German Coalition Politics: Between Pluralist Stagnation and Crisis‐Driven Welfare Retrenchment

The current German coalition government of the centre‐right Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the centre‐left Social Democrats (SPD) has spent its first year in office preparing for a major round of welfare state retrenchment. However, the coalition lacks a coherent political project. It is mostly kept together by the objective to prevent the right‐wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) from having political influence and by pushing through guns rather than butter policies, that is, German rearmament financed by cuts in welfare state spending. In this context, the German party system is now divided into insiders, the established parties including the Left Party, and outsiders, principally the AfD, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP). The need to mobilise unprincipled parliamentary majorities and to exclude outsider parties delivers pluralist stagnation, which further escalates people's disenchantment with politics and fear of economic decline. In this context, Germany's party state is losing its representativeness and is turning increasingly to authoritarian and technocratic measures. Germany's present‐day party‐state conglomerate should be broken up, allowing citizens to put forward their demands without shoehorning them exclusively into the mechanisms of party politics.