Christian Democratic disunion: Germany’s political upheaval

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Plenty of kids feel that their gender identity and their assigned sex don't match. What to do about that has become fully subsumed into America's culture wars. We look at the attempts to curtail some of the options and the woeful lack of research on the topic. And you've probably heard that Blue Monday, the third Monday in January, is supposedly the deepest trough of the winter blues. We've got data that suggest otherwise. It's what people listen to that may indicate when the mood is bluest. But first, After a tumultuous week, German politics is in disarray. Chancellor Angela Merkel's succession plans lie in ruins after her heir apparent, Annegret Cramp Karenbauer, announced yesterday that she would step down as leader of the ruling Christian Democratic Union, or cdu. Meanwhile, the party continues to grapple with a resurgent far right in the form of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD party. The recent troubles began last October with an election in the eastern state of Thuringia.

Back in October, they hold a state election in the small eastern state of Thuringia, and it produced a badly hung state parliament.

Christopher Lockwood is our Europe editor.

Nobody was able to form a majority and in the end, what happened, rather unexpectedly, was that a tiny party, the Free Democrats, who had barely 5% of the vote, cobbled together a government government. And the way that they did that was by relying on the support in the confirmation vote not only of the cdu, and here's the controversial part, but also by the right wing Alternative for Germany, a party that has been accused by many people of harbouring neo Nazis within it. That's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it's clearly a xenophobic party well, to the right and regarded as untouchable by all mainstream parties in Germany until now. So this was the first time that a government had been formed with the support, and it's important to say with the support, not the participation. They weren't in coalition or anything like that of the AfD.

And what was the reaction to that sort of handshake deal in Germany?

It was condemned by everybody. Angela Merkel said it was completely unacceptable. The Social Democrats, who at the national level are in coalition with the Christian Democrats, said it threatened the survival of the coalition. And outside politics it was extremely unpopular too. There were enormous demonstrations outside the state parliament in Iraq and the whole deal fell apart. The man that was supposed to become, as they call it, minister, president, presiding minister in the local government in Thuringia decided that he wouldn't go ahead with the deal. It was all an enormous embarrassment. And because the ruling federal, ruling CDU was involved in this rather shabby arrangement, no one really knows whether it was a formal deal or not, that cast a terrible light on the party's leader, Annegret Crown Carabagh. And that coming on top of the long term problem that she's had in building popularity and winning elections meant that she felt that she had no option but to resign as leader. She was already really in a position where her future was incredibly insecure. So this came as no surprise.

And she was to be Angela Merkel's hand pick successor here from party leader to eventual chancellor in the longer run. What does that situation look like now?

Well, it's catastrophic because as well as resigning as party leader, she said that she was not prepared to be a candidate for chancellorship when that comes around. Now, the way it works in Germany is that parties don't necessarily nominate their leaders to be their chancellor candidates. The CDU always has, but other parties haven't always done that. And a decision was supposed to be made probably towards the end of this year on who would be the candidate for the election that's expected to take place in 2021. Now, she's not to be a candidate anymore. She's not even going to be leader of the party anymore. And that means that the whole process of finding both a new party leader and, more important, a new chancellor candidate now has to accelerate. And probably what will happen is that they will try and mush the two processes into one and choose somebody who will be both party leader and chancellor candidate.

But the bigger picture here is one of political fragmentation of the big parties that run Germany coming up against smaller insurgent Parties. How do you think the. The traditional parties should deal with that?

Well, it's very difficult for them. This all stems from the fact that there are now more parties around than ever before. You've had the rise of the AfD, the resuscitation of de Linke, the left wing party descended from the former Communists that ran East Germany. And you've had the spectacular rise to prominence of the Greens, who are probably, according to most polls, the second most popular party in Germany now. So it makes it very hard at the local level as well, where you have the same parties appearing to form governments. And that's why we've had a series of weak coalition governments in various states. And why at the centre in Berlin we have a very damaged and fractious ruling grand coalition, as they call it, between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats.

