CDU later? Germany’s topsy-turvy election

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. It's already relatively easy to get a gun in America, but it's even easier to get a kit to build your own without the trouble of a background check or the traceability of a serial number. We look into the push to clamp down on these ghost guns and there was a time that bands could prove their countercultural credentials by picking a controversial name. As sensibilities and sensitivities have changed, though some groups are now choosing to rebrand. But first, it's now less than a month until Germany's elections and the situation is looking ever more uncertain. The only sure thing is that the government will again be a coalition of parties. During the campaign's first televised debate on Sunday, three leading candidates sparred. Armin Lashet, the chancellor candidate from Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, or CIA party, went after Olaf Scholz, the candidate from the spd, the Social Democrats, about his cozying up to another party Die Linka Way on the far left, Mr. Schultz batted it away with characteristic pragmatism. His SPD party has been in a coalition government with Mrs. Merkel's CDU since 2013. Annalena Baerbock of the third highest polling Green Party said that coalition considerations would come down to a stance on the climate and that the CDU simply wasn't green enough. Angela Merkel is the first post war Chancellor not to stand for re election. But her party was seen as certain to be the big partner in a new government. That is until very recently.

The big story in Germany's election campaign now is the extraordinary collapse in support for the center right Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union. And conversely, the incredible rise of the Social Democrats under Olaf Scholz, their candidate for the Chancellery.

Tom Nuttall is the Economist's Berlin bureau chief.

We had a poll yesterday that put the SPD 5 percentage points ahead of the CDU CSU 25 to 20%. And if someone had said to me two or three months ago that this is what we'd be looking at less than a month before voting day, I would have thought they were completely crazy. It's absolutely extraordinary just how volatile this election campaign has turned out to be.

And so why is it that the Social Democrats have surged recently?

It's a good question and I'm not really sure that anybody has the complete answer to that. But I think the place to start looking is at the candidates that each of the parties have put up for the Chancellery. Olaf Scholz, the SPD's candidate, he's pretty well known to the electorate. He's the Finance Minister, he's the Vice Chancellor. He's an extremely safe pair of hands. And he's now more or less explicitly presenting himself to the electorate as the kind of continuity candidate after Angela Merkel, who of course is stepping down at this election after 16 years.

I mean, arguably the continuity candidate should have been someone from Mrs. Merkel's party, the CDU CSU. What's happened there?

Yeah, there's a certain irony that you're seeing continuity more in the hands of the coalition partner to the cdu, csu, than the party itself. That party has chosen a man called Armin Laschet to lead the campaign. Europa NATO. He's currently the premier of North Rhine Westphalia, which is the most populous state in Germany. And to put it bluntly, he's having an absolute shocker. The party has lost about one quarter of its support in just a few weeks. There's now a very serious prospect that they're going to be kicked out of government entirely. Armin Lashid, I think, has failed to convince the electorate that he's a credible candidate for the Chancellery. He's trying to push back now. He's taking a much more aggressive stance in this campaign. But so far there's no indication at all that that's gaining any traction with the electorate. And if after election day we do see the CDU CSU booted out of government, then the reckoning inside the party is going to be extraordinary.

But what about the other parties that are in the mix here? This is not all of the runners and riders.

Absolutely, yeah. I mean we're probably going to have six parties in Parliament other than the SPD and the CDU csu. The ones to watch are the Green Party.

Nein diese Bundestags wall ist wa.

Of course we're doing very well a few months ago, slipped back a little bit since then, but still have a very strong chance to be part of the next government. And then the Free Democrats, the fdp, which is a smaller liberal party, which has been having a pretty good campaign, also has a strong chance to be part of the next government. And right now we're engaged in this sort of kabuki theater of who might be thinking about going into coalition with which other party.

And how is it then that the cdu CSU could in fact be booted out of government? What would that look like?

So this is all about coalitions. And I think, you know Jason, that this is tremendously complicated stuff. It's more complicated this time around than it's ever been in the past. But I think to simplify it a little bit, let's think about two possible scenarios that we might have after the election results come in on September 26th. One thing we can be pretty confident about is that Germany is going to have its first three ways coalition at national level for decades. One possible configuration is a so called Jamaica coalition. This would be led by probably the CDU CSU with the Green Party and the FDP as junior coalition partners. A second possible configuration would be what's called a traffic light coalition. The colors match the red, amber and green. So that would be an SPD led coalition. Olaf Scholz as Chancellor, also with the Greens and the FDP as junior coalition partners. And I think one genuine possibility is that both of these will be viable arithmetically after election day. And what happens then is anybody's guess. Then we're going to get into an extraordinary and completely unpredictable period of coalition negotiations.

