Will Merz also become a basta chancellor? It depends on that now

Friedrich Merz reminds a little of Gerhard Schröder. Why is that? I want to tell you.

Before the summer break, Merz confirmed that various commissions should deal with the reform of social insurance in autumn. Pension, health, care. These commissions are intended to develop “good advice”, said the Chancellor, “which we then also want to implement in the coalition”.

Schröder did it similarly. Rürup Commission, Hartz Commission, Süssmuth Commission, Weizsäcker Commission. In the red-green government there was hardly a important political field that was not plowed through a group of experts-often led by a respected personality. It promptly became too much for the opposition leader. “We don’t need new commissions in Germany,” Masted Friedrich Merz in a Bundestag debate in 2002, “we need new jobs.”

23 years later, he does it himself. Governments form commissions to outsource difficult problems into non -partisanity. Behind it is the idealistic idea that only sufficient expertise is required to overcome contradictions and to carve an objective solution behind which everyone can gather.

Schröder once defended this procedure with the argument that the more people he contains his policy the more legitimation. In this way, the SPD Chancellor believed that he could overcome “authorities”, which turned out to be a boomerang formulation in retrospect, because Schröder, as is well known, went down in history as Basta Chancellor.

It couldn’t be any different, as a brief review shows. Some suggestions from the Rürup Commission for Health and Pension were later realized, according to the pension with 67. Overall, the lack of a pilgrimage of the Commission is already evident that one needed again 20 years later.

The proposals of the Rita Süssmuth immigration commission were crushed in the party dispute. You could have had a controlled immigration back then, but the Union didn’t want that. The Weizsäcker Commission proposed a reduction in the Bundeswehr and the renovation into an intervention army and ultimately prepared the way for the end of military service. Their suggestions, as far as they were realized, did not withstand the change in foreign policy circumstances.

Most of the “Commission for Modern Services on the Labor Market “‘s proposals, better known as Hartz Commission, have changed the country. Schröder enforced the most important elements in the 2010 Agenda and paid the highest possible political price with the loss of power. The Hartz reforms are the prime example of the fact that commissions can develop sensible suggestions, but does not end the political work, but only really starts.

The title of the Basta Chancellor is actually a compliment for Schröder because he has stood up to politics at least in the case of Hartz reforms and linked his political fate. Whether Friedrich Merz also resembles his predecessor there depends on the country.