Newsweek is pretty excited (over-excited, I think) about Merkel's speech in Davos and what it might mean. Germany's new Chancellor is certainly talking the talk and making a case for reform, but can she deliver?
Like Canadia's new PM Stephen Harper, who faces a related situation, Markel believes that incremental changes, pursued consistently over time, will get her country where it needs to go. I tend to suggest that the first vitiates the second by mobilizing opposition without delivering the associated benefits of real reform.
To paraphrase a certain US Democrat: "Ms. Merkel, you are no Margaret Thatcher." Having said that, she won't be completely useless, either.
The European system's internal contradictions are rooted in demographics, and cannot be escaped. A rapidly aging population, plus large bureaucracies and a culture that stifle economic growth, plus massive social entitlements that grow with age, is a situation with only one possible outcome. In the end, therefore, the contradictions must be faced. The only question is: faced before or after they create ruin?
It's like any AA maxim: first, you have to admit you have a problem. Will it be before rock bottom? Or after? That why bringing clarity and honesty to the debates, and setting down the markers against the current coccoon of selfishness and denial, is the first step.
If Merkel leaves that process further ahead than it was when she arrived, she will have put down some important markers. She will also have begun shaping the debates toward the day when Europe's looming fiscal and governance catastrophe becomes clearer.
When those days arrive, more Europeans will be looking for alternatives and critiques. Given Europe's history, and the likely unsavoriness of many of those alternatives, having markers on the board matters.
"Show me" - Rumsfeld would say.
Take into account the fact the she has a slim majority in the Bundestag and the inertia of a Socialist supercharged burocratic system that controls above 80 million souls...
Therefore I am pretty skeptical.
Thank Godness, the FPD (classic liberal party), the ones who usually have had a better perspective in economics and foreign policy, are not present in today's government coalition. Their pressure from the opposition will be applied in the right direction.
European problems are clear, as the solution to them. The question is not about, in my opinion, identify them and debate them. The problem is that there is a great percentage of population working for the government-owned sector, with better salaries, or receiving subsidies, and they don't want to give up these privileges at any cost. They don't even want to hear about it, they name it "social justice". That is the reason leftist parties are so powerful in Europe, when usually their economic policies are disastrous. Many of their voters are just outside the market and don't feel the heat (though they know it is hot). A tight control over the media does the rest.
She has a large majority in the Bundestag but that is because she is in coallition with the socialist SPD which makes governing difficult.
She also wants German women to breed...
German women told: we need more babies
By Kate Connolly in Berlin
(Daily Telegraph 1/28/2006)
Chancellor Angela Merkel has pushed Germany's low birth rate to the top of the political agenda for the first time since the Nazi era as an expert said the nation could die out if the trend continued.
A third of German women are not having children, a remarkable figure even compared with low birth rates in the rest of Europe. Among graduates the figure is as high as 40 per cent. Every year 100,000 more Germans die than are born and each generation is shrinking by about a third.
Even in the poverty and despair after the Second World War, more babies were born than now. The figure has slumped to 1.3 children per woman, far short of the replacement rate of 2.1. Some observers attribute the trend to young people's reluctance to sacrifice their comfortable way of life and leisure time to bring up the next generation.
Others argue that German society expects women to stay at home to look after the family and that child care is inadequate and expensive. Mrs Merkel, 51, is not the best role model: she has no children. Asked why, she said: "It just did not fit in with my career path." But she is fully aware that the onus is on her, the country's first female leader, to improve the lot of women, raise the birth rate and put Germany back at the top as an economic power within a decade.
"If the birth rate continues to fall, Germans are at risk of dying out," said Harald Michel, the head of the Institute for Applied Demography. He foresees a future in which the workforce will be unable to support the elderly, nor indeed the country. Past reluctance to tackle the problem is largely explained by the sensitivity of child-bearing in a country which, under the Nazis, did all it could to raise the birth rate for the state.
"The Nazi ideal of kinder, küche, kirche (children, kitchen, church) still prevails," said Jutta Schmidt, 33, a sociologist and mother of two children from Hamburg. "The pressure on women to fulfil the maternal role, coupled with the lack of support to carry it out, such as part-time jobs and child care provision, is so great that many would rather forgo the opportunity than risk failure."
In Nazi times women were awarded motherhood medals for bearing children. Child bearing was strictly under the control of the state, not the individual. Had Ursula von der Leyen, 47, been a mother in the Third Reich, she would have won the silver medal. She is a gynaecologist, a mother of seven and, as the family minister, is Mrs Merkel's greatest hope. She says that Germany is "extremely backward" in its attitude towards the family. Unless the birth rate rises, "we will have to turn out the light". Mrs von der Leyen, a member of the Christian Democratic Union, has offered women one-year wage replacement subsidies and to raise the amount of child care that can be offset against tax. But some of her proposals, such as encouraging fathers to stay at home for two months after the birth of a child, have provoked stiff opposition even from male party colleagues. They accuse her of wanting to "tie men to the nappies".
For many, child care and not money is at the root of the problem. The country that invented the kindergarten 170 years ago is pitifully lacking in child care places. Only 10 per cent of children under three have access to pre-school care and most of those are sent home at noon, a 2001 study showed. In Denmark the figure is 64 per cent and in Britain 34 per cent. The problem is exacerbated by employers who are unwilling to help workers with young children - and schools, most of which also close at noon.
"People have to give up their careers because there are no child care places," said Renate Köcher, the director of the Allensbach polling institute. "And because they have given up their jobs, we have neglected to create more child care places."
Germany is also a country in which everything happens comparatively late. The average starting school age is almost seven. University takes the best part of a decade to complete, so the average student is in her late twenties when she graduates. Therefore, finding a job, particularly in these days of high unemployment, stands much higher on the list of priorities than having babies.
University takes the best part of a decade to complete
Well, it is true that at least this is changing: new university degrees, copied from the Anglosaxon world, take only three years.