to publicly distance himself from the former chancellor.“There is only one chancellor, and that is me,” he told the public broadcaster ZDF.His party’s divisions over Russia are one way to explain why Mr. Scholz has shrunk away from taking a bolder lead in the standoff with Russia, prompting some to lament the loss of leadership of his conservative predecessor.Mr. Scholz won the election last year primarily by convincing voters that he would be very much like Ms. Merkel. Terse, well briefed and abstaining from any gesture of triumph, he not only learned to sound like the former chancellor, he even emulated her body language, holding his hands together in her signature diamond shape.But now that he is running the country, that is no longer enough. German voters are hungry for Mr. Scholz to reveal himself and increasingly impatient to learn who he is and what he actually stands for.The receiving station for the $10 billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which connects Russia directly with Germany. If Russia invades Ukraine, Mr. Scholz will be under enormous pressure to close it down. Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesAs the current crisis unfolds, Mr. Scholz’s imitation of Ms. Merkel is also less and less convincing. She was understated and studious, and often kept her work behind the scenes, but she was not invisible.In the spring of 2014, after Mr. Putin invaded Crimea, Ms. Merkel was on the phone to him almost every day. It was Berlin that united reluctant European neighbors behind costly sanctions and persuaded President Barack Obama, distracted by domestic affairs, to focus on a faraway conflict.At that point, of course, Ms. Merkel had already been chancellor for nine years and knew all of the protagonists well.“The crisis came very soon for Scholz,” said Christoph Heusgen, a veteran diplomat and Ms. Merkel’s foreign policy adviser during the last Ukraine crisis.Mr. Scholz’s advisers have been taken aback by the level of criticism, arguing that Mr. Scholz was merely doing what Ms. Merkel had so often done: Make yourself scarce and keep people guessing while engaging in quiet diplomacy until you have a result.When Mr. Scholz has spoken up on the current crisis — referring to the Russia-owned gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 as a “private-sector project” before pivoting to saying that “everything” was on the table — he has conspicuously recycled language that Ms. Merkel used before.President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Deauville, France, in June 2014. In the spring of 2014, after Mr. Putin first invaded Ukraine, Ms. Merkel was on the phone to him almost every day.Sasha Mordovets/Getty ImagesBut given the escalation in the current crisis, that language is long outdated, analysts say.“He’s overlearned the Merkel style,” Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff of the German Marshall Fund said. “He’s Merkel-plus, and that doesn’t work in a crisis.”After facing mounting criticism from Kyiv and other Eastern European capitals, Mr. Scholz’s leadership is increasingly being questioned at home, too.In a recent Infratest Dimap poll, Mr. Scholz’s personal approval rating plummeted by 17 percentage points, to 43 percent from 60 percent in early January, the sharpest decline for a chancellor in postwar history, the firm says. Support for his Social Democrats fell to 22 percent, lagging the conservatives for the first time since last year’s surprise election victory.Mr. Scholz’s team announced that after returning from Washington, the chancellor will pivot to a full schedule that he hopes will shift German diplomacy into high gear. Following his meeting with Mr. Biden, he will meet with Mr. Macron; the Polish prime minister, Andrzej Duda; and the three leaders of the Baltic States. The week after, he will travel to Kyiv and Moscow, in that order.Senior diplomats say it is high time for such a pivot, starting with Monday’s visit to the White House.Mr. Scholz has a seeming center-left ally in Mr. Biden, who has so far refrained from publicly criticizing Berlin. Not since President Bill Clinton’s second term have both the White House and the German chancellery been in the hands of center-left leaders, and for all of the wavering on the German side, the two administrations have been in close contact throughout.Mr Scholz, right, listening to President Biden, left, at the start of the virtual Summit for Democracy in December. Mr. Biden has so far held off on publicly criticizing Berlin.Michele TantussiBut patience is running thin, and Mr. Scholz will have to bring something to the table.“There has to be a visible sign of commitment to the alliance,” Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff said. “That’s what other allies are doing: The Spanish, the Baltic countries, the Poles, the Brits — everyone has offered something to strengthen deterrence on the eastern flank.”German lawmakers have started preliminary conversations about beefing up their troop presence in Lithuania, officials say. Other options include more naval patrols in the Baltic Sea and more air patrols in Bulgaria and Romania.As important as any material commitment may be the words Mr. Scholz uses — or does not use — to publicly communicate that commitment.“Maybe for the first time he could mention Nord Stream 2 by name when talking about possible sanctions,” Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff said. “He needs to make a clear statement that Germany gets the situation and will stand with its allies in a language that appeals to people in the U.S. and ideally not in his usual flat language,” he added. More

