After losing two key regional elections, the German government pledges to listen more closely – By Peter H. Koepf

Humility was in the air. As the results came in for the state elections in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, the losers – there were many – were doing their best to demonstrate their meekness. The day’s biggest loser, Foreign Minister and FDP leader Guido Westerwelle, summed up the lesson learned in three words: “We have understood.”

The two regional elections were in effect a national referendum against nuclear power. Despite outstanding economic data, the CDU – the “nuclear power party” – was kicked out of government in Baden-Württemberg for the first time in 57 years. The pro-market (and pro-nuclear) FDP was catapulted out of the state legislature in Rhineland-Palatinate and almost suffered the same fate in Baden-Württemberg. And because Germans trust the Greens most on the nuclear issue, the Social Democrats also lost votes to the environmentalists.

Voters were not convinced by the federal government’s reaction to the Fukushima disaster – a three-month “moratorium” on longer operating periods for Germany’s nuclear reactors. The extension, pushed through parliament last fall, watered down the historic nuclear phase-out adopted by the SPD/Green government in 2000. The policy suspension was widely perceived as an election tactic on the part of CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel. After the elections, she went a step further. “My view has changed,” Merkel said. “There will be a change in energy policy,” promised FDP General Secretary Christian Lindner.

Other major policy reversals by the federal government had also not escaped the attention of voters in Germany’s southwest: The decision to abstain on UN Security Council Resolution 1973, allowing the international community to come to the aid of the civilian population in Libya – despite Foreign Minister Westerwelle’s vocal support for their uprising; and the agreement in Brussels to use taxpayers’ money to prop up the euro – a step that Chancellor Merkel had previously ruled out.

Merkel took a shellacking for these turnarounds, even from her own party’s grandees. “The lesson from Japan cannot now be the famous backward roll,” former Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) told the mass-market newspaper Bild just two days before the elections. Germany should stick to a “conditional but yet clear yes to nuclear power,” Kohl demanded.

In regard to Libya, Volker Rühe, a former CDU defense minister under Kohl, accused Merkel of destroying “the supporting pillars of conservative policy” with a “combination of dithering and incompetence.” CDU lawmaker and security policy expert Wolfgang Bosbach criticized the breach with Germany’s Western allies: “We should have stood by them.”

The day after the vote, the chorus of critics swelled. “This government’s style has long been merely pragmatism and tactics,” complained Josef Schlarmann, head of the influential conservative business lobby for small and medium-sized companies. “People no longer know what the government stands for.”

Other representatives of the pro-business wing of Merkel’s party said she had “no direction.” The CDU has lost its footing on policy, remarked Kurt Joachim Lauk, president of the CDU Economic Council. “The party is no longer making an impression in the very areas it claims as its own: economic and fiscal policy, nuclear power, protecting industry.”

The FDP barely squeaked into the legislature in Baden-Württemberg, a former party stronghold. Party leaders duly recited their mea culpas yet utterly failed to grasp why the course they charted during the nuclear power debate was at all wrong. On the same day Merkel announced the moratorium, Economy Minister Rainer Brüderle (FDP) told a meeting of industry leaders that “given the looming regional elections there is pressure on policymakers and their decisions are not always rational.” When his comments were leaked to the press, voters took them to mean that it would be a return to business as usual after the elections, reinforcing the general impression that the moratorium was a cynical campaign ploy.

Brüderle resigned as FDP leader in Rhineland-Palatinate on the day after the regional election but kept his federal cabinet post in Berlin. The Free Democrats hope to “reposition” their leadership at a party conference in May, though national chairman Westerwelle is not questioning his own position – yet.

The Greens were the only real winners on March 27. They will lead the government in the Baden-Württemberg capital Stuttgart with the Social Democrats as their junior partner. Winfried Kretschmann is set to become the first Green state premier in the party’s 30-year history.

The strongest performance by a Green candidate in Baden-Württemberg was by a Muslim woman, whose father was a former “guest worker.” Muhterem Aras, who came to Germany from Turkey 33 years ago as a 12-year old, garnered 42.5 percent of the vote in her district. Her success is a clear sign of progress on two issues close to Green hearts: equality and integration.

In Rhineland-Palatinate, the Greens will govern alongside SPD state premier Kurt Beck, who lost his overall majority after the Social Democrat share of the vote slipped by 10 percent from the previous election.

The most profound change from these two regional elections, for the Greens and the country as a whole, could result if the CDU-led government in Berlin really does abandon plans to extend the life of reactors and returns to the original nuclear phase-out. Doing so would remove the biggest obstacle to a potential future Christian Democrat/Green coalition – a natural alliance of two conservative parties.