> I'd say the chances of the Grand Coalition look really good since the
> alternative is a much more left-leaning Germany in direct conflict with
> the US. I doubt German voters have the stomach to take on the US agenda
> with all that would mean. I guess it's a good day for the WTO and the New
> World Order.
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German voters, like everyone else, worry about the dangerous US foreign
policy agenda, but it the agenda of their homegrown German capitalists which
worries them most.
Casting a long shadow over the election - and German economic and political life generally over the past period - has been the East European, especially Polish, working class which, though it didn't have a vote, mightily affected the outcome.
That's because German capital has been exporting manufacturing jobs to lower-wage Poland and other former Comecon countries, and where it hasn't exported them, has used the threat of relocation to wring concessions from the German working class.
The argument used by the SPD in office and the CDU in opposition is that Germany's relatively higher wage and benefit costs, corporate taxes, and unemployment and welfare programs were the source of capital flight to the east and double digit German unemployment, and that joblessness would continue to increase unless German working and social conditions were brought closer in line to its eastern neighbours. German workers at the political and workplace level have, for the most part, grudgingly succumbed to this argument.
The Left party argued that the existing social wage could be maintained if the SPD tax cuts for the corporations and the wealthy were reimposed, but the Left party never had any pretensions of forming a government, and German voters were probably skeptical that it would be able to carry out its program in the face of German capitalist blackmail even if it were to come to power.
In the old days, the unions used to close the wage gap by going into cheap labour regions and organizing the unorganized. But that was when capital was much less mobile and largely confined within the boundries of the nation state, where the working class was more homogenous and spoke the same language.