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      Why So Many People Are Unhappy With Democracy

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      We pay too little attention to delivering effective government as a critical democratic value. We are familiar with the threats posed by democratic backsliding and the rise of illiberal forces in several democracies, including the United States. But the most pervasive and perhaps deepest challenge facing virtually all Western democracies today is the political fragmentation of democratic politics.Political fragmentation is the dispersion of political power into so many different hands and centers of power that it becomes difficult for democratic governments to function effectively.President Biden has recognized this historic challenge, calling the defining mission of his presidency to be winning the “battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.”Yet even with unified control of government, the internal divisions of the Democratic Party postponed passage of his bipartisan infrastructure bill for several months and have made it uncertain which parts, if any, of the Build Back Better proposal will be enacted.When democratic governments seem incapable of delivering on their promises, this failure can lead to alienation, resignation, distrust and withdrawal among many citizens. It can also trigger demands for authoritarian leaders who promise to cut through messy politics. At an even greater extreme, it can lead people to question democracy itself and become open to anti-democratic systems of government.The struggle of the Biden administration to deliver on its policy agenda offers a good example of the political fragmentation of politics taking place throughout Western democracies. It takes different forms in the multiparty systems of Europe and the two-party system of the United States. The European democracies are experiencing the unraveling of the traditionally dominant center-left and center-right major parties and coalitions that have governed since World War II. Support for these parties has splintered into new parties of the right and left, along with others with less-easily defined ideological elements. From 2015 to 2017, over 30 new political parties entered European parliaments. Across European democracies, the percentage of people who identify strongly with a political party or are members of one has declined precipitously.The effects on the ability to govern have been dramatic. In Germany, the stable anchor of Europe since the 1950s, the two major parties regularly used to receive over 90 percent of the vote combined; in this fall’s elections, that plummeted to less than 50 percent. Support has hemorrhaged to green, anti-immigrant, free-market and other parties. After its 2017 elections, with support fragmented among many parties, it took Germany six months to cobble together a governing coalition, the longest time in the country’s history. The Netherlands, after its 2017 elections, needed a record 225 days to form a government.The coalitional governments assembled amid this cacophony of parties are also more fragile. Spain, for example, was forced to hold four national elections between 2015 and 2019 to find a stable governing coalition. Spain had effectively been a two-party democracy until 2015, but mass protest movements spawned a proliferation of new parties that made forging stable governments difficult. In Sweden, the prime minister lost a vote of no confidence this summer — a first in the country’s modern political history. Digital pop-up parties, including anti-party parties, arise out of nowhere and radically disrupt politics, as the Brexit Party did in Britain and the Five Star Movement did in Italy.The same forces driving fragmentation in other democracies are also roiling the United States, though our election structures make effective third parties highly unlikely. Here the forces of fragmentation get channeled within the two major parties. The most dramatic example on the Republican side is that when the party controlled the House from 2011 to 2019, it devoured two of its own speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. Mr. Boehner’s memoir portrays a party caucus so internally fragmented as to be ungovernable.Similarly, the central story of the Biden administration is whether the Democratic Party can overcome its internal conflicts to deliver effective policies. Remarkably, Speaker Nancy Pelosi scheduled floor votes on the infrastructure bill, only to pull it because she could not deliver enough Democratic votes — extraordinary evidence of how difficult it is for a speaker to unite her caucus amid the forces of fragmentation. It took a disastrous election night for progressives to bury their concerns and support the bill — and several now regret having done so.The recent collapse of Build Back Better, at least for now, led to a remarkable public bloodletting between different elements within the party.Large structural forces have driven the fragmentation of politics throughout the West. On the economic front, the forces include globalization’s contribution to the stagnation of middle- and working-class incomes, rising inequality and outrage over the 2008 financial crisis. On the cultural side: conflicts over immigration, nationalism and other issues.Since the New Deal in the United States and World War II in Europe, the parties of the left had represented less affluent, less educated voters. Now those voters are becoming the base of parties on the right, with more affluent, more educated voters shifting to parties on the left. Major parties are struggling to figure out how to patch together winning coalitions in the midst of this shattering transformation.The communications revolution is also a major force