Change in Germany Is Cosmetic
BONN -- A group of Free Democratic Party campaign workers didn't find many takers when they tried to foist pamphlets and balloons on pedestrians here on the eve of Sunday's election. I asked one of them why the Free Democrats -- the closest thing Germany has to a Thatcherite or Reaganite conservative party -- were attracting so little interest. "People here don't always like our message," he sighed. "They don't want Germany to be like America."</br></br>That is an assessment I heard throughout Germany in the run-up to the election. Alarming rates of unemployment and signs that the country is losing its competitive edge have convinced the German people that the welfarist "social market economy" that has served them since the end of World War II is seriously ill. But aside from the 6% to 7% of voters who regularly back the FDP, there is little support for a wholesale change of the old system. It is said that the laissez-faire capitalism that has fueled growth in the U.S. is somehow un-German and un-European, a risky experiment with what is perceived to be a uniquely American culture of slums, crime and rampant individualism.</br></br>That mentality -- the desire for change, but only a bit of it -- explains the enormous appeal of Gerhard Schroeder, Germany's new chancellor-elect. He speaks in lofty terms of the future, but the success of his message is in its implication that Germany can reclaim a past when the welfare state seemed to work. The voters screamed for "change," but all they really wanted is the promise of a more functional status quo.</br></br>"This is a conservative country with conservative attitudes," says Dieter Roth, a pollster with Forschungsgruppe Wahlen in Mannheim. He means conservative in the European sense: "The German people want security -- social security. They have been socialized behind the German {economic} model." Mr. Roth adds that while Germans don't fully believe it is possible to maintain a socialist economy in today's world, Mr. Schroeder has managed to convince the country that it just might be.</br></br>What does this all mean for the future of the world's third-largest economy? Despite Mr. Schroeder's claims, German socialism has seen its last days. Tanglesome regulations, one of the world's heaviest tax burdens and the most expensive labor force in the Western world are eroding the competitiveness of German corporations. The subsequent unemployment is contributing to a rotten culture of dependency. (Sixteen percent of able-bodied Germans are unemployed if you include, as government statistics do not, sources of hidden unemployment, such as those given part-time jobs by the government.)