Bavaria
mark. Some slippage is inevitable: the CSU won 61% of the state vote in 2003, when Bavarians registered their anger against an unpopular government in Berlin. But the CSU could be forced for the first time since the 1960s to govern Bavaria with a coalition partner. That would be “catastrophic”, says Alois Glück, the president of Bavaria’s legislature.
The shock would be felt nationwide. The CSU is the electoral partner of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the
mainstream conservative party for the rest of Germany and the senior member of the national “grand coalition” government.
Bavaria, with 15% of Germany’s population, supplied a quarter of conservatives’ overall votes in the last national election. A stumble by the CSU in September would be a bad omen for conservatives in the next parliamentary vote in September 2009. That is why at the CSU’s convention in Nuremberg in July the chancellor, Angela Merkel, reminded Bavarians how lucky they were. “Bavaria is where Germany wants to be,” she told the delegates.
Bavaria was not always so fortunate. Its largely agrarian economy missed the first stage of Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, the post-war “economic miracle”, and absorbed some 2m ethnic German refugees from Czechoslovakia and Poland. But these burdens turned out in the end to be blessings too; Bavaria was not held back by industries destined to become uncompetitive, except in parts of Franconia, the Protestant north, which now lag behind the south. Refugees became entrepreneurs backed by government-
guaranteed loans, the germ of later schemes to promote enterprise through credit.
By the late 1950s full employment elsewhere pushed German industry towards Bavaria’s beckoning arms.
It used the federal aid to which it was entitled as a poor state to build roads and other things useful to business. It secured cheap and reliable energy, partly by building an oil pipeline from Italy and Germany’s first nuclear power plant. It was an early promoter of industrial “clusters” and realised that universities would be a draw (it is home to two of the best nine). Nine of the 30 companies whose shares comprise the DAX index have their headquarters in Bavaria, among them BMW, a carmaker.
The late Franz Josef Strauss, the CSU’s pugnacious chairman from 1961, who served as Bavaria’s premier for a decade, championed defence and aerospace (and helped found Airbus). Günther Beckstein, the current premier, says that he wants his state to be “one of the five most innovative regions in the world”.
The CSU did not get where it is by catering only to business. It befriended the common folk, who are more rural and, especially in Catholic “old Bavaria”, the state’s southern and eastern heartland, more
conservative than the bulk of Germany’s working class. CSU governments blanketed the countryside with schools and lobbied for federal welfare spending; the party was traditional on family matters and tough on criminal ones. It is “unbelievably well networked” in Bavarian society, says Michael Weigl of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. No town lacks a CSU office (which cannot be said of the opposition Social Democrats). It has links, often more of affinity than formal, to local football clubs, volunteer fire
www.EliteBook.net
departments and the Gebirgsschützen companies.
Now, though, the CSU is looking vulnerable. Last year it ousted Edmund Stoiber as state premier and party chief, fearing he would lead the party to defeat after nearly 15 years in power. The charismatic strongman yielded to an uninspiring duo: Mr Beckstein, a Franconian who is the first Protestant premier;
and Erwin Huber, an old Bavarian, now party chairman.
The state government alienated innkeepers with Germany’s toughest smoking ban. The state-owned Bayerische Landesbank lost €4 billion ($6.23 billion) in subprime punts. A plan to reduce from nine to eight the number of years pupils spend in Gymnasium, which prepares them for university, was poorly executed. Parents now suspect that Bavarian education is not as good as advertised; just a third of pupils make it to university, compared with more than half in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state.
In local elections in March the CSU’s vote fell to 40%, its worst result in nearly 40 years.
The CSU has bounced back from scandals and setbacks before and may well do so again. It has already regained some support by demanding tax cuts aimed at the middle class in defiance of the chancellor. The Social Democrats, moreover, are in a state of internal turmoil (see article), and anti-CSU votes may be split among several other parties.
Yet victory would be a reprieve for the CSU, not a resolution. The party is changing, for example by accepting that working mothers need to park young children in crèches, but Bavaria is changing faster. An inspirational video screened at the party’s convention—“Proud of Bavaria”—failed to show a single non- white face.
Partly thanks to Bavaria’s economic success, the CSU’s traditional demographic base of often rural Bavarians is losing importance. The state’s growing ethnic and social diversity means that “it will be ever more difficult to get more than 50% of the vote”, admits Mr Glück. The CSU helped modernise Bavaria;
now it is stalked by modernity.
The feisty men of the Gebirgsschützen cannot defend it for ever.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
www.EliteBook.net
Germany’s Social Democrats