generating the disabling fragmentation of politics. Across Europe, it has given rise to loosely organized, leaderless protest movements that disrupt politics and give birth to other parties — but make effective government harder to achieve.In the United States, the new communications era has enabled the rise of free-agent politicians. A Congress with more free agents is more difficult to govern. Even in their first years in office, individual members of Congress (like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ted Cruz) no longer need to work their way up through the party or serve on major committees to attract national visibility and influence.Through cable television and social media, they can find and construct their own national constituencies. Through internet fund-raising (particularly small donations), politicians (particularly from the extremes) can become effective fund-raising machines on their own. In this era, party leaders lack the leverage they once had to force party members to accept the party line. That is why speakers of the House resign or reschedule votes on which they cannot deliver.The political fragmentation that now characterizes nearly all Western democracies reflects deep dissatisfaction with the ability of traditional parties and governments to deliver effective policies. Yet perversely, this fragmentation makes it all the more difficult for governments to do so. Mr. Biden is right: Democracies must figure out how to overcome the forces of fragmentation to show they once again can deliver effective government.Richard H. Pildes, a professor at New York University’s School of Law, is the author of the casebook “The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process.”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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      Macron and Scholz Meet and Call for More ‘European Sovereignty’

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      The new German chancellor made his first foreign stop in Paris, where the two leaders discussed a more independent, bolder Europe.PARIS — On the face of it, President Emmanuel Macron, a showman, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a study in reserve, would not be natural companions. But the world has changed, and for France and Germany the imperative of building what they call a “sovereign Europe” has become overwhelming.So Mr. Scholz, who took over from Angela Merkel on Wednesday, chose France as his first foreign destination, not only because that tends to be what newly installed German chancellors do, but also because, as he said standing beside Mr. Macron in Paris on Friday, “We want to reinforce Europe, work together for European sovereignty.”The two men, who first met in Hamburg, Germany, in 2014, held a working lunch at the presidential palace that reflected “the essential need to meet quickly,” as Mr. Scholz put it afterward at a 20-minute news conference. “Our first exchanges demonstrated a solid convergence of views,” Mr. Macron said.Their tone was serious but convivial, with Mr. Macron referring repeatedly to “dear Olaf” and using the less formal “tu,” rather than “vous,” when addressing the chancellor. At the end of the news conference they fist-bumped — a far cry from the image of President François Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl holding hands on the battlefield of Verdun in 1984, but a Covid-era indication of friendship.Mr. Scholz’s embrace of “European sovereignty” was surely music to Mr. Macron’s ears, as the French president prepares to take over the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union on Jan. 1. The bloc faces an immediate crisis as Russia builds up troops on the Ukrainian border and the pandemic refuses to wane.Asked about the Russian buildup, Mr. Scholz said, “It is clear to all of us that there is no alternative to de-escalation.” Mr. Macron, who seemed skeptical of any imminent Russian threat, said, “We must avoid all useless tension.”Mr. Macron’s vision for a Europe of “power,” backed by real European military and technological capacity, tends toward the grandiose. Mr. Scholz may not like that style — his German government coalition prefers the more prosaic “enhancing European capacity to act” — but the general goal is intensely shared, perhaps more so than in the later Merkel years or at any time since the Cold War.The distance from shared goals to shared action in the European Union is always great because 27 countries have to be aligned. Still, the trauma of Covid-19 and its accompanying economic challenges have brought urgency, as has a sense of European vulnerability in a more unstable world where American leadership is no longer assured.Demonstrations in Frankfurt last week after Germany imposed new Covid regulations.Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters“I’m more optimistic than I was with Ms. Merkel toward the end,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat. “We have a window of opportunity.”That window may be narrow. Any joint Franco-German plans could be rudely interrupted in April if Mr. Macron is defeated in the French presidential election. He is the favorite, but if France lurched toward the ascendant nationalist hard right, all bets would be off.A German priority in the coming months will be to avoid that outcome, making accommodating gestures toward Mr. Macron more likely.France and Germany have always been the motor of European integration; when they stall, so does the whole project. Although the need to confront the pandemic brought budgetary breakthroughs, Europe has found itself in the shadow of Brexit and internal division while China rose and the United States turned its attention elsewhere.The 177-page coalition agreement of Mr. Scholz’s three-party government alludes to ultimate evolution toward a “federal European state.” Mr. Macron, with the election in mind, has not gone that far — the French attachment to the nation is fierce — but the mere German mention of a United States of Europe suggests new boldness and revived ambition.Still, there are differences. Where Mr. Macron speaks of European “strategic autonomy,” Mr. Scholz prefers “strategic sovereignty.” The difference is not small.