And what's your view on Sunday's debate? How much has that changed the electioneering here?

I'm not sure that the debate itself will have a marked impact on the campaign. It's the first of three live televised debates between the chancellor, candidates from the top three parties, the spd, cbd, the UCSU and the Green Party. The most important aspect of this was that Armin Laschet, who's having such a terrible campaign, really, really needed to find a way to put himself back into contention. And so we saw him behave in a slightly different way to what we've done in the past. He was more aggressive, particularly towards Olaf Scholz, who's now his main rival for the Chancellery. He was more assertive on some of the policy areas that the CDU CSU wants to make its own, such as improving planning procedures for infrastructure projects, industrial policy, and so on. I think the problem for him is that a lot of voters now have already made up their mind that this is not the sort of candidate that he is. So he has a certain kind of credibility deficit that he's going to struggle to make up in the last few weeks of the campaign.

And so how do you see this heading as we get closer and closer to election day?

I mean, it's anyone's guess. Nobody expected this volatility this late in the game. So who knows what's still to come? You may see, for example, some CDU leaning votes, voters who are skeptical about Amin Lashet, who are now getting spooked by the idea that their party might leave government entirely and sort of reluctantly come back to the fold. Maybe the Greens will stage some sort of comeback. It's a bit of a fool's errand to make serious predictions, but one thing I think is worth mentioning is that we're likely to see a particularly large share of postal votes in this campaign. A lot of people have already voted already and of course those votes are already baked in, as it were. So any late breaking campaign developments are not going to influence them. That's a problem, I think, in particular, particular for Armin Lashet, who really, really needs to stage a recovery because some of the votes that he might want to win back have already been cast.

Tom, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks a lot, Jason.

An American company called 80% arms doesn't sell guns. Well, not quite. It sells kits of component parts which can be assembled at home into a working firearm.

Are you looking to protect yourself and.

Your loved ones in these uncertain times?

Are you worried about the government tracking your gun purchases and putting you on a list? The online listing for its AR15 assault rifle claims this makes starting your own personal gun factory a breeze.

And that's how you go from a hunk of aluminum to a full functional fire. It's really just that simple.

That the company exists and is thriving represents a loophole in gun regulations, ways for customers to get an anonymous gun while avoiding background checks. It's led to efforts to clamp down on the market for these so called ghost guns.

Ghost guns are a colorful term for a pretty simple concept. They're privately made firearms that don't have serial numbers, which makes it really difficult to identify them.

Alexandra Sewich Bass is a senior correspondent for the Economist.

In some cases, people can buy them online. These ghost guns are assembled out of component parts for the well resourced. People can also use 3D printers to produce them, but in either case, they're impossible to trace if they're used, for example, to commit a crime.

And how common are these ghost guns?

They're becoming more and more common every year in America. Last year, for example, nearly 9,000 Ghost guns were recovered at potential crime scenes and reported to the federal government. That's more than triple the number in 2017. And the data clearly indicate that ghost guns are popular among people who might not otherwise have had access to guns. So for example, a quarter of ghost guns that were seized by Baltimore's police department last year were from people who were too young to buy a firearm legally. It's also really concerning that felons who are barred from gun ownership under American law can also gain access to firearms through gun. Ghost guns have also shown up in several mass shootings. There was one in Dayton, Ohio two years ago.

And so where do ghost guns fit in legally? Is it legal to buy them this way?

Yes, ghost guns are legal. Sellers are exploiting a loophole in federal law which hasn't caught up with the times. Basically, an unfinished kit or gun. Parts that are sold online do not count under the current definition as a firearm, and so they're not required to have a serial number on them. The other issue with ghost guns is that the people who sell them, because they're not technically considered firearms, are not obligated to conduct a background check on the buyers as licensed gun dealers do. Different government bodies are trying to close down this loophole.

What is being done to close it?

So you see two types of action, one on the state level, one on the federal level. So far this year, 10 states have introduced bills to regulate ghost guns. More are expected to address the issue. This ought the best example of a state taking aim at ghost guns is probably in Nevada, which has decided to prohibit ownership or sale of unfinished gun kits and the manufacture of guns without identifying marks or serial numbers. On the national level, Republicans are resistant to new gun laws or anything that could curtail perceived gun ownership. And so the Biden administration has tackled this in a more creative way through an executive order. Much more need be done, but the first, first want to rein in the.

Proliferation of so called ghost guns.

