Colour schemes: Germany’s coming coalition

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.

Payment of $45 for three month plan.

Equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

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. The lightning fast development of vaccines against the coronavirus had a lot to do with piles of earlier work using mRNA. Now there are hopes that same technology will do what's proved elusive for four provide protection against hiv. And paleontologists looking at scars commonly found in the bones of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex have come up with a slightly titillating hypothesis. It may be that as part of a mating ritual, these toothy giants gave one another love bit. First up though, election night at last arrived in Germany, and it was the nail biter that was very much predicted. The big questions had been around two parties, that of departing Chancellor Angela Merkel, the center right Christian Democrats, or CDU and its sister csu, and the center left Social Democrats, or spd, which had been enjoying a recent surgeon chancellor. Candidates from both Armin Laschet from the CDU and Olaf Scholz from the SPD had the same thought. It was going to be a long night. Exit polls had the parties a hair's breadth apart, but the mood at the SPD headquarters was jubilant as Olof Scholz took to the stage. Mr. Schulz said said citizens wanted a change in government and he spoke boldly of coalition building. But so did the CDU's Armen Laschet, Promising a conservative led government a coalition to modernize the country. That coalition building, a blur of more letters and party colors, is now where Germany's future lies and the power to shape it may lie with two different parties. Supporters of the Greens rejoiced after exit polls, having taken nearly 15% of the vote, and the Liberal Democrat, or FDP party took nearly 12. Tellingly, its candidate, Christian Lindner, remarked not only on his party's performance, but also that of the Greens. Anne McElvoy, a senior editor at the Economist, and Tom Nuttall, our Berlin bureau chief, have been reporting on the election, the and took in the atmosphere at two very different party headquarters.

So it was clearly a close election. But the preliminary results that we have this morning indicate that the Social Democrats have won a small victory over their conservative Christian Democratic rivals. And it's going to take months to put together a government. That's clear. It's going to have to be a coalition of three parties. That's also clear. Both Olaf Scholz, the candidate for the Social Democrats, and Armin Laschet, the candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats have said that they want to try to put together a government. But at this point I think you'd have to say that the SPD have the advantage. It looks like they will come in first place. Olaf Scholz is personally much more popular than Mr. Laschet and Mr. Laschet has led the Conservatives to their worst ever post war election results.

And you spent the evening with the spd. How was it overnight?

I'd say the mood was pretty bullish. It was funny because at 6 o' clock when the exit poll came in, they projected a two point lead for the SPD. So the hall erupted in cheers. Then a few seconds later it emerged that a rival broadcaster with a different exit poll had the SPD neck and neck with the CDU csu. So those cheers were quickly muted, but overall it was a pretty positive mood, I would say. Olaf Scholz gave a fairly upbeat speech and was hailed with cheers and applause. And the sense was that the SPD was on its way to leading the next government.

And Anne, conversely, you spent the evening with the cdu. How were things there?

Well, I think Tom got the better party. There was a bit of a forlorn feeling, frankly, at the Conrad Anonauer House, the CDU headquarters. I think they were divided as to whether they were saying goodbye to Angela Merkel. We got our thank you Merkel water bottles as we arrived and it felt kind of symbolic that we were at some sort of farewell party. And the mood didn't really improve as the evening wore on. I think that moment when Merkel's own constituency in the east went to an SPD candidate, at least the winning candidate in the vote share because the system is complicated here. But it was a moment when you saw that swing happening to the SPD and there was a lot of head shaking around me at that point. One upbeat moment, Jason, was when Lashet spoke and said he had a mandate for conservatives to build a vote against a left led government. And that sort of got people going a bit and there was a lot of applause for that. But I would say that was the standout moment of a pretty quiet evening.

So, Tom, as you say, the coalition talks now, now have to start. How do you think that's going to go?

Yeah, this is the crucial question.

Now.

What was clear last night was that once we had a rough sense of where the results were going, there was such a high degree of uncertainty that the party leaders in their post election comments didn't really want to stake out too strong a claim because they didn't want to rule out any of the options that might be available to them. But I think there was one important development and that was that the Free Democrats, a small pro business party, and the Green Party and both of these parties are likely to be needed in the next coalition. They said that they would try to come to terms with each other before going to either of the bigger parties, the Social Democrats or, or the Christian Democrats, to try to put together a government. And that gives them a very strong hand in setting out a stall for whatever government we're going to get next. If they are able to come to terms. And that is a big if, because these two parties don't agree on very much. But if they are able to come to terms, then they will in effect act as a joint kingmaker.

And Anne, what do you make of that? The Greens and the Liberal Democrat FDP party kind of preemptively ganging up. I mean, that puts the two big parties in a different sort of negotiating position, doesn't it?

