Technology | 2009.08.28
We should take more notice of this woman at the top | Martin Kettle
Brown should drop his Obama pretensions and look to Germany for his inspiration. Angela Merkel has got a lot right
Angela Merkel may have been crowned the most powerful woman in the world – and for the fourth year in succession too, according to the latest Forbes magazine list – but you would never know it, or understand why it is so, from the derisory level of interest that the British political class and our media take in either her or the great country she leads.
Yesterday I did an internet search of British coverage of next month\'s German general election. You didn\'t know there was one ? You are in good company, because the German election on 27 September has barely received any coverage at all in the UK yet. My search produced embarrassingly slim pickings.
With depressing inevitability, just about the only German campaign story to have yet broken through the British indifference was about the Berlin candidate whose unauthorised election posters have featured Merkel\'s cleavage . This tells us more about Britain than about Germany. If it were not for the fact that the German chancellor has breasts, election interest here would have been even more vestigial.
Given that the German economy is the most important in Europe, emerging out of recession in a way that Britain can only envy, and given also that Germany is by some distance the largest and most powerful nation in the EU, you might just think that a German election would attract more coverage. Please be clear. I\'m not asking for nightly campaign reports on the BBC news in the run-up to the vote, or daily spreads in every supposedly serious paper, or batteries of maps and charts on every website – though personally I would be like a pig in muck if they were on offer. But I do demand a bit more collective recognition that what happens in Germany is more inherently important – and more relevant to our own concerns – than most of the British political class can be bothered to grasp.
It is impossible not to contrast the political class\'s collective mental black-out about Germany with its seemingly insatiable appetite for the affairs of the US. I need to cover my back here. I\'m not saying America is uninteresting – I have bought yet another two books on US politics this week – or that we need to have less focus on America. The US is both compellingly interesting and the paramount nation in our world. I do say, however, that the British need to accept that there are other compellingly interesting nations as well as, and a lot closer to home than, America – Germany prominent among them.
Is it not irrational, as well as more than a little demeaning, that the British press has written so much more about Sarah Palin this year than it has written about Merkel? Of course, Palin must not be ignored. All the same, the record shows that Palin is a populist ignoramus, a political failure, an election loser, comes from a thinly populated place thousands of miles away, holds no power at all and does not feature in the Forbes list in spite of its American bias. Merkel, on the other hand, is intelligent, successful, a winner, lives in the biggest country within a couple of hours of Heathrow and is powerful enough to be top of the list. What does it say about us that we show such obsessively disproportionate interest in the former rather than the latter?
Part of what it says is that British political culture is introverted and lazy, not to say infantilised and hostile to understanding. It\'s not good enough to say that the disjunction in knowledge is all down to the language barrier, though the dreadful decline in the study of German here is surely not irrelevant to this lack of intellectual curiosity. Yet if our political class really took an interest in all English-speaking countries, and was inhibited from understanding European national politics only by not knowing their languages, then we would at least know something about politics in Ireland, Canada and New Zealand, as well as the US. Yet few of us do.
This incorrigible narrowness of national outlook is an overlooked aspect of the decline of our politics. A political culture which thinks it has nothing to learn from any other except America – whose institutions and culture are in fact hugely different from ours – is one that will sleepwalk more easily into crisis, as ours has done. But the particular tragedy of our insularity is that Germany has in many ways got more to teach us about policy and politics than the US. If only our politicians holidayed on Rügen, not Martha\'s Vineyard.
Part of this is about understanding the enduring virtues and stability of the German social market model, with its clearly defined and balanced relationship between the state and the business sector, its lower levels of personal debt, its export and manufacturing-led balance of payments, its stronger investment in sustainable technologies and its well-managed, good value public services, to say nothing of its industrial democracy and proportional representation electoral system. Germany has got a lot of things right that we have got wrong.
But it is also about grasping the lessons of Germany\'s modern political evolution. Merkel\'s CDU/CSU is on 37% in this week\'s Forsa opinion poll, with her prospective liberal Free Democrat coalition partners on 14%. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, are now down to 22%, with the Greens 12% and the Linke, the left party, on 11%.
These figures have several lessons for Labour and Gordon Brown. One is that voters in bad economic times do not automatically take it out on incumbents; Merkel\'s good sense is a much more useful political model for Brown than delusions of reinventing himself as a British Barack Obama, or the man who solved the world\'s problems (or not). A second is that a centre-left that turns in on itself and gets out of touch with the voters is at risk of catastrophic marginalisation and continuing fragmentation. The decline of the SPD is already a stark warning for Labour, and it could get worse.
In his farewell blog as the BBC\'s Europe editor, the excellent Mark Mardell wrote this month that experience has taught him that Germany is not just the most important country in Europe. It also, he said, has a greater sense of responsibility and an ability to reflect upon itself. "It is probably the most grown-up country in the world today," he concluded.
A grown-up country – and with a grown-up leader like Merkel too. It is a beguiling thought and perhaps, in Germany, it is even a reality too. But it is certainly not a reality in Britain. Bring on the German lessons.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]any-angela-merkel-gordon-brown
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