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      A Pillar of the European Order Has Collapsed

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      The drubbing inflicted on Germany’s Christian Democratic Union in the country’s recent elections is a sign that, alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 16-year stint in power, something larger is coming to an end.Aside from NATO, the Christian Democratic Union is the most venerable postwar political institution in continental Europe. It has led Germany, usually in coalition, for all but 20 years of the country’s post-Nazi political history. Focused on economic growth, Christian traditions, anti-Communism and maintenance of the Atlantic alliance, the party was a guarantee to Germany’s allies that Europe’s largest, richest country would be stable and dependable. With the measly 24 percent of the vote that Ms. Merkel’s successor, Armin Laschet, managed to win, the C.D.U. can no longer play that role. A pillar of the European order has collapsed.The C.D.U.’s decline has been underway since at least the turn of the century. While Ms. Merkel managed to disguise it, she showed little aptitude for reversing it. In the five elections since 2005, when she took power, her party’s vote share fell in all but one.Perhaps not every country needs a “people’s party” of the center-right. Big gainers in this election included Greens worried about climate change and Free Democrats worried about supply chains — two preoccupations that didn’t exist at the time of the C.D.U.’s founding. But there has always been more at stake for the party than an up-to-date servicing to voter preferences. In light of Germany’s Nazi past, it fell to the C.D.U. to play a moderating role — to speak to the patriotic longings of ordinary Germans in a way that would dissuade them from drifting to the political fringes.This role was almost constitutional. Half a century ago, Franz Josef Strauss, leader of the C.D.U.’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, justified his own rock-ribbed conservatism by saying it came with a guarantee that “no legitimate political party” could exist to his party’s right. Many felt they could trust Mr. Strauss to police the country’s rightmost ideological boundary.But in electoral politics, or game theory, or whatever you want to call it, there is a fallacy in such an arrangement. Ms. Merkel was not slow in discovering it: If there really were no legitimate viewpoints to the right of the C.D.U., then the party’s optimal strategy would be to move ever leftward, which it could do with no fear of an alternative right-wing party ever outflanking it.And this is what Ms. Merkel did, whether out of idealism or calculation. In the wake of the Fukushima meltdown of 2011, she announced an exit from nuclear power, long sought by the Greens. In 2015, she joined Social Democrats in passing a minimum wage. In 2017, she secured a vote legalizing gay marriage (without voting for it herself). Most crucially, in 2015, she announced that Germany would welcome hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing the war in Syria, creating a continentwide political crisis that, among other consequences, arguably drove Britain out of the European Union.The effect on German politics was unnerving. The Alternative for Germany party, up to that point a wonkish group obsessed with the European Union’s monetary policy, changed its focus to immigration in July 2015. The following March — eight months before Donald Trump’s election — the party harvested 13, 15 and 24 percent of the vote in state elections. In 2017, Alternative for Germany, now well-established on the C.D.U.’s right, not only sent nearly 100 members to the Bundestag, it also became the leading opposition party. It appeared that Ms. Merkel was heedlessly allowing votes to “drain” out of her own party into an American-style populism.Ms. Merkel, of course, is not the first conservative politician to poach voters from her progressive opponents. But certain problems come predictably with this strategy. The leader benefits more than the party’s rank and file, because the landscape of progressive issues is foreign territory to them. In last month’s rout, things that Christian Democrats might ordinarily have talked about and rallied kindred spirits around — Covid-19, migrants, the euro — were suddenly off limits. The rank and file fell silent. In last week’s rout, the C.D.U. lost half its voters from the previous election. Fewer than 3 percent defected to Alternative for Germany. The lion’s share went to the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens.Now German politics has become less predictable. The Green delegation in the Bundestag has nearly doubled. Many of the newcomers are people who have never been in elected office before, giving them something in common with upstart European parties, like the Five Star Movement in Italy and LREM in France, and with Democrats in the United States on the arrival of their progressive wing after 2018. The Social Democrats are young, too. This year they took Ms. Merkel’s seat, which will go to Anna Kassautzki, a 27-year-old self-described feminist and environmentalist who wasn’t born when Ms. Merkel was first elected.Certainly some traditional German conservatives deplore Ms. Merkel’s legacy. But there was one sense in which she was mostly in continuity with her predecessors — her resistance to utopianism. Germany’s society, economy and (since Covid-19) health care system have lately performed more efficiently than those of its neighbors. The great achievement of Ms. Merkel was to understand that in the global economy, efficiency is often a synonym for vulnerability. Like a lot of its best machinery, Germany is both high-functioning and delicate.Many Germany watchers forget this. Ms. Merkel pushed her country’s relatively generous “social market economy” to do a lot more — to offer a reasonable minimum wage, to accept the burden of educating and assimilating millions of desperate immigrants from the Syrian war, and to do those things while promising to forgo the relatively cheap energy that nuclear power provides. She assented to the creation of European Union bonds — a perennial taboo in her party — to finance an emergency Covid-19 package.She was conservative mostly in what she did not do. She realized that Germany does not have the resources to do everything. It cannot underwrite the debts of other European countries, as many of Germany’s southern neighbors assume. It cannot dismantle its existing carbon-based energy system as quickly as Greens would wish — that would pose significant direct transitional costs and indirectly undermine the auto industry that is the linchpin of its manufacturing system. It cannot sever all contact with economies that American boycott enthusiasts deem boogeymen. It cannot say no to Nord Stream II (the pipeline that permits cheap energy from Russia) nor can it revisit its manufacturing arrangements with the “illiberal democracies” of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.Overindulging a country’s virtues can be as dangerous as overindulging its vices. More than her predecessors Ms. Merkel ran the risk of exposing Germany to instability — in her case, to an American-style class conflict between the beneficiaries and the outcasts of the global economy. She avoided the worst. But she had some close calls, and the shrinking of Germany’s great, stabilizing bourgeois party is bound to reduce her successors’ room for error.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      German Election Leaves Merkel’s Conservatives in Disarray

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      Sunday’s defeat has revealed a gasping conservative party. But what that means for Germany’s future is not clear as traditional left-right politics are scrambled.BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel was standing two paces behind Armin Laschet, her party’s candidate to succeed her, stony-faced and with her hands clenched. The first election results had just come in. The conservative camp had collapsed by 9 percentage points, the Social Democrats were winning — and Mr. Laschet was vowing to do “everything” to form the next government.To watch the scene on Sunday night at conservative party headquarters was to watch power melt away in real time.Germany’s once-mighty Christian Democratic Union is not used to losing. Five of eight postwar chancellors were conservatives and the current one is leaving office after 16 years as the most popular politician in the country.But Sunday’s defeat, the worst since the party was founded after World War II, has revealed almost overnight a conservative movement not just in crisis and increasingly open revolt, but one fretting about its long-term survival.“It has raised a question about our very identity,” Norbert Röttgen, a senior member of the Christian Democratic Union told public television ARD on Monday. “The last, the only big people’s party in Germany. And if this continues, then we will no longer be that.”Nearly 2 million voters shifted their support away from the Christian Democrats to the Social Democrats on Sunday, a departure coinciding with the end of Ms. Merkel’s tenure as chancellor.Pool photo by Fabian SommerYet beyond the conservatives’ disarray, what Germany’s messy vote says about the future of the country — and of Europe — is still hard to divine. It was an election filled with paradoxes — and perhaps one in which Germans themselves where unsure what they wanted.The last government included both traditional parties on the center-right and center-left, making it harder to gauge whether Sunday’s vote was in fact a vote for change. Olaf Scholz, the chancellor candidate of the Social Democrats, campaigned against Ms. Merkel’s party — but he has served as Ms. Merkel’s finance minister and vice chancellor for the past four years and in many ways ran as an incumbent. Some of the “change vote” went to him, but much of it was split between the progressive Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats whose economic agendas could not be further apart. Overall, 45.4 percent of votes went to parties on the left — the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party — and 45.9 to those on the right, including the C.D.U., the Free Democrats and the far-right Alternative for Germany party. But even if not a dramatic shift to the left, the devastation the returns have wrought on Ms. Merkel’s party are plain. With Ms. Merkel leaving, millions of conservative voters are leaving, too. Nearly 2 million voters shifted their support away from the Christian Democrats to the Social Democrats on Sunday, and more than 1 million defected to each of the Free Democrats and the Greens.It was a splintered result that revealed a more fragmented society, one that increasingly defies traditional political labeling. And it appeared to spell a definitive end to the long era of Germany’s traditional “Volks”-parties, catchall “people’s” parties. In their heyday both Social Democrats and Christian Democrats routinely got over 40 percent of the vote. A working-class organized in powerful labor unions voted Social Democrat, while a conservative churchgoing electorate voted Christian Democrat. The Social Democrats lost that status a while ago. With union membership declining and parts of the traditional working-class constituency abandoning the party, its share of the vote roughly halved since late 1990s. The crisis of social democracy has been a familiar theme over the past decade. Olaf Scholz, the candidate for chancellor of the German Social Democrats after initial results in the federal parliamentary elections on Sunday in Berlin.Steffi Loos/Getty ImagesMs. Merkel’s conservatives were insulated from these tectonic shifts for longer. As long as she was in office, her own popularity and appeal reached well beyond a traditional conservative electorate and disguised many of the party’s creeping troubles.Ms. Merkel understood that in a rapidly changing world, where church membership was declining and values evolving, she needed to appeal to voters outside the Christian Democrats’ traditional base to keep winning elections. Since taking office in 2005, she gradually took her party from the conservative right to the center of the political spectrum, not least by co-governing with the Social Democrats for three out of her four terms. It worked, at least for a while. Ms. Merkel kept the party together, analysts say, but in the process she stripped it of its identity. “The C.D.U. is hollowed out: it has no leadership and no program,” said Herfried Münkler, a prominent political scientist and author on German politics. “The essential ingredient has gone — and that is Merkel.”There are many reasons the conservatives performed badly. One was the fact that after 16 years of a conservative-led government, a certain stasis had set in and, particularly among younger voters, a desire for new leadership.Another was the deep unpopularity and poorly run campaign of Mr. Laschet, who staked his political future on winning the chancellery but is losing support by the day even within his own party. Since the election, a simmering civil war inside Germany’s conservative camp between those eager to cling on to power at any price and those ready to concede defeat and regroup in opposition was increasingly coming into focus.While Mr. Laschet is still insisting that he will hold talks with the Greens and the Free Democrats to form a majority coalition, many in his own camp have conceded defeat.Workers took down a campaign poster showing Mr. Laschet in Bad Segeberg near Hamburg, Germany.Fabian Bimmer/ReutersOn Tuesday one of his main internal rivals, Markus Söder, the swaggering and popular governor of Bavaria who narrowly missed landing the nomination himself in April, went so far as to congratulate Mr. Scholz on the election result.“Olaf Scholz has the best chance right now of becoming chancellor,” Mr. Söder told reporters in Berlin on Tuesday. The regional conservative leader in the northern state of Lower Saxony, Bernd Althusmann, told public broadcaster ARD that voters wanted change. “We should now humbly and respectfully accept the will of the voters,” he said.The pressure on Mr. Laschet to concede the race only increased after he failed to win the support of voters even in his own constituency. But some said that Ms. Merkel herself shared some blame for her party’s abysmal result. In all her years in power, she failed to successfully groom a successor. She tried once; but her attempt to position Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, now the defense minister, proved deeply divisive and ended in Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s resignation as party leader after barely a year.Mr. Laschet, who followed her at the helm of the party, has also failed to bridge the divisions within the party between those who embraced the social changes Ms. Merkel had overseen from parental leave policies and same-sex marriage to welcoming over a million refugees in 2015 and 2016 — and those nostalgic for the party’s conservatism of old.But the days of uniting both camps under the umbrella of a single party may simply be over, analysts said.