One theory that I heard from CDU senior folk in the CDU as well, lash it. He may not have done so great in this election, but he's a great negotiator. He's held together difficult coalitions, he's been much more experienced. He's run a big region in Germany. Could he maybe offer more to the Greens and the FDP than Scholz could?

It's a really interesting idea. I mean, you're absolutely right. This is what the, as it were, the Lasher topologists will always say, look at the government that he's led in North Rhine Westphalia. It's full of people that disagree with one another. And Lashet is a brilliant convener and an integrator and so on. The difference though is that previously he's been able to do that from a position of strength. Now he would be doing that from a position of extreme weakness, having led the party to its worst ever result. That means, in effect, that he would have to make the Greens in particular, who would be extremely skeptical about putting Armin Lashet in office. He would have to make them an absolutely tremendous offer to consider upending negotiations with Olaf Schultz.

I keep thinking about the great Goethe novel, which is called Elective Affinities. And my sense is that the Greens just psychologically are going to find it a lot easier to go with the SPD than have to explain why they're propping up a party that's been dominant for so long. What did you make of the Green result, though? Because the campaign that you covered seemed to go from the Greens being credible to to possibly be the next chancellor to being kind of lucky to be in there as number three.

It's really interesting with the Greens. I think it basically depends on how far back you want to draw the camera. I mean, the mood apparently, in the Green Party last night was very, very downbeat. The result was of course, not only a lot worse than they might have hoped for a few months ago when they were briefly leading in the polls. It was also worse than the latest opinion polls suggested at about 15%. But you can look at this the other way around. This is by far the best result the Greens have had in their they're about 6 percentage points ahead of their result in 2017. They are almost certainly going to be part of the next federal government, and they will have a very strong hand to play. They will probably be able to control some pretty important ministries. The party's more unified than it's been for a very long time, possibly ever. So, you know, I think it's pretty difficult overall to say that this was a bad night for the Greens.

So with all of these changes in evidence and all of the coalition discussions yet to be had, I guess the question is whether Germany is ready to move on after. After 16 years under Angela Merkel.

Well, for me, there is still a big legacy question there in this election, Jason, and you see it in the east, for instance, where the AfD vote, that far right populist vote, is still extremely strong. And that is a part of the Merkel legacy that she must regret. They certainly haven't fallen back in the old East. At the same time, I think the fact that she is leaving the scene has clearly left a vacuum. It's left a gap that her successor, Amin Lashet, has struggled to fill. He's just about keeping Arpiece still in the game. But you have to say it feels like the end of the Merkel party rather than the beginning of a new, confident era for the cdu.

Yeah. And I think one of the most interesting legacies for Angela Merkel is that while we are very Obviously seeing continued fragmentation of the vote in Germany, just like we've seen in many other European countries.

We've seen.

What's very interesting for me is that that fragmentation is not coming at the expense of the centre. The extreme parties, the AfD on the right and Die Linke on the left, both had bad results. The extremes on German politics are actually shrinking. So the fragmentation is coming at the expense of the old people's parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. But it's coming at the benefit of the smaller parties of the centre. And this centre, conceived in its largest sense, is exactly what Merkel was able to tap so successfully for so many years. It's a center that each of the mainstream parties had tried to tap in this election. Center in German politics remains very strong indeed. I think this is good news for Germany, good news for European democracy, because it's not necessarily a pattern that you see in other European countries.

Tom, and thank you both very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

Pleasure to be with you.

The speed with which effective vaccines were developed against the coronavirus was nothing short of astonishing. Vaccines against other pandemic causing pathogens have taken longer in the making. Much longer. It's four decades since the emergence of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. By now it's cost an estimated 36 million lives. Yet no effective vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes the illness, has been found. That might be about to change.

Moderna, a Boston based firm that rose to fame for quickly producing a viable COVID vaccine, are basically having a go at using the same MRNA technology that they used for the COVID vaccine to make an HIV vaccine.

Ore Ogunbi writes about business and science for the Economist.

Human clinical trials for the vaccine are supposed to start in America this month, and they should follow in Rwanda and South Africa shortly after. Looking at about 56 people who have never had HIV before.

And let's wind back a bit. What is it that's held up an HIV vaccine for so long already?

Yeah, so the issue is that HIV is a very genetically diverse virus, so it has a high mutation rate, which means it adapts quickly to dodge both natural immune systems and artificial vaccines. The HIV virus replicates itself in key cells that are part of your immune system, which vaccines depend on to work and generate an immune response. Basically, the system that your body needs to fight this virus is the exact system that the virus is infecting.

And so this new vaccine, then how will it get past that limitation?

