Free At Last?

The election of Joachim Gauck as President of Germany not only illustrates the complete fallacy of the idea that there can be any such thing as a nonpolitical Presidency (if we ever had such a thing in Britain, then the reality would be alternation or rotation between or among the main parties, by iron gentleman's agreement), but might also serve as more than a reminder that what has become of Eastern Europe is not exactly what all those East German pastors and Polish priests had had in mind.

It is very notable that Alliance 90 is now a party firmly of the Left as understood in reunified Germany, just as it is that the old East Germany, with a very left-wing political culture to this day, reopened by popular demand hundreds of what are now thriving grammar schools as soon as the Wall had come down. Angela Merkel represents a sort of East German and wider Eastern European dissent which looked, not to the West Germany that prided herself on her many religiously or historically significant holidays for everyone each year and on paying fathers enough to ensure that mothers could afford to be full-time homemakers, but to what is now the collapsed "Anglo-Saxon" model.

President Gauck offers a vitally necessary corrective. Jakob Kaiser's vision was of a German Christian Democracy that looked to British Labour for its inspiration in giving effect to Catholic Social Teaching (which has many Protestant approximations, not least in Germany), and which gave such effect by emphasising co-operatives, the public ownership of key industries, extensive social insurance, and the works councils later suggested in the SDP's founding Limehouse Declaration and advocated by David Owen, while also seeking a United Germany as a bridge between East and West, allied neither to NATO nor to the Soviet Bloc. Buy the book here.