“Germans do not want strategic autonomy if that means independence from the United States,” said Cathryn Clüver, the director of the German Council on Foreign Relations.The French president offered some de rigueur praise of NATO when laying out his European presidency program on Thursday. He said it had proved its “usefulness.” But he broadly views European independence as an emancipation from the United States.Germany, intensely attached for historical reasons to the American anchor of European security, is wary of any strategic distancing from Washington. This view is broadly shared in several European Union states, including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, especially at a time when Russian troops are massed on the Ukrainian border.All this complicates both the meaning and the attainability of whatever European sovereignty may be.A Christmas market in Paris last week as virus cases were rising in Europe.Ian Langsdon/EPA, via ShutterstockFrance and Germany share the view that they preserved a multilateral global system based on the rule of law and Western values while the United States, under former President Donald J. Trump, embraced nationalism and disparaged Europe.Understand Germany’s New GovernmentCard 1 of 6The post-Merkel era begins. 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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      Skateboards, Climate Change and Freedom: Germany’s Next-Generation Parliament

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      A new generation of lawmakers is entering Germany’s Parliament. They felt ignored by the previous government, so they set out to change that by winning elections.BERLIN — Emilia Fester is 23 and has yet to finish college. Max Lucks is 24 and calls himself a militant cyclist. Ria Schröder is 29 and has the rainbow flag on her Twitter profile. Muhanad Al-Halak is 31 and came to Germany from Iraq when he was 11.And all of them are now in the German Parliament.The German election result was in many ways a muddle. The winners, the Social Democrats led by Olaf Scholz, barely won. No party got more than 25.7 percent. Voters spread their ballots evenly across candidates associated with the left and the right.But one thing is clear: Germans elected their youngest ever Parliament, and the two parties at the center of this generational shift, the Greens and the Free Democrats, will not just shape the next government but are also poised to help shape the future of the country.For now, the Greens, focused on climate change and social justice, and the Free Democrats, who campaigned on civil liberties and digital modernization, are kingmakers: Whoever becomes the next chancellor almost certainly needs both parties to form a government.“We will no longer leave politics to the older generation,” said Ms. Schröder, a newly minted lawmaker for the Free Democrats from Hamburg. “The world has changed around us. We want to take our country into the future — because it’s our future.”Ria Schröder, center, the chairwoman of the youth organization of the Free Democrats, listening to a speech at the party’s European Congress in 2019.Gregor Fischer/Picture Alliance, via Getty ImagesFor decades, Germany has been governed by two rival establishment parties, each run by older men, and, more recently, by a somewhat older woman. Indeed, when Chancellor Angela Merkel took office in 2005 at age 51, she was the youngest ever chancellor. Germany’s electorate still skews older, with one in four voters over 60, yet it was a younger vote, some of it angry, that lifted the two upstart parties.Fully 44 percent of voters under 25 cast their ballot for the Greens and the Free Democrats, compared with only 25 percent in that age range who voted for Ms. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, the traditional center-left party.The most immediate effect will be felt in Parliament. Roughly one in seven lawmakers in the departing Parliament were under 40. Now the ratio is closer to one in three. (In the U.S. Congress, one in five members are 40 or younger. The average age in Congress is 58, compared with 47.5 for Germany’s new Parliament.)“We have a generational rift, a very stark polarization that didn’t exist before: It’s the under-30s vs. the over-50s,” said Klaus Hurrelmann, a sociologist who studies young people at the Hertie School in Berlin. “Young people want change and these two parties got the change vote.”The Greens finished in third place, while the Free Democrats came in fourth, both seeing their vote share rise. The split-screen quality of the race was unmistakable: Candidates for the two traditional parties campaigned for the status quo while the Free Democrats and Greens unabashedly campaigned for change.A polling station in Berlin during the election last Sunday.Lena Mucha for The New York Times“It mustn’t stay as it is,” read one Free Democrats campaign poster.The two parties are already signaling that they intend to change the old ways of doing business in German politics. Their leaders reached out to one another — an unprecedented step — before meeting with representatives of the bigger parties in advance of coalition negotiations, a process that began over the weekend.Rather than publicize their meeting with a leak to a newspaper or a public broadcaster, they posted a selfie of their four leaders on Instagram, causing a sensation in a country where political discussion has focused more on curbing social media than using it to reach new audiences.Many of the young lawmakers now moving to Berlin, like Mr. Lucks, say they will bike or — in the case of Ms. Fester — skateboard to work. Some are looking to rent communal housing. Others plan cross-party “beer pong” gatherings to meet one another. And all of them are in regular communication with their voters via social media.