So Moderna's approach is based in part on a New study announced in February that shows that it's to stimulate activity in unique immune cells that can produce neutralizing antibodies against hiv, the antibodies that usually fail because of how rapidly this virus mutates. The study looked at antibodies called broadly neutralizing antibodies. The part of the virus that these special antibodies recognizes is the viral protein in the hiv, where the virus normally attaches to our cells. So if that bit mutates, then the HIV virus is a lot less effective. The researchers have engineered a protein that looks exactly like this viral protein. And Moderna's vaccine then contains MRNA instructions that teaches your body how to make it, and then your body goes and produces it on its own, generates an immune response, and prepares your body for if you are infected with hiv.

So after all of these years waiting for an HIV candidate vaccine that looks promising, it's kind of curious that it contains the very same technology that got us a COVID 19 vaccine. Are those two things connected?

Kind of, but not entirely. HIV vaccines had already been decades in the making, and experts have been really clear and cautious that we shouldn't expect an effective HIV vaccine for a while. But that being said, it's clear that some lessons were learned from the COVID vaccine development that might actually accelerate the timelines a little bit. But we won't know by how much until we see the results of this trial in 2023. I think now that MRNA has been really made popular by this viable COVID 19 vaccine. We're going to be hearing about it a lot more. We're going to see that that technology is being used to basically target lots of other diseases and hopefully generate lots of other vaccine breakthroughs.

Orey, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Jeremiah.

Digging up bones isn't the most revealing way to find out about long ago, beasts that have roamed the earth. But in a lot of cases, that's all that scientists have to work with. Sometimes those bones raise more questions than they answer, and sometimes the answers they reveal are enough to make you blush.

So paleontologists for years have been digging up tyrannosaur bones and finding scars on them.

Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent for the Economist.

These are scars that were caused by some animal that was able to actually dent the bone of the tyrannosaur, such that it survived fossilization and all of that. And as they looked closer and started measuring up the size of these scars, they realized they were being delivered by other tyrannosaurs. And their theory behind this is that this is happening when tyrannosaurs are about to mate with one another.

You mean these marks are from love bites?

That is entirely one possibility. We do see it in other animals like crocodiles. It could also be tyrannosaurs that were engaging in some sort of fights for mates before breeding. But either way, the team tracked down all these tyrannosaur skull fragments to look at. They found hundreds of wounds that were bad enough to really dent the bone, but not bad enough to kill the animal because they could see the bone healing up after the wound had been dealt. So this suggests that there was a lot of biting of one another amongst tyrannosaurs, which is really quite something.

So it's clear that the bites on these skulls were inflicted by other tyrannosaurs. But what's the connection with mating, though?

So we don't see any of the bite marks in juvenile tyrannosaurs. Even when you get to tyrannosaurs that are like half size adults, they start to show some of these marks, but not very many of them. It's only until the tyrannosaur reaches adulthood that you see more than half of the skulls regularly having these bite marks, which tells us this was only happening amongst animals that were sexually active. So you normally can't tell much about the sex life of an extinct animal, but here we've got some signs that suggest we now know what they were doing as they were going about the mating process.

So does that tell us something that we didn't know more generally about tyrannosaurs and their sexual proclivities?

Well, we haven't known very much about the sexual proclivities of dinosaurs in general. It's very, very difficult to discern that from just a bunch of bones. But what's really interesting about these particular fossils is when the team looked at every scar on every skull, these bites were not inflicted at random. The bites are almost all congregating along the lower jaw, which suggests that these tyrannosaurs were engaging in some sort of ritualistic movement or behavior whereby they bit each other in the same place.

Dare I ask what this tells us about other dinosaurs?

Well, the researchers also took a glance at the skulls of some of the tyrannosaurs, smaller cousins like Velociraptor, and they found no evidence of these animals biting each other's faces. What's really interesting is we don't see this kind of activity in birds today. Birds, they flap their feathers, they do aerial displays, they sing very loudly, they do everything, except they don't do much aggressive attacks on one another. Crocodiles and alligators, their ancient ancestors do.

A lot of that.

And so when did that suite of aggressive behaviors before mating kind of die out on the lineage of birds? And by looking at the tyrannosaurs and the velociraptors, it looks like there's this moment where the big ones that were still very aggressive, very reptilian in their ways were engaging in this biting activity. But as the smaller theropod dinosaurs like Velociraptor got more feathery, more gracile, they started adopting more of these bird like copulatory behaviors. So it looks like it may have been a last hurrah for this very aggressive behavior. Evolution revolutionarily.

Thanks very much for your time, Matt.

My pleasure, Jason.

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 notes. See you back here tomorrow.