But doesn't that speak to a future in which working with extremist parties on left or right will become politically necessary?

There is that danger. It could happen. And clearly plenty of people in the CDU are interested in the idea of working with the AfD because it's the only way to form governments. Think, however, there is an alternative, and I think that is the Greens. The future, I suspect, of Germany is what they call black green. Black for the cdu, green for the Greens, obviously. And following the next election, it's very possible that the Bundestag, those two parties together, would have a majority, in which case they wouldn't need to go near the AfD.

And what do you read into the rise of the AfD? Sort of in and of itself. That's clearly what's struck a nerve for Germans here.

Well, the AfD has risen, particularly in the East. If you look at western Germany, they're really still not a factor, polling very poorly, but in the east they're very strong. What are the reasons for that? Well, the east has fallen behind the West. Despite the enormous amounts of money pumped from west to East. Eastern Germans still feel that they haven't had a good crack of the whip since reunification. And clearly they are worse off and have higher unemployment rates on pretty much every indicator do fare a lot worse than their West Western counterparts. So that's driven them to various alternatives to the established parties which they regard as stitching everything up and not helping them. So some go to the far left, some go to the far right. The danger there is indeed that these parties will continue to prosper. The opportunity is for better policies that do more to improve the way things work in the east and make it possible for those parties, again to be marginalized. But I'm not saying it will be easy.

But from a purely ideological perspective, it has seemed for many decades that Germany was somewhat more immune to the rise of the right that's been going on elsewhere in Europe. Do you think that immunity is changing? Do you think that the right has a greater chance now than it did a few years ago?

It's indisputable that AFD is more popular than it was, but it is still not necessary to form coalitions. There are other ways to do it. And I think what this episode in Thuringia has shown us is that it's extremely dangerous to get involved with the AfD. They're a bit like the third rail. Touch it and you die. That's exactly what happened to the poor man from the Free Democrats who thought he could become premier of Thuringia and ended up having to resign after a date and an enormous crisis for the CDU because they seem to go along with this foolish scheme. So perhaps you could argue that it's shown that still the AFD are completely untouchable.

And are there any wider lessons to be drawn from this episode for those other countries where the right is on the rise?

Well, I'm very nervous about drawing lessons across countries because circumstances are so different from country to country. There are parties of the right, just as there are parties of the left in each country. Some of them are completely unacceptable. Some of them may be acceptable. I think there's an argument, if a party is not too extreme that says bring them into government, give them some responsibility and then they will become more moderate and sensible or they will fail. But every country is different and I wouldn't want to say that what works in Norway could work in Germany. And Germany, for very obvious reasons, has a particular antipathy towards dealing with the far right.

Chris, thank you very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

Last month, South Dakota became the first American state to pass a bill that would ban all medical interventions for transgender children under the age of 16. If it's signed into law, prescribing puberty blockers cross sex hormone treatment and performing gender reassignment surgery will be illegal. The bill follows a drawn out custody battle over seven year old James Younger, who identifies as a girl. James parents disagreed about whether or not to allow gender reassignment treatment. The case sparked widespread attention on social media and has prompted lawmakers in other states to back similar legislation.

At least six states in America have introduced bills which would ban any medical interventions on transgender teens either under the age of 18 or under the age of 16.

Meehan Ridge is our U.S. news Editor.

South Dakota is the first state to have started moving a bill like this. It's gone through the Lower House, but another five have done the same thing. And they all broadly ban surgery, which is very unusual for teens, but also puberty blockers and cross sex hormones.

So the treatments that are potentially being banned here, what do they entail?

So if it's a young child before the age of puberty, then it might just be a non medical approach where the child's gender identity is affirmed. So if it was a girl who wants to be a boy, she would be encouraged or allowed to cut her hair, change her name, live as a boy. But in the early stages of puberty, if a doctor feels that a child is transgender, they are quite likely to be prescribed puberty blockers, which basically put puberty on hold for a few years. And then after that, if they persist in feeling that they're transgender, the doctor might put them on cross sex hormones. Surgery for teens under the age of sort of 18 is very unusual.

