User:Hobbitschuster/Postwar Leaders of Germany

This is a travel topic about the Presidents of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Chancellors of the Federal Republic of Germany and the de facto "Paramount Leaders" of East Germany (the "German Democratic Republic")

Understand
Germany's history in modern times was a tumultuous and often unhappy one. Only coming into being in 1871 as a modern relatively unified state, it was the main culprit of World War I and consequently in a position of international pariah for much of the Weimar Republic. After Hitler unleashed World War II in Europe, Germany once more became an international pariah and was utterly militarily defeated and occupied by Britain, France, the US and the Soviet Union. In 1949 the Western Allies (France, the UK and the US) decided to create a new German state in the three western sectors with a "Basic Law" (Grundgesetz) coming into force as a de facto constitution on May 23 1949. In reaction to that, the Soviet Union created the "Deutsche Demokratische Republik" (DDR) in their zone of occupation, officially being founded on October 7 1949, a day widely celebrated by the regime for the next forty years with huge parades. The two states were in fierce competition in almost all imaginable fields and during the 1950s West Germany would end diplomatic relations with any country (safe for the USSR) that recognized the DDR. By the late 1980s East Germany entered economic decline and protests throughout the Eastern Bloc led to the fall of the wall in 1989 and German reunification on October 3 1990, a day chosen in part to avoid a forty-first "birthday" of East Germany.

While the constitution of East Germany changed several times and there were several people who supposedly held various amounts of power, in reality there was usually a quite identifiable "paramount leader" whose power mostly rested upon his control of the Socialist Unity Party (SED in German) and only secondarily on his official political offices. Only in the last year prior to reunification did the importance of the SED decrease.

The West German Basic Law was written in part to avoid supposed mistakes of the Weimar Constitution such as the strong role of the President (elected to a seven year term by popular suffrage under the Weimar Constitution) and the weak role of the chancellor, who could be sacked by the President and unseated through a simple Reichstag majority against him. Under the Basic Law, the chancellor has the final say on the basic outlines of cabinet decisions and no chancellor can be unseated without the majority also choosing a new candidate to become chancellor (so called "constructive vote of no confidence"). In addition to that, the German political landscape which had been fractious during the Weimar Era has proven one of the more stable in postwar Europe, in part due to a 5% electoral threshold and the CDU/CSU managing to form an alliance between political Catholicism, liberal conservatism and the moderate right wing, which had not existed in a similar form at any prior time in German politics.

Konrad Adenauer (1949-1963)
Adenauer was in his seventies by the time he assumed office as chancellor (the deciding Bundestag-vote was won by a single vote - his own - leading him to quip "Mehrheit ist Mehrheit" - "majority is majority") and would lead Germany for fourteen years - the second longest term to date. His politics of western alignment and establishing a de facto independent West Germany along capitalist principles were controversial at the time but are largely celebrated as the right calls in official commemoration. In the last years of his chancellorship he worked with French President Charles de Gaulle towards Franco-German reconciliation and European unification.

Ludwig Erhard (1963-1966)
Erhard, a native of Fürth and together with Adenauer the only chancellor born in the 19th century is far more known for his role as minister for the economy than his short relatively luckless term as chancellor.

Kurt Georg Kiesinger (1966-1969)
After the classical liberal FDP had increasingly drifted away from the center-right CDU/CSU throughout the 1960s and the social democratic SPD increased in vote-share a "grand coalition" between SPD and CDU/CSU was formed in 1966. This coalition had a huge