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Conclusion: Governing under Conditions of Uncertainty

This concluding article is intended as a kind of postscript, drawing together some of the most important aspects covered in this collection and looking at their implications for the future of German party democracy. Naturally, this comprises federal and Land politics as they are interconnected and influence each other in many ways. The most important aspects include rising levels of volatility, the changing role of the mass media in campaigns, the transformation of the German party system(s) and its implications for coalition formation and the quasi-plebiscitary function of elections. Finally, it touches upon the changing nature of political leadership which is characteristic of all modern democracies but may be even more pronounced in Germany as a result of party system change. The contributions covering the election campaign clearly show that the media performance of the major candidates has become a major factor of German election campaigns. While the precise electoral effect of the candidates’ media performance is difficult to ascertain, it is beyond doubt that media strategies play a crucial role in the way election campaigns are designed and managed. In an age of intensive TV coverage, no major party can afford to field leading candidates who are not good media performers. This extends beyond the chancellor candidates of Christian and Social Democrats, even though these two parties have – thus far successfully – dominated the media campaign by excluding other leading candidates from the major TV debates. Yet in the light of ever-increasing volatility this may soon become untenable as in late 2010 survey ratings on the forthcoming Berlin and Baden-Württemberg Land elections indicated that the Social Democrats are not necessarily any longer the natural senior partner in a left-of-centre coalition. When the Green parliamentary party leader Renate Künast announced her candidacy to become mayor of Berlin in November 2010, this was a clear signal that the Greens seriously expected to beat the SPD in the race for strongest party. The writing on the wall was even more visible in Baden-Württemberg where the Greens tended to have a lead of about 10 percentage point vis-à-vis the Social Democrats with some five months to go until election day. Realistically, but much to the dismay of the national SPD leadership, regional party leader Nils Schmid agreed that the SPD might have to accept a junior role in a possible green–red government in Stuttgart. The debate over possible Green government leadership – premature as it may be – highlights a very substantial and by now fairly stable feature of the German party system, namely considerable levels of volatility. As longitudinal analyses clearly show, volatility levels have now reached those last experienced in the late 1950s