POLITICS-GERMANY: Narrow Win on Troops Deployment Overseas

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yojana Sharma

BERLIN, Nov 17 2001 (IPS) - In a knife-edge vote, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder on Friday narrowly won a confidence vote in the German parliament (Bundestag) linked to his decision to send German troops into combat in Afghanistan.

The confidence vote, only the fourth in Germany’s post war history, is an indication of how difficult it is for Germany to steer a new foreign policy role in a country still stymied by its own military role in two world wars.

The chancellor won approval to send troops to Afghanistan by just 10 votes, with the Bundestag voting 336 in favour and 326 against his decision to send 3,900 troops into combat areas.

Schroeder was forced to link troop deployments with a vote of confidence in his own government when Green party members of his own ruling coalition threatened to vote against the deployments. The Green party has its roots in the pacifist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and opposes, on principle, the sending of German troops into overseas theatres.

But in a cliff-hanger that even hours before the vote was too close to call, Schroeder made it clear that a vote against troop deployments would amount to a vote against himself.

“A German Chancellor cannot take the responsibility of his office or for the general wellbeing of the community if he personally, nor his policies, has the support of his own party,” he told the Bundestag on Friday.

In August, opposition votes made up for dissenters in the government’s ranks during a vote on German troops to be sent as part of NATO’s peacekeeping operation in Macedonia.

By pushing dissenting Greens into a corner, in tactics which many complained amounted to blackmail, in the run up to the vote, the Chancellor was able to show that he had his own coalition behind him.

Commentators note the vote has Schroeder emerging stronger on the world stage as a statesman and politician, having staked his own government on the issue of backing the NATO alliance.

Schroeder has been determined to push for a bigger role for Germany on the world stage, and to break out from its post-war straitjacket which restricted a military role overseas.

But unlike other Alliance members, such as Britain and France, who have backed the U.S.-led coalition against terror, Germany’s constitution requires it to seek parliamentary approval of any troop deployments, a move which invariably lays Germany open to much soul searching on any active role within the NATO alliance.

Before the vote, the Social Democrats party leader Peter Struck said that if Schroeder lost the vote there would be “only one possible solution – new elections”. However this may have played into Schroeder’s hands as the ruling Social Democrats are currently riding high in the country’s polls. The Christian Democrat opposition is currently in disarray with few issues where it has the upper hand.

Commentators said that Schroeder would not be upset at the need to go to the polls at an earlier date, making Schroeder’s decision to gamble the government on the vote on troops that much easier.

The losers of Friday’s debacle are seen to be the Green party. Although many finally toed Schroeder’s line, with only four voting against, Greens will be seen as reneging on their pacifist principles and are likely to be hauled over the rocks by party grass roots in a party conference next week in the Northern town of Rostock.

Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister and Green party leader, who has resolutely backed Schroeder on troop deployments insists that military involvement amounts to “preventative politics” to avoid “a bloody spiral” of death and destruction.

On the eve of the vote, the Green party was putting a brave face on the vote insisting that even die-hard pacifists would be able to vote in favour of troop deployments because of the most recent developments in Afghanistan.

Some Green party members were even saying the war in Afghanistan was as good as over, and the focus was now on aid, reconstruction and setting up a representative government.

Green party member Ludiger Volmer had urged the party not to score its own goal. “It would be really tragic if the coalition were to collapse over our military contribution which may in practice never become relevant,” he said just before the vote.

But politicians such as Liberal Free Democrat Guido Westerwelle noted that in the wake of Friday’s vote, the Greens could “no longer take the moral high ground” in foreign policy issues, since they were willing to renege on principles if threatened with being turfed out of government.

And Michael Glos of the Bavarian conservative Christian Socialist party noted dryly: “It wasn’t the Greens who pushed back the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

As commentators noted, the Greens voted with the government only for tactical reasons – no one wanted to see the end of the Greens in the ruling coalition. The problem is that the grassroots still oppose troops in principle.

As the respected daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said on Friday “almost all the Greens want to save the coalition, and more important its foreign minister, but many are far less motivated to support what is at the moment Germany’s most important foreign policy initiative”.