“What are your hopes and fears for a traffic light?” Mr. Lucks asked his followers on Instagram this week, referring to the green, yellow and red party colors of the most likely governing coalition of Greens and Free Democrats with the Social Democrats at the helm.Max Lucks, right, with Annalena Baerbock, the Greens’ candidate for chancellor, in Bochum, Germany, in August.Kay Nietfeld/Picture Alliance, via Getty ImagesWithin a couple of hours, Mr. Lucks, who was elected for the Greens, had received 200 comments. “Maintaining that direct line to my voters is really important to me,” he said. “Young people yearn to be heard. They’ve felt betrayed by politics — their issues were just not taken seriously by those in power.”The two issues that appeared to animate young voters most in the election were climate change and freedom, polls suggest.“There is no more important issue than climate change — it’s existential,” said Roberta Müller, a 20-year-old first-time voter in the Steglitz district of Berlin. “It doesn’t feel very democratic to me that older people get to decide on — and effectively destroy — our future.”The handling of the pandemic also played a big role. Schools were closed and college classes moved online, while billions of euros in aid flowed into the economy to keep businesses afloat and prevent widespread layoffs.“Hair salons were more important than education during the pandemic,” said Ms. Fester, of the Greens, who at 23 is the youngest of the 735 members of the new Parliament. “There were long discussions about how the hair salons could stay open, but universities and kindergartens remained closed.”The pandemic also put the spotlight on key workers who are often badly paid — and younger — while bringing to light how far behind Europe’s biggest economy is on developing the digital infrastructure needed to be competitive in the modern, globalized world.A younger cohort of lawmakers has also helped increase other kinds of diversity in what previously had been a mostly homogeneous chamber. There will be more women and lawmakers from ethnic minorities than ever before — and Germany’s first two transgender members of Parliament.At 31, Mr. Al-Halak, of the Free Democrats, could be considered one of the “older” new members of Parliament.Muhanad Al-Halak, who was born in Iraq before emigrating with his family to Germany, will represent a Lower Bavaria district in Parliament.Free DemocratsBorn in Iraq, he was 11 when he emigrated with his family to Germany, settling in a southern part of Lower Bavaria, which he will now represent in Parliament. He wants to serve as a voice for a new generation of Germans who were born elsewhere but have successfully learned the language and a trade — he worked at a wastewater facility — to become active members of society.“I wanted to be an example for other young people that you can get ahead as a working man, regardless of where you come from, what you look like or what religion you practice,” Mr. Al-Halak said.Despite having a woman as chancellor for 16 years, the percentage of women represented in Parliament only rose slightly from 31 percent in the previous legislature.“I know there are some people who are happy that we now have 34 percent women represented in Parliament, but I don’t think it is anything to celebrate,” said Ms. Fester, who included feminism as one of her campaign issues. “The predominance of old, white men is still very visible, not only in politics but in other areas where decisions are made and money flows.”Germany’s smaller parties have traditionally defined themselves by issues, rather than staking out broadly defined ideological stances. They also agree on several things; both parties want to legalize cannabis and lower the voting age to 16.“There are now other coordinates in the system, progressive and conservative, collectivist and individualist, that describe the differences much better than left and right,” Ms. Schröder said.Still, the two junior parties disagree on much. The Greens want to raise taxes on the rich, while the Free Democrats oppose a tax hike. The Greens believe the state is essential to address climate change and social issues, while the Free Democrats are counting on industry.A climate demonstration in Berlin last month.Markus Schreiber/Associated Press“The big question is: Will they paralyze each other or will they manage to build the novelty and innovation they represent into the next government?” said Mr. Hurrelmann, the sociologist. “The balancing act will be: You get climate, we get freedom.”This week, incoming freshman lawmakers went to the Parliament building, the Reichstag, to learn rules and procedures, as well as how to find their way around.“The first days were very exciting,” Ms. Fester said. “It was a bit like orientation week at university. You get your travel card and have to find your way around — only it is in the Reichstag.”Mr. Lucks said he still has to remind himself that it is all real.“It’s a great feeling,” he said, “but then it’s also kind of humbling: We have a big responsibility. Our generation campaigned for us and voted for us and they expect us to deliver. We can’t let them down.”Christopher F. Schuetze More

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      Do Germany’s Election Results Signal a Left Turn for Europe?