These are guns that are homemade, built from a kit. The Department of Justice has proposed requiring vendors of kits containing parts to assemble guns to run background checks. And the Department of Justice also wants to require manufacturers to include serial numbers on firearm frames that are sold in kits.

And those measures that are being proposed, as you say, at the state and the federal level, do you think they will work?

I think that they can help, but they are not a total solve. State laws can only do so much because guns flow so easily between states. A federal law would really help and is certainly more effective, although I think Congress has limited appetite right now for anything in the realm of gun control. The problem is also enforcement. Catching people who are illicitly selling and manufacturing guns would require a much better resource. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is known as the atf. It's been starved of funding and leadership by the gun lobby. It's only had a permanent Senate Approved director in two of the last 15 years. So it's likely that ghost guns are going to continue to haunt America for many years ahead. Already there's been a big run on AR15 gun kits, which are sold out on many of the websites that I visited. That's because whenever people think a particular type of firearm is going to be targeted by new regulation, it perversely boosts sales. So even if a crackdown happens, America has so many guns and ghost guns already in circulation that the new laws are likely to only have a limited effect.

Alexander, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

When the indie rock band British Sea Power chose their name, they did it with a wry sense of humor. The the group known for underground hits such as Waving Flags wanted an ironic nod to the militarism of Britain's past. But in the current political climate, the band were worried that some fans would take the name a bit too seriously. So now they're simply known as Sea Power. And they aren't the only musicians who've had to rethink their image recently.

While it used to be the case that bands would have to change names because of copyright issues because there was someone with the same name as them.

Michael Hann writes about culture for the Economist.

Now they're having to change name for political reasons.

But music history is filled with Bands that have provocative names. This isn't something new. Sometimes the provocation is wanted, right?

Well, that's right. Especially during the punk era, groups would take names as a deliberate affront to people.

Sex and violence.

You only have to look at Sex Pistols. That was not a name chosen to get onto national radio. But one of the most starting examples is a group group from Manchester called Warsaw, who changed their name in 1978 to something they'd read in a novel called House of Dolls. The name they took was Joy Division, which in the novel was the name given to the groups of Jewish women in concentration camps who were forced into prostitution by their Nazi captors. When we think of Joy Division now, we don't think of concentration camps. We think of Ian Curtis. She's Lost Control. We think of songs like she's lost control from 1979 and the raw and untrammeled power of that group.

But you say the motivations for name changing are shifting these days.

They definitely are. I think the first example that I really noticed was a group from Canada called Viet Cong. When the group's first album came out in 2015, it had rave reviews. No one picked up on this at all. Rather than talking about the politics, people were talking about songs such as March of Progress. Now, Viet Cong said they were naive about the history of a war in a country they knew little about. And so instead, they changed their name to Preoccupations after they started losing shows because promoters and fans were a bit cautious about their name, first on the grounds of appropriation, and second, because of fear of being linked to atrocities committed by Viet Cong soldiers during the Vietnam War.

And so the changes that are going on these days are mostly for that reason, that kind of historical sensitivity.

Not entirely. Some names change because of current events. The Black Lives Matter protests in the United States last year had a big effect, actually, on musical names. 2American country bands altered their names in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. The Dixie Chicks, who first came to prominence in the late 90s for their hit Wide Open Spaces, which won two Grammys in 2020. They rebranded themselves as the Chicks to remove associations with the Confederacy, the group of slave states that fought the American Civil War. At the same time, they released a protest track called March March, which speaks about social justice. The name change actually angered some of their more conservative fans, but the Chicks said they didn't care one jot. Another band, formerly known as Lady Antebellum, shortened their name to Lady A to remove reference to the period before the Civil War. But In a perfect demonstration of the law of unintended consequences, that turned out to be the stage name of a black blues singer whose real name is Anita White. And she was furious. She accused them of viewing the Black Lives Matter movement as a moment in time and said it shouldn't have taken George Floyd dying for them to realise that their name had a slave reference to it.

And so, in some sense, is that an end of an era, then, for names that are deliberately provocative, that take us back to eras such as punk?

I think there'll probably always be a place for provocation, but I think it'll probably be more carefully thought out. Different sets of sensitivities will be offended. But it does seem astonishing now to think there was ever a time when bands would choose a name that was unequivocally and deliberately just distasteful rather than merely provocative. The point is that now even ironic band names such as British Sea Power can be misinterpreted, and, of course, that attention gets drawn to it. Now, Twitter and other social media means that people can raise legitimate animals, important questions of taste and respect. And I think what's certain now is that if a band nowadays, no matter how great, took their name from the rape of women in concentration camps, then the Internet would tear them apart.

Michael, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you so much.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow.