IN THE PENULTIMATE week of Germany’s election campaign, it was children, apparently prompted by mischievous television-programme makers, who turned out to be the sharpest political interviewers. They caught out Tino Chrupalla, one of the two co-heads of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), who says he wants more German songs and poetry taught in school—but could not name his favourite (or indeed any) German poem. They asked Armin Laschet, the beleaguered chancellor-candidate of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sibling, the Christian Social Union (CSU), whether Hans-Georg Maassen, ex-boss of the domestic intelligence service, was “a Nazi”. (Mr Maassen, a member of Mr Laschet’s CDU, stepped down in 2018 after being accused of downplaying far-right violence and having links to the AfD.) And one of the Kinder told Olaf Scholz, the chancellor-candidate of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the country’s finance minister, that his mother lost all the money she invested in Wirecard shares. So, he went on, could Mr Scholz—whose ministry oversees BaFin, the financial regulator that missed the brewing problems at the payment-processing company—have prevented Wirecard’s spectacular collapse?
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For weeks Mr Scholz has shone as the unexpected front-runner in the campaign. But in recent days he has had a bumpier time. On September 20th he is due to be summoned for questioning by the Bundestag’s finance committee. The CDU/CSU bloc has stepped up its attack on the finance minister over three scandals on his watch: the failings of BaFin in the Wirecard affair; a multi-billion tax fraud through “cum-ex” share deals; and irregularities at the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), Germany’s main anti-money laundering agency. Public prosecutors carried out searches last week at the finance ministry in Berlin as part of an investigation into alleged obstruction of justice at the FIU. They are investigating whether staff of the unit failed to communicate warnings from banks about possible money-laundering to the police.
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The SPD is still expected to get more votes than any other party, but it—or whoever else leads the next government—is likely to need two coalition partners. Christian Lindner, leader of the liberal, businessophile Free Democrats (FDP), will not make it easy for Mr Scholz to form a “traffic light” coalition with his party and the Greens. He proclaimed that he “fails to imagine what kind of offer the SPD or Greens can make us liberals which will be attractive to the FDP, as well as to their own grassroots supporters”. The prerequisite for the FDP joining any coalition, he said, was respect for the debt ceiling enshrined in the constitution and a promise not to raise taxes. This clashes with the SPD’s and the Greens’ goal of boosting public investment and increasing taxes (not to mention redistributing wealth). Building a coalition, never easy, will be harder this time because trios are harder to form than duos. And politics in Germany, as elsewhere, has become more polarised.
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In some places, as the campaign draws to a close, politics is getting nastier, too. Last week the eastern city of Zwickau ordered The Third Path, a far-right splinter party, to remove its posters emblazoned with “Hang the Greens” within three days. But this week a court down the road in Chemnitz allowed The Third Path to keep putting them up, although not within 100 metres of the Greens’ own placards. The administrative court accepted The Third Path’s argument that the slogan was not to be taken literally, especially in the context of an election, and that the right to free speech justified keeping the posters. Zwickau is appealing against the court’s decision.
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Greta Thunberg, a Swedish schoolgirl and prominent climate activist, has announced that she will take part in a protest in Berlin, organised by Fridays for Future, a climate movement, on September 24th, two days before the election. A boost for the Greens? Ah, no. In an interview with Der Tagesspiegel, a Berlin daily, Ms Thunberg emphasised that she is not lobbying for the party. For the pigtailed activist no German party or politician treats the climate crisis as an emergency. Germany, she points out, plans to quit coalmining only by 2038. That, she says, shows a woeful lack of urgency, whatever the parties’ hues. ■