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      It is too early to tell, but the results certainly illustrate a fragmentation in politics and the growing influence of personalities.Sunday’s election in Germany ended in victory for the country’s Social Democratic Party and its candidate, Olaf Scholz. It was a remarkable comeback for a center-left party, which like many of its counterparts across Europe has been bleeding support at the ballot box for the past decade or more.So the question immediately arises whether Mr. Scholz’s victory in Germany may be a harbinger of revival more broadly for the center-left parties that were once mainstays of the continent’s politics.Inside Germany, Mr. Scholz is preparing for negotiations to form a left-leaning coalition government with the Greens and the libertarian Free Democrats. After his centrist campaign, just how left-leaning remains an open question. And nothing is guaranteed: His conservative rival, who lost by just 1.6 percentage points, has not conceded and also wants to try to form a coalition.Though the results have thrown Mr. Scholz’s conservative opponents into disarray, the landscape for the center left also remains challenging. Elsewhere in Europe, many center-left parties have watched their share of votes erode as their traditional base among unionized, industrial workers disappears and as political blocs splinter into an array of smaller parties.But after a surge among right-wing populists in recent years, there are some signs that the political pendulum may be poised to swing back. Here is a look at the factors that will influence whether a center-left revival is possible.Big-tent parties on both sides have shrunk.The German elections have cast in sharp relief the continuation of a trend that was already visible across the continent: fragmentation and volatility in political support.Only three decades ago, Germany’s two leading parties garnered over 80 percent of the vote in a national election. On Sunday, the Social Democrats received just 25.7 percent, while the Christian Democrats, together with their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, received 24.1 percent — calling into question their legitimacy as “Volkspartei” or big-tent parties that represent all elements of society.Inside a polling station, a gym at a secondary school in Berlin Neukölln, on Sunday.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesThe votes being lost by the once-dominant parties are going to parties with more narrowly defined positions — whether the Greens, animated by environmental issues, or the libertarian Free Democratic Party. If the German vote were broken down by traditional notions of “right” and “left,” it would be nearly evenly divided, with some 45 percent on each side.On the eve of the coronavirus pandemic, a survey of 14 European Union countries in 2019 by the Pew Research Center found that few voters expressed positive views of political parties. Only six out of nearly 60 were seen favorably by more than 50 percent of the populations in their countries. Populist parties across Europe also received largely poor reviews.The left has a lot of recovering to do.It remains to be seen whether the Social Democrats in Germany will be able to lead a governing coalition. But if they do, they will join a relatively small club.Of the 27 member states in the European Union, only Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Malta have distinctly center-left governments.The old voting coalitions that empowered the center-left across the continent after 1945 included industrial workers, public sector employees and urban professionals. But those groups, driven primarily by class and economic needs, have fragmented.Two decades ago, Tony Blair’s Labour Party cruised to re-election in Britain, promoting center-left policies similar to those of President Bill Clinton. Now, Labour has been out of power for more than a decade, and in recent elections it has suffered stinging losses in working-class parts of England where its support once ran deep.In France, the center-left Socialist Party has never recovered from the unpopular presidency of François Hollande and its disastrous performance in the subsequent elections. Since then, France has moved increasingly to the right, with support for the Socialists and other left-leaning parties shrinking.With an eye toward presidential elections next April, President Emmanuel Macron, who ran as a centrist in 2017, has been courting voters on the right. Polls show that he and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, are the two favorites to make it out of the first round and meet in a runoff.President Emmanuel Macron of France speaking at a police academy in Roubaix this month.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor and Socialist presidential hopeful, has been losing support since declaring her candidacy early this month. According to a poll released last Thursday, only 4 percent of potential voters said they would support her in the first round next April.And ‘left’ is not what it used to be.In the aftermath of World War II, as money flooded into Europe through the Marshall Plan and industry boomed, those who opposed Communism but were worried that capitalism could stoke instability and inequality came together under a broad umbrella of center-left parties.They favored strong trade unions and welfare states with generous education and health care systems.In Germany, as in other countries, the lines between the center left and the center right began to fade some time ago.But if there is one animating issue for many voters on the left and the right, it is the role that the European Union should play in the governance of nations.Many far-right parties have won support by casting Brussels as a regulatory overlord stripping sovereignty from the union’s member states. Ms. Merkel’s conservatives, by contrast, are very pro-European Union — yet have been wary of deepening some fiscal ties inside the bloc. Many Social Democrats argue, however, that the European Union must be strengthened through deeper integration.Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the top E.U. official Ursula von der Leyen and Mr. Macron during economic rescue discussions in Brussels in 2020.Pool photo by Francisco SecoEurope’s bonds were tested in the pandemic, and that process may have ultimately helped the Social Democrats as Germany set aside its traditional abhorrence of shared E.U. debt to unleash emergency spending.It was a plan that Mr. Scholz, who is Germany’s finance minister, drew up with his French counterpart. Ms. Merkel, who approved the deal, has since repeatedly pointed out was a one-off.Mr. Scholz’s central role in crafting the deal put him squarely on the side of Germans in favor of ever-tighter connections with their European neighbors.Personality counts for more than ever.Another common denominator in the fragmented European political landscape is that personalities seem to be far more important to voters than traditional parties and the issues they represent.There have always been outsized personalities on the European political stage. But whether it was Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl or Willy Brandt, they were more often than not guided by a set of ideological principles.The failure of the leading political parties to address the problems confronting voters has led to a new generation of leaders who position themselves as iconoclasts. Mr. Macron in France and Boris Johnson in Britain could hardly be more different. But both are opportunistic, flout convention and have crafted larger-than-life personas to command public attention. So far, voters have rewarded them.Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week.Pool photo by Eduardo MunozAngela Merkel was their polar opposite, a study in staid reticence who transcended ideological differences by exuding stability. Her party’s candidate, Armin Laschet, couldn’t convince voters that he was her natural heir, which opened the door to Mr. Scholz, who managed to cast himself as the most Merkel-like candidate — despite being in another party.Norimitsu Onishi 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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      Olaf Scholz is a Winner but Not Chancellor — Yet.

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      Olaf Scholz, the leader of the center-left Social Democrats, narrowly won the night. But now the hard part begins — building a durable governing coalition.BERLIN — For a moment it felt like he was already chancellor. As Olaf Scholz stood on the stage surrounded by euphoric followers chanting his name and celebrating him as if he were the next leader of Germany, he was the clear winner of the night.Mr. Scholz had just done the unthinkable — carry his long moribund center-left Social Democrats to victory, however narrow, in elections on Sunday that were the most volatile in a generation.But if winning wasn’t hard enough, the hardest part may be yet to come.Mr. Scholz, an affable but disciplined politician, most recently served as the vice chancellor and finance minister in the outgoing government of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Though he leads the party opposing her conservative Christian Democratic Union, he came out on top by persuading voters that he was not so much an agent of change as one of stability and continuity. In a race without an incumbent he ran as one.It is a balancing act that may be hard to sustain for a onetime socialist who today is firmly rooted in the center of a fast-changing political landscape.It’s not that Germans have suddenly shifted left. In fact, three in four Germans did not vote for his party at all, and Mr. Scholz campaigned on raising the minimum wage, strengthening German industry and fighting climate change — all mainstream positions. Despite earning the most votes, Mr. Scholz is not yet assured of becoming chancellor. And if he does, he risks being absorbed in wrangling among multiple coalition partners, not to speak of rebellious factions within his own party.On Monday, as his conservative rival continued to insist that he would work to form a government, the momentum seemed to swing behind Mr. Scholz as it became increasingly evident he had the strongest hand to play in coalition talks involving two other parties. “The voters have spoken,” he told reporters confidently.Still, his will be no easy task.Mr. Scholz has been a familiar face in German politics for more than two decades and served in several governments. But even now it’s hard to know what kind of a chancellor he would be.A fiery young socialist in the 1970s, he gradually mellowed into a post-ideological centrist. Today he is to the right of significant parts of his party — not unlike President Biden in the United States, to whom he is sometimes compared. He lost his party’s leadership contest two years ago to two leftists.His party’s surprise revival in the election rested heavily on his own personal popularity. But many warn that Mr. Scholz’s appeal does not solve the deeper problems and divisions that have plagued the Social Democrats, known by their German acronym S.P.D.