The Conversation: This small German town took back the power – and went fully renewable

Addressing the climate emergency demands huge amounts of investment, but it also requires drastic changes to the forms of ownership and governance that underpin the contemporary capitalist economy. We need to move towards models of economic democracy, where everything from investment decisions to wages are decided democratically by workers and citizens. [...]

With 100% of its electricity coming from renewable sources (and more to spare), the German town of Wolfhagen is particularly demonstrative of what can be achieved when municipalities adopt innovative approaches to the ownership and governance of key infrastructure. Significant lessons can be drawn from Wolfhagen’s hybrid model of ownership, which can – and must – be applied to sectors beyond energy production. [...]

What the experience of Wolfhagen shows is that the rapid decarbonisation of our energy supply is wholly compatible with new models of economic democracy. Strong and effective action to address the climate crisis can be met through processes of collective empowerment, without resorting to ecological authoritarianism.

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Social Europe: Searching For Germany’s Volkspartei

Of course, the political landscape in Hesse and Bavaria is not homogenous, forcing separate analysis to explain the results. This is necessary despite their similarities. The most remarkable being, for the first time, the AfD will enter Bavaria’s parliament, Maximilianeum, and Hesse’s Hessischer. A far-right party with a taste for the politically distasteful making such strides in Germany is alarming. The Greens are closing in from another direction, up to 24 percent in one recent poll, with the SPD down to 13 percent. [...]

One must consider the contexts that produce results that is shaking up Germany’s politics to the extent that Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to announce she’d step down in 2021, much earlier than she would have wanted to. Of course, no sage who follows German politics would wager Ms. Merkel had plans to seek another term. She delivered a strong economy prior to 2017. Her exit is a chance for the country’s political centre to strengthen.[...]

The Greens’ success in Bavaria is not a SPD death knell. It’s a sign of a weakening political middle. It took the AfD a single run in Bavaria to achieve (10.7 percent) what the Greens took 36 years to achieve with their 17.5 percent win. Until now, the Greens had been in single digits ever since they burst onto Bavaria’s political scene. The last time the SPD got their lowest score, 18.6 percent, was in 2008. Bavarians do not have an enduring love for the Greens. Proclamations such as “Green is the new Red,” based on an infatuation, are unwise. The Hessians have had a relatively mature affair with the Greens, giving them a mandate in the early 80s and allowing their slow and steady progress to date. These contrasting histories do not provide a full explanation for the SPD’s loss in either case.

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Politico: The dispensable chancellor

Visions of the German chancellor as the only person standing between humanity and the apocalypse became fashionable after U.S. President Donald Trump’s election to the White House. But they were always overblown. Merkel herself knows that Germany — with its poorly-equipped military, deeply ingrained pacifism and historical hang-ups — is in no position to defend the West.[...]

But now Germany, too, has become more politically unstable, with the rise of the far right populist Alternative for Deutschland and support for the two establishment parties of the post-war order — Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democrats — collapsing.[...]

But Merkel is also the victim of larger social forces sweeping the West, which have led to the collapse of the political center she bloodlessly embodied. Given Germany’s history and taboos, the sort of mass, nationalist political movements present in most other Western countries had eluded it since the end of World War II. That special dispensation, regretfully, is now over. In this sense, Germany is becoming more “normal.”

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Politico: Merkel’s twilight heralds German turmoil

The decision injects further instability into German politics, increasing the likelihood that Merkel’s grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), already hanging by a thread, will collapse in the coming months. What’s more, it now appears inevitable that the race to succeed her atop the CDU will unleash a bitter battle over its direction, one that will further distract the party from governing.[...]

While Merkel said she intends to remain chancellor until the end of the legislative period in 2021, her decision not to run again for the CDU’s chairmanship when her term expires in December unleashed forces she can no longer control.[...]

She insisted the move wasn’t triggered by Sunday’s election, but by her decision over the summer, which she had not previously shared with the public, not to pursue another term as chancellor. Handing over the reins of the party now would ease the transition and allow the CDU, still Germany’s dominant party despite recent losses, to retain its strength, she argued. If Merkel really planned Monday’s move months ago, she kept the decision close to her chest, not even telling Kramp-Karrenbauer, who on Sunday evening insisted Merkel intended to run again for the CDU chairmanship.[...]

A persistent critique of Merkel in the CDU’s more conservative quarters has long been that she moved the party too far to the left, abandoning its roots. Much of that criticism has focused on the refugee crisis but it extends to social issues as well, with Merkel skeptics accusing her of steering the party away from its traditional values on family and religion. Merkel’s belief that “Islam is a part of Germany” is one of a number of her positions that conservatives take issue with.

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The Atlantic: A Slow, Somber End to the Merkel Era

Merkel—who has led her party for 18 years and her country for 13—will continue as Germany’s chancellor until the next federal elections, expected in 2021, but she will relinquish her position as the leader of the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) in December and won’t run for further political office. “I am sure today that it’s time to open a new chapter,” she told reporters in Berlin.[...]

But while she survived all those battles on the surface, each dealt a blow to her image as the country’s beacon of stability and, perhaps more importantly, to her standing within her party. “It’s quite clear that the election last September was a turning point,” Jan Techau, who heads the German Marshall Fund’s Europe project, said in an interview. “Since then, she’s been under tremendous pressure to give some sort of indication as to how long this can last.”[...]

Hesse was the final straw: The state-level election there very clearly became a referendum on the performance of Merkel’s government in Berlin, and both the CDU and the center-left SPD posted significant losses as a result. Despite Merkel’s personal involvement in the campaign—she stumped with Hesse Premier Volker Bouffier across the state multiple times—her party dropped more than 10 percentage points in the past five years. Merkel nodded to the Hesse results in her remarks Monday, saying the party’s support there was “disappointing and bitter” and a “clear signal that things can’t go on as they are.”[...]

But it also poses a challenge: Whoever takes over from Merkel as party leader is someone she will have to work closely with for the remainder of her chancellorship. A like-minded CDU leader could make that transition easier than a rival. Merkel has nevertheless said she is ready to work with whomever is chosen to replace her. “I am someone who can work very well together with a lot of different people, and I think I have a reputation for it,” Merkel said.

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Politico: Merkel’s coalition lives to fight another day — just

Angela Merkel’s “grand coalition” of conservatives and Social Democrats (popularly known as the “GroKo”) suffered substantial, though not crippling, losses in a regional election in the state of Hesse on Sunday. While the result was somewhat better than predicted for the major parties and should quiet fears of an imminent coalition collapse, it highlighted how fragile and unloved the Berlin government has become after little more than half a year in office.[...]

The chancellor’s CDU won 27 percent of the vote in Hesse, down from 38.3 percent in the last election in 2013, while the Social Democrats (SPD) finished second with 20.1 percent, dropping from 30.7 percent, according to a projection by Infratest dimap, a polling institute, for ARD public television. The Greens won 19.6 percent, nearly doubling their 2013 result.[...]

National issues dominated the campaign in Hesse, a wealthy region that is home to Germany’s financial capital Frankfurt. That turned the election into a referendum on the performance of Merkel’s coalition with the SPD, which has been plagued by infighting since it took office in March.[...]

Above all, the result signals that German politics have become more volatile than at any time since World War II, meaning established parties are no longer able to rely on the allegiance of core constituencies. For example, nearly 75 percent of voters who abandoned the CDU and more than 50 percent of those who left the SPD said they did so in order to “send the party a message.”

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