And so how is it that those treatments were settled upon? How is it that the medical community believes that that is what should be done?

So the argument for puberty blockers is that for children suffering from gender dysphoria or who feel that they're transgender, it can save them from an awful lot of distress if they very, very strongly do not want to develop the sex characteristics of the sex that they believe that they are truly not. In theory, if they want to come off with puberty blockers, normal puberty will resume. So lots of doctors think of puberty blockers, that first medical intervention is a very conservative pub first step.

And what are the downsides to using puberty blockers?

So it seems that you can safely be on puberty blockers for a year or two, but if you're on puberty blockers for very much longer than that, it can affect the way that your bones develop. Puberty is a very important time for developing bone density. And if you're on puberty blockers, for some doctors think more than four years, something more than five years, then your bone density can be adversely affected. The other big problem with puberty blockers is that it interrupts a normal process of puberty, which can help children reconcile themselves to their natural birth sex.

And I suppose that feeds the argument that perhaps by simply letting kids grow out of it, that that might be a better approach, certainly one that might be advocated by people who don't like the sound of any of this.

Yes, that's absolutely right. By putting children on puberty blockers and setting them on a path to treatment, because puberty blockers, if you come off them, your puberty resumes. If you feel yourself to still be transgender, then doctors want to put you onto sex hormones. By the point, you've been on puberty blockers and sex hormones for a few years, you could become infertile. You're very likely to become infertile. And so puberty blockers seem conservative, but they set you on this path to treatment. That means that you possibly don't have the opportunity that you otherwise would have to reconcile yourself to your biological sex.

You've spoken a lot, essentially, about drugs, about hormones. What about the psychological end of it? The degree to which this can be dealt with, in part through the degree to which sort of the scope of treatment could be narrowed, perhaps through psychological assessments.

I've spoken to a number of mental health professionals who work with transgender children and, in fact, who support prescriptions of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones to transgender children. One doctor told me the majority of children being given puberty blockers are not first given a proper mental health assessment. And given that gender dysphoria is often accompanied by anxiety and depression, it seems very, very important that children do have a proper screening process beforehand.

And that's not happening.

Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that that's not happening. There's two causes. One is that there's a shortage of mental health professionals who are trained to work with transgender children. The other is that there's been a huge growth in the number of transgender clinics and doctors are laudably keen to help this group of people who have been denied medical help and understanding for too long. But the outcome of both of those things means that too many children are almost certainly being prescribed drugs without having first been properly screened.

So how many people might be affected by all this? Do we know how many children are transgender?

No one really has any idea of how many children are transgender in the us, Certainly there's a very great lack of data. There's no one organization seeing the doctors who treat these children. But what we do know is that the number of centres or clinics, pediatric transgender clinics, have surged in the last decade. From One Centre in 2007. Now there are perhaps 50, maybe even more, and there are long waiting lists. I know from what doctors have told me at these centres. So certainly we know there's a big increase in the number of children both identifying as transgender and being treated for it medically.

So it sounds as if there's a real dearth of information and research here. And in the absence of all that, what do you think can be done about this?

I would say that the first, most urgent requirement is for clinics who work with transgender children to make sure that they are getting proper mental health evaluations before they're put on any kind of medication. The other thing that needs to happen is that there needs to be independent, neutral research into the effects of these drugs, whether they work in the long term, what the pitfalls are, how they should be prescribed. It's difficult at the moment because puberty blockers have only been prescribed for transgender teenagers since the late 90s. So there's a lack of data on which to do research, but there should be efforts made by people outside the field to look into the effects of these drugs.

Meehan, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you very much, Jason.

In the northern hemisphere, this time of year can feel pretty bleak. The holidays are over, the sun sets in the middle of the afternoon, and summer couldn't feel farther away. In times of spiritual and actual darkness, many people turn to music, and that can reveal some interesting international trends.

