Editorial: Confusion in MMP's homeland

Opinion

If we think we have post-election problems, we should take a look at Germany. There the election has been "won" by a party without sufficient potential partners to form a parliamentary majority. It is as though National had finished slightly ahead of Labour last Saturday but had only Act as a potential partner. Germany's conservative alliance, the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union, has beaten Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party by just 1 percentage point. But the CDU-CSU has only one natural ally, the market liberal Free Democratic Party. Together they represent just 45 per cent of the electorate. Against them, the SDP and its governing coalition partner the Green Party and a new Left Party have amassed 51 per cent.

The result is a disappointment for the conservatives and their new leader, Angela Merkel, who were leading the polls by as much as 10 per cent early in the campaign and who looked certain to give Germany its first woman Chancellor. But Mrs Merkel is claiming the right to form a government on the principle that her party has the largest vote. Germany's Green Party, more pragmatic than its New Zealand namesake, is willing to talk to her but the Free Democrats - like United Future here - have said they will not go into coalition with the Greens.

Meanwhile, Mr Schroeder, like Don Brash, is refusing to concede the election, arguing that he leads the party with the most votes because the CDU-CSU are two parties. In fact they are a permanent federal alliance. The smaller, the CSU, is the dominant party of Bavaria. That is one complication that New Zealand does not face but in most other respects the post-election behaviour is remarkably similar. Mr Schroeder, like Helen Clark, believes he can negotiate a governing arrangement with the Greens and a party to his right. Unfortunately for him, the Free Democrats refuse to consider a deal with his party or the Greens, and Mr Schroeder, rather like Helen Clark in her attitude to the Maori Party, is reluctant to turn to the new party to his left.

The German experience has particular interest for us because MMP was copied largely from the former West Germany's variant of proportional representation. No other country besides the two of us has it. In post-war West Germany the electoral system produced strikingly stable government, which contributed to economic success. But since Germany's re-unification the economy has faltered, mostly under the weight of integrating the eastern economy but also from the failure to reform an economy that Germans like to call their "social market model". The failure is not for want of trying. Mr Schroeder's centre-left Government has expended a great deal of political capital trying to convince the country to relax labour protections and other employment costs that are causing high unemployment and low growth.

His Government was lucky not to lose the last election and again this time it might scrape back in since the centre-left has the majority of the vote. But again, it will owe its survival largely to fears that the conservatives would be even more determined to tackle the economic malaise. Whatever Government emerges from the latest election is unlikely to have a clear mandate or the confidence to set about the job. For that the electoral system must take some blame. Looking on, New Zealand ought to be thankful it set about much-needed economic change before adopting proportional representation.

Change in Germany might require nothing less than a "grand coalition" of the main parties of the left and right, which it had briefly once before. But Mr Schroeder is adamant that will not happen. Whichever side cobbles together a coalition, the country appears to be destined for another term of indecision and economic drift. Let's hope our resemblance ends here.