“Conservatism no longer has convincing answers — or at least not convincing enough to get 40 percent of the voters,” Mr. Münkler said.That raises existential questions for the Christian Democrats.In several neighboring European countries, including France and Italy, traditional center-right parties have already shrunk into irrelevance, struggling to find a message that appeals to voters and ripped apart by internal power struggles.Most now expect that the Christian Democrats will end up outside of government.“They might be in opposition for a while,” said Mr. Münkler, the political scientist, “and then the question is: Will they survive it?” Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting. More

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      German Election Heralds Messier Politics and Weaker Leadership After Merkel

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      Preliminary results indicated an outcome so tight that it could take months of talks to form a new government at a critical moment for Europe.BERLIN — After 16 years of Angela Merkel as their chancellor, Germans scattered their votes across the political spectrum on Sunday in the election to replace her, a fractured return that heralds a messier political era in Germany and weaker German leadership in Europe.Preliminary official results gave the center-left Social Democrats a lead of 1.6 percentage points, an outcome so close that no one could yet say who the next chancellor would be nor what the next government would look like.The only thing that seemed clear was that it would take weeks if not months of haggling to form a coalition, leaving Europe’s biggest democracy suspended in a kind of limbo at a critical moment when the continent is still struggling to recover from the pandemic and France — Germany’s partner at the core of Europe — faces divisive elections of its own next spring.Sunday’s election signaled the end of an era for Germany and for Europe. For over a decade, Ms. Merkel was not just chancellor of Germany but effectively the leader of Europe. She steered her country and the continent through successive crises and in the process helped Germany become Europe’s leading power for the first time since two world wars.Her time in office was characterized above all by stability. Her center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, has governed in Germany for 52 of the 72 postwar years, traditionally with one smaller party. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany clenching her hands as she listened to speeches on Sunday at her party headquarters in Berlin after parliamentary elections.Markus Schreiber/Associated PressBut the campaign proved to be the most volatile in decades. Armin Laschet, the candidate of Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, was long seen as the front-runner until a series of blunders compounded by his own unpopularity eroded his party’s lead. Olaf Scholz, the Social Democratic candidate, was counted out altogether before his steady persona led his party to a spectacular 10-point comeback. And the Greens, who briefly led the polls early on, fell short of expectations but recorded their best result ever.On Sunday, the Christian Democrats’ share of the vote collapsed well below 30 percent, heading toward the worst showing in their history. For the first time since the 1950s, at least three parties will be needed to form a coalition — and both main parties are planning to hold competing talks to do so.“It’s so unprecedented that it’s not even clear who talks with whom on whose invitation about what, because the Constitution does not have guardrails for a situation like that,” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, the Berlin-based vice president of the German Marshall Fund, a research group.Even before the first official returns were announced, the battle lines were drawn as both main contenders to succeed Ms. Merkel as chancellor announced their claims to the top job — and their intention to fight for it. A long tradition of deferential, consensus-driven politics was quickly evaporating, giving way to a more raucous tone.At the headquarters of the Social Democrats in Berlin, loud cheering erupted when the first exit polls were announced. “The S.P.D. is back!” Lars Klingbeil, the party’s general secretary, told the crowd of party members, before Mr. Scholz took the stage with his wife and insisted “that the next chancellor is called Olaf Scholz.”Across town, at the conservative headquarters, Mr. Laschet, the candidate of Ms. Merkel’s party, made clear who he thought the next chancellor should be, saying, “We will do everything to form a government.”The unpopularity of Armin Laschet, the Christian Democratic Union candidate, appears to have dragged the party down.Fabrizio Bensch/ReutersIt is a messy set of circumstances likely to complicate the negotiations to form a government. And whoever ends up being chancellor will have not just a weaker mandate — but less time to spend on leading in Europe, analysts said.