Is there actually a mood of change in the country?

That depends on who you ask.

They exist, and at a record level, according to a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation from August this year.

55 percent of those surveyed said it would be good if the federal government in Berlin would change.

Only 16 percent opted for the status quo.

The rest was a tie.

Rainer Hank

Freelance writer in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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Election researcher Karl-Rudolf Korte has a completely different opinion: "The Germans love stability," he said shortly before the election to the Bundestag.

They are risk averse and favor the familiar.

So there is no trace of a mood of change.

The lowest common denominator

What is true?

I'm not an election researcher, but I think both could be true.

That would then be an explanation for the unexpected rise of Olaf Scholz.

"German voters do not like young Kennedys, no charismatic exuberance," says election researcher Korte.

You really can't blame Scholz for such qualities.

On the one hand, it promises continuity, reliability and respect: after all, he was finance minister for the past four years, did not attract much attention, but did not really do anything wrong (apart from Cum-ex and Wirecard).

On the other hand, he is now presenting himself as a representative of social progress, who with green and yellow in a “coalition of winners” would do a lot better that the SPD could have done differently in the past three major coalitions.

Both those who want to change and those who do not want experiments can come to an agreement on Scholz.

It is the lowest common denominator for election year 2021.

When Kohl was voted out

If you want to know what a mood of change really is, you have to go back a long way in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The last time it happened was in 1998, some will remember.

At that time, the desire to vote out the CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl dominated.

Instead of the Union and the FDP, the Germans elected two opposition parties - red and green - to the government.

There has never been a change like this before and never since.

Even today, the FDP and the Greens form the power center of the coalition soundings.

But it is also clear that they will have to look for an anchor in the past grand coalitions in order to stabilize them in black or red.

The most serious political and economic change in sentiment of the post-war period occurred twenty years before Kohl was voted out of office in Great Britain, when Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in 1979.

That was the departure from the idea of ​​a state-driven, Keynesian-interventionist welfare state towards the conviction that markets would develop a growth dynamic that would benefit everyone if they were only allowed to take place.

Supply instead of demand policy.

Hayek instead of Keynes.

Laissez faire instead of fine tuning.

So roughly and roughly were the slogans back then.

New beginnings in the past

The election of Thatcher was an epochal turning point, with the question of who occupied the "command hill" (Lenin) in society, politics and the economy: the market or the state?

From 1979, a signal went out into the world that neither right-wing nor left-wing, and certainly not liberal parties could escape.

Not only Ronald Reagan (1981) and Helmut Kohl (1982), but also Tony Blair (1997) and Gerhard Schröder (1998) were convinced that the welfare state freed from its incrustations, deregulated goods and labor markets and politics with theirs citizen-pleasing fantasies have to be modest.