Europe in the German Federal Elections: What Do the Manifestos Say?

Image courtesy of Thomas Dämmrich/Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This article was originally published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) on 26 July 2017.

Here we compare the parties’ positions on the four core EU policy domains: common security and defence, migration, financial, and trade policy.

How does Europe feature in the German elections? How do Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), Martin Schulz’ social democrats (SPD), the Greens (Bündnis90/Die Grünen), the business-friendly free democrats (FDP), the left party (Die Linke), and the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) aim to reshape four core EU policy domains: common security and defence, migration, financial and trade policy? A comparison of their election manifestos provides some first answers to these questions.

Nearly all established parties running for the coming Bundestagswahl on 24 September have adopted a narrative that combines a pro-European outlook with an emphasis on the need for European reforms. Only the Eurosceptic AfD bucks the trend with its calls for a ‘Dexit’ referendum.

How to Prevent Economic Crises

G20 Summit, courtesy of The Prime Minister's Office/flickr (Crown Copyright)
G20 Summit, courtesy of The Prime Minister's Office/flickr (Crown Copyright)

The global economy is strongly integrated, and domestic economic policies are strongly… well, domestic.

A landmark report by Chatham House and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) argues that the way in which nations design their economic policies is woefully inadequate to prevent financial and economic crises.

Entitled “Preventing Crises and Promoting Economic Growth: A Framework for International Policy Cooperation“, the report is the outcome of a nine-month international research project. Authors Paola Subacchi and Paul Jenkins consulted with finance and foreign affairs ministries, multilateral institutions and research institutes in Europe, Asia and North America.

They call for national policy-makers to recognize the spillover effects of their policies on other countries as well on the wider economic system. In practice, this would mean accompanying internationally relevant domestic policies by “international impact assessments”.

The report also proposes a new framework for G20 policy cooperation. Indeed, cooperation tends to be “only feasible when interdependencies are made clear by incidents of instability and volatility as happens during crises, i.e. when the costs of non-cooperation are painfully evident“.