“Germany will be absent in Europe for a while,” said Andrea Römmele, dean of the Hertie School in Berlin. “And whoever becomes chancellor is likely to be a lot more distracted by domestic politics.”The election’s outcome gives significant leverage to the two smaller parties that are almost certain to be part of any new government: the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats. Courted by both Mr. Scholz and Mr. Laschet, they have signaled they will first talk among themselves.“Two Maybe-Chancellors and Two Kingmakers,” read one headline of the German public broadcaster ARD.The murky outcome made for a tense night of election-watching in the Pankow district of Berlin. Lena Mucha for The New York TimesIn one way Sunday’s returns were an expression of how disoriented voters are by the departure of Ms. Merkel, who is leaving office as the most popular politician in her country.The chancellor oversaw a golden decade for Europe’s largest economy, which expanded by more than a fifth, pushing unemployment to the lowest levels since the 1980s.As the United States was distracted by multiple wars, Britain gambled its future on a referendum to leave the European Union and France failed to reform itself, Ms. Merkel’s Germany was mostly a haven of stability.“She was the steady hand at the helm, the steady presence,” said Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff of the German Marshall Fund.“Now there is an uneasiness about what comes next,” he said. “The presence and reputation of this chancellor is outsized and very hard to emulate.”That explains why both main candidates to succeed her mostly ran on platforms of continuity rather than change, attempting where possible to signal they would be the one most like the departing chancellor.“This election campaign was basically a contest for who could be the most Merkel-like,” Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff said.Even Mr. Scholz, whose center-left party is the traditional opposition party to Ms. Merkel’s conservatives, played up his role as finance minister in the departing government rather than his own party’s sensibilities, which are well to the left of his own.Inside a polling station, a gym at a secondary school in Berlin Neukölln on Sunday morning.Lena Mucha for The New York Times“Stability, not change, was his promise,” said Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff. The distinctive political tradition of the Federal Republic of Germany is change through consensus.In the four decades it was split from the Communist East, West Germany had strong governments, traditionally formed by one of the two larger parties teaming up with a smaller partner or, in rare circumstances, the two big parties forming a grand coalition. This tradition was continued after reunification in 1990, with far-reaching changes — like the labor market reforms of the early 2000s — often carried out with support from across the aisle.But four parties have become seven and the two traditional main parties have shrunk, changing the arithmetic of forming a government that represents more than 50 percent of the vote. In the future, analysts say, three or four, not two, parties, will have to find enough common ground to govern together.Some analysts say this increasing fragmentation of Germany’s political landscape has the potential to revitalize politics by bringing more voices into the public debate. But it will no doubt make governing harder, as Germany becomes more like other countries in Europe — among them, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands — that have seen a similar fracturing. And messier politics could make the next chancellor weaker.Ms. Merkel has embodied the tradition of consensus more than perhaps any of her predecessors. Of her four terms in office, she spent three in a grand coalition with her party’s traditional opponents, the Social Democrats. When he took the stage at S.P.D. headquarters on Sunday evening, Olaf Scholz insisted “that the next chancellor is called Olaf Scholz.” Laetitia Vancon for The New York TimesGoverning as Ms. Merkel’s junior partners almost killed the Social Democrats, Germany’s oldest party, stripping it of its identity and its place as the leading voice of center-left opposition. But Mr. Scholz used his cozy relationship with the chancellor to his advantage, effectively running as an incumbent in a race without one.At party headquarters on Sunday night, he was being celebrated as a savior by party members who were adamant that the chancellery was theirs.“The S.P.D. is the winner here,” insisted Karsten Hayde, a longtime party member, while Ernst-Ingo Lind, who works for a parliamentarian, said that only a year ago, he would “not have dreamed of being here.”Among the parties represented in the next German Parliament is the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which shocked the nation four years ago by becoming the first far-right party to win seats there since World War II. Its vote share slipped to 10.5 percent from almost 13 percent in 2017 and it will no longer be the country’s main opposition party. But it solidified its status as a permanent force to be reckoned with. In two states in the former Communist East it came first.“We are here to stay, and we showed that today,” Tino Chrupalla, co-leader of the party, told party members gathered on the outskirts of Berlin.For all the messiness of this election and Merkel nostalgia, many Germans took heart from the fact that more than eight in 10 voters had cast their ballots for a centrist party and that turnout was high.Early-morning voters in Munich. In a sign that the closest election in years had mobilized voters, turnout was expected to surpass the 76 percent recorded in 2017, when the last national elections were held.Laetitia Vancon for The New York TimesThe mobilization was palpable outside several polling stations in Berlin, where families patiently waited their turn in long lines.“It’s the beginning of a new era,” said Ms. Römmele of the Hertie School. Christopher F. Schuetze, Jack Ewing and Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin. More

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      Germany’s Elections Show the Country Is Stuck

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      Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 16 years in charge of Germany are coming to a close. Just not quite yet.On Sunday, voters cast their ballots — and the results were profoundly equivocal. No party took more than 26 percent of the vote, the gap between the two biggest parties was minimal and no one made a major advance. The next government is some way off: Weeks, possibly months of coalition negotiations beckon. In the interim, Ms. Merkel will continue to lead the country.In many ways, it’s a surprising result. For large stretches of the campaign, the Green Party and the Christian Democratic Union were the front-runners. But both fell away, their campaigns faltering as their candidates failed to convince voters they were worthy successors. The Social Democratic Party, headed by Olaf Scholz, then appeared to rise in the electorate’s esteem. But that, too, faded. There was no decisive victory.It could have been a fresh start. In the face of a number of pressing challenges, rising inequality, run-down infrastructure and spiraling climate change among them, the election was a chance for the country to chart a better, more equal course for the 21st century. Instead, Germany is stuck. Ms. Merkel may be leaving. Yet the Germany she cultivated — careful, cautious, averse to major change — will carry on as before.The campaign gave us early clues. Typically, candidates for the highest political office seek to distance themselves as much as possible from incumbents, to demonstrate the superiority of their vision for the country. But in Germany, the main candidates vied to imitate Ms. Merkel’s centrist political style. It delivered four successive electoral victories, after all.Annalena Baerbock, the leader of the Greens, tried to cultivate a Merkel-like image of rigor and expertise. Foiled by a plagiarism scandal, and perhaps by voters’ aversion to somebody without government experience, she soon lost her early lead in the campaign and ended taking her party to just 14 percent of the vote.Armin Laschet, Ms. Merkel’s successor as the head of the Christian Democrats, likewise attempted to depict an aura of competence and efficiency. But the effort was undermined by an erratic, error-strewn campaign, encapsulated by his tone-deaf joking while on a visit to flood victims in the summer. In leading the party to 24 percent, he presided over a historically poor performance. He will, however, still try to cobble together a coalition.Then there’s Mr. Scholz. Though the candidate for the Social Democratic Party, he made every effort to associate himself with the outgoing chancellor, offering himself, rather than Mr. Laschet, as the true continuity option. As deputy chancellor and finance minister in Ms. Merkel’s administration, the maneuver was an easy one: He even adopted Ms. Merkel’s trademark “triangle of power” hand gesture. It worked, up to a point. But the nearly 26 percent won by his party is not enough to assure Mr. Scholz of the chancellorship.The convergence among candidates goes beyond political style. After 16 years of rule by Ms. Merkel, the country has settled into a seemingly unshakable status quo. Economically, socially and ecologically, very little is up for change.First, the economy. With an export economy oriented to international trade — and one, unusual for industrialized countries, with a substantial manufacturing sector — Germany prizes monetary stability above all else. Anything that might affect the country’s international competitiveness is ruled out of court.What’s more, the debt brake, a law cemented into the constitution in 2009 that forbids budgetary deficits, puts a hard limit on what’s possible: There will be little room for a debt-funded investment program or major infrastructure spending. In this setting, no fundamental restructuring of the economy seems feasible.Outwardly, at least, the economy is successful. But the economic gains have not been widely shared. Wealth inequality has increased — the richest 1 percent possess nearly a quarter of all wealth — and Germany has one of the largest low-wage sectors among nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Around one in five workers, close to eight million people, earn less than 11.40 euros, or $13.36, an hour.Social discontent, accordingly, is on the rise. There has been a considerable renewal of strikes over the past 10 years and the term “class society,” previously banished, has returned to public debate. More amorphous anger, finding expression in support for the far-right Alternative for Germany and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, has spread across society. It would take thoroughgoing changes to address the roots of such distemper. None of the major parties appear capable of taking on the task.Similarly, an ambitious approach is unlikely when it comes to the climate. In large part that’s because, for the first time in its postwar history, Germany’s government is likely to be formed of three parties in coalition. Led by either the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats, who will seek to form a government without one another, that will include the Greens and the Free Democratic Party.Though the Greens pledged to “make the impossible possible,” the presence of the Free Democrats — a party of classical liberals and entrepreneurs for whom the market and new technology should solve the climate crisis, not the state — will put a sharp brake on far-reaching policy.Ironically, given its cautious nature, the campaign played out against a backdrop of multiple crises. The pandemic continues to place enormous strain on the country, NATO suffered a historic defeat in Afghanistan, and floods caused by climate change devastated large swaths of land this summer and claimed nearly 200 lives.Individually, each problem would be significant. Taken together, they amount to a major confrontation to business as usual. The moment — not least at the European level, where the bloc requires firm leadership — demands boldness.But that’s not going to happen. Instead the new era, locked into consensual politics and tepid policy, is likely to be more of the same.Oliver Nachtwey (@onachtwey) is professor of sociology at the University of Basel and the author of “Germany’s Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      So Organized It's Chaos: A Guide on Germany's Vote

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      It has been said that Germans are sometimes so organized that chaos reigns. Germany’s election system is no exception. It is so complex that even many Germans don’t understand it.Here’s a brief primer.Are voters choosing a chancellor today?Not exactly. Unlike in the United States, voters don’t directly elect their head of government. Rather, they vote for representatives in Parliament, who will choose the next chancellor, but only after forming a government. More on that later.The major parties declare who they would choose for chancellor, so Germans going to the polls today know who they are in effect voting for. This year the candidates most likely to become chancellor are Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats or Armin Laschet of the Christian Democrats. Annalena Baerbock, a Green, has an outside chance.Who can vote?Any German citizen 18 or over. They don’t need to register beforehand.How are seats in Parliament allocated?Everyone going to the polls today has two votes. The first vote is for a candidate to be the district’s local representative. The second vote is for a party. Voters can split their votes among parties and often do. For example, a person could cast one vote for a Social Democrat as the local member of Parliament, and a second vote for the Christian Democrats as a party.Parliament has 598 members, but could wind up with many more because of a quirk in the system. The top vote-getter in every district automatically gets a seat in Parliament. These candidates account for half of the members of Parliament. The remaining seats are allocated according to how many second votes each party receives.But parties may be allocated additional seats according to a formula designed to ensure that every faction in Parliament has a delegation that accurately reflects its national support. So Parliament could easily wind up with 700 members.Also: A party that polls less than 5 percent doesn’t get any seats at all.What happens next?It is very unlikely that any party will wind up with a majority in Parliament. The party that gets the most votes must then try to form a government by agreeing to a coalition with other parties. That has become mathematically more difficult because of the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party and the far-left Linke party.The mainstream parties have ruled out coalitions with either of those parties because of their extreme positions. But it will be a struggle for the remaining parties to find enough common ground to cobble together a majority. The process could take months. More