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As Germany’s main opposition party, [the SPD] keeps criticising Angela Merkel’s policies on the eurozone, but ends up supporting whatever policies she drags before the Bundestag. They did so again on Friday, when they reluctantly approved the latest bailout package for Greece. SPD members of parliament are increasingly restless. They know that when it comes to the eurozone the government – a coalition of Ms Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats – has effectively lost its parliamentary majority. Without SPD help, Ms Merkel could not govern. Yet it is incapable of using this situation to its own advantage.
The SPD also does not want to be responsible for a Greek exit from the eurozone. The party sees itself as profoundly pro-European and is paranoid about being portrayed by others as irresponsible. Hence the dilemma. It has been trying to solve it by criticising Ms Merkel in the Bundestag for her persistent failure to recognise the problems early enough – while simultaneously supporting her policies.
Tactics aside, what is most infuriating is the SPD’s sheer inability to explain in a clear way why the chancellor is wrong. The reason for this inability is that the party has bought into the same panoply of false crisis narratives. It bought into the lie about fiscal profligacy as the cause of the crisis, and the need for austerity to solve it. It bought into the lie that Greece is fundamentally solvent. In particular, it bought into the lie that foreign speculators have brought about the situation. This is how the party ended up supporting the eurozone’s fiscal pact, which remains a solution in search of a problem.
Why? Under normal circumstances, one would have expected Ms Merkel might by now have lost her reputation of being a competent crisis manager. Her contribution to this crisis has been to delay resolution, but her political support is holding up. The CDU has a large and persistent lead in the opinion polls over the SPD. And she enjoys an even larger personal lead over her SPD challenger, Peer Steinbrück.
That conundrum is easily explained. The only real opposition to her policies comes from the post-communist left. With Mr Steinbrück, a former finance minister under Ms Merkel, the SPD has chosen the man least likely to offer a credible alternative. He was, after all, the architect of Germany’s anti-crisis policies until late 2009. Mr Steinbrück and Mr Steinmeier are not campaigning to get rid of Ms Merkel. They are campaigning to serve under Ms Merkel as a junior coalition partner.