Spotify have all this streaming information about basically what countries listen to. So for the top 200 songs in each country on every day going back from the beginning of 2017, James Fransham.

Is a data journalist for the Economist.

And at the same time, they have all this information underlying these songs, like how fast it is, the tempo, how danceable it is, how much energy it's got. And critically for us, like, how happy or sad it is, they call this the valence score. And they scale this on a score from 0 to 100. And so basically what we thought is if we just match in this happiness score to the listening across time, maybe it can tell us something cool about what's going on in these countries.

So wait a minute. What is the source of the happiness? The beat and the danceability, I kind of almost imagine. But what makes a song happier? Sad?

Yeah. So this is based on an algorithm. Algorithms aren't perfect, but what Spotify have done, they got some musical experts to classify a thousand or a couple of thousand songs. On that basis of having experts train an algorithm, they've basically then just classified 30, 40 million songs. For example, Aretha Franklin's Respect, that's the 1967 song from the album I never loved a man the way I love you. Now, that's got a valence score of 97.

Because it's a banger.

It is a banger. And then let's take Radiohead creep from the 1993 album Pablo Honey. I'm a big fan of that song, but it's quite a sad one. And it scores just 10 on the valence score.

Okay, so you've got this vast data set broken out across countries, and you have all of these songs that these countries are listening to, and you have a sort of general rating. And that tells you what? That tells you just generally how happy the listening is in all these countries.

Yeah, basically, you crunch it all down, and on a daily basis, we then have the average mood for each country. So what we found was that in February, the average happiness of music played was 4% lower compared to the rest of the year, and in July, it was 3% higher. And also that Christmas time brings a real kind of joyful peak in people's lives. So it gets happier and happier as you get to December 25th, and then it drops a bit down into New Year's Eve.

And that's true across all of these different markets.

So it is broadly true across these different markets, and it's even true in the Southern Hemisphere. But in the Northern Hemisphere, further north you go. The greater seasonal variation you see stands to reason. But we also saw a similar pattern in the Southern Hemisphere. So basically, places like Argentina and Brazil, for example, they also got kind of pretty sad in February, even though it's kind of effectively that August. So we were kind of wondering why this might be.

Any ideas?

I think it's kind of. Perhaps these are Christian countries, too, so they kind of like, have the peak of Christmas. It's a happy time. And then people make their resolutions in January. They seem optimistic. The weather's still good, for sure, but maybe in February you kind of go, oh, no, still the same old year. I'm still limited by my own abilities. I don't know. But who knows?

So isn't there an effect here also as to when the music itself is released, when it gets its most plays, when it's on radio playlists and so on? Big happy summary songs come out in big happy summary times.

Yeah, we thought that might be true, too. So we took a look at the most popular 100 songs from each of these countries, and we actually didn't find that there was any kind of variation in the happiness of the song by the release date. Ed Sheeran's Shape of youf, which has been played around remarkable 2.4 billion times. That's from the album Divide in 2017. That has a valence score of 93. That was released in January and that's basically the most popular song on Spotify.

And I suppose that all of this analysis that you've done permits you to drill down also into individual level preferences and against my better judgment, I have given you my Spotify login details. Tell me about me.

Well, yeah, with your permission, you did let me log into your Spotify, which was quite fun. Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be part of this kind of science.

We basically had a look at your most played songs. I saw some Led Zep in there, which is good. Some Ed Harcourt, which we both enjoy. It's good. And some weird stuff too, which I can't even mention here on the radio. But basically what I found was indeed that you conformed to type. Jason, insofar as that your long term listening has an average valence of 58.

Relatively happy then?

Yeah, yeah, I'd say pretty cheerful. But this week, I don't know, how's it been for you?

It's been a bit of a tough week, I have to say.

It looks like it's been a tough week. Your valence score from your most recently played tracks this week has been just 48.

I'm feeling the February lull too.

16% down. Yeah, yeah.

Right. I gotta go home and put on some Aretha Franklin.

We should all do that. She's amazing.

Thanks for your time, James.

My pleasure.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.