“None of the claims of staleness or political irrelevance leveled at the S.P.D. over the past few years have gone away,” the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote on Monday. Or as Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff of the German Marshall Fund put it: “Social Democrats aren’t offering a new package, they’re offering a centrist who makes you forget the party behind it.”Like many of its sister parties elsewhere in Europe, Germany’s Social Democrats have been in crisis for years, losing traditional working-class voters to the extremes on the left and right and young urban voters to the Greens.Now Mr. Scholz will not only have to satisfy his own leftist party base, but he must also deal with a wholly new political landscape.Instead of two dominant parties competing to go into coalition with one partner, four midsize parties are now jockeying for a place in government. For the first time since the 1950s, the next chancellor will have to get at least three different parties behind a governing deal — that’s how Mr. Scholz’s conservative runner-up, Armin Laschet, could theoretically still beat him to the top job.A new era in politics has officially begun in Germany — and it looks messy. Germany’s political landscape, long a place of sleepy stability where several chancellors stayed on for more than a decade, has fractured into multiple parties that no longer differ all that much in size.“There is a structural shift going on that I don’t think we have understood yet,” said Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff. “We are confronted with a change in the party system that we didn’t see coming just weeks ago. A multidimensional chess game has opened.”Olaf Scholz (2-L), with leading candidates of the SPD in Berlin Franziska Giffey, (L) and in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Manuela Schwesig (3-L) with flowers following a statement to the media in the aftermath of the German general elections, in Berlin.Focke Strangmann/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Scholz is walking into a fiendishly complicated process where the power to decide who will become the next leader lies almost more with the two smaller parties that will be part of any future administration: the progressive Greens, who at 14.8 percent had the best result in their history; and the pro-business Free Democrats, with 11.5 percent. Together, these two kingmakers are now stronger than either of the two main parties.In another first, the Free Democrats signaled that they would hold talks with the Greens first before turning to the larger parties.The Free Democrats have never been shy about their preference to govern with the conservatives. The Greens are a much more natural fit with the Social Democrats, but might see advantages in negotiating with a weaker candidate. On the state level they have co-governed successfully with the Christian Democrats for years.Armin Laschet, right, and CDU party Secretary General Paul Ziemiak leaving a news conference on Monday at the Christian Democratic Union party headquarters in Berlin.Martin Meissner/Associated PressMeanwhile, Mr. Laschet, whose unpopularity and campaign blunders sent his party crashing nine percentage points to its lowest election result ever, said he would not concede on “moral” grounds, ignoring a growing number of calls from his own camp to accept defeat.“No one should behave as if they alone can build a government,” Mr. Laschet told reporters Monday. “You become chancellor if you can build a majority.”It would not be the first time that someone who lost the popular vote became chancellor. In 1969, 1976 and 1980, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, both center-left chancellors, formed coalition governments having lost the popular vote. But both got upward of 40 percent of the vote and did not face the complex multiparty negotiations now getting underway in Germany.Several conservatives urged Mr. Laschet to concede on Monday.“It was a defeat,” said Volker Bouffier, the governor of the state of Hesse, adding that others were now called upon to form a government.Ellen Demuth, another conservative lawmaker, warned Mr. Laschet that his refusal to concede was hurting his party further. “You have lost,” Ms. Demuth tweeted. “Please recognize that. Avoid further hurting the C.D.U. and resign.”The state leader of the conservative youth wing was equally adamant. “We need a true renewal,” said Marcus Mündlein and that, he said, could be successful only if Mr. Laschet “bears the consequences of this loss in trust and steps down.”An opinion poll released after the election showed that more than half of Germans preferred a coalition led by Mr. Scholz, compared to a third who said they wanted Mr. Laschet at the helm. When asked who they preferred as chancellor, 62 percent opted for Mr. Scholz, compared to 16 percent for Mr. Laschet.Some argued that a Scholz-led government would present his party with an opportunity to revive its declining fortunes. “It’s a momentous moment for German social democracy which was on the verge of eternal decline,” Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff said. “Mr. Scholz will have a very powerful position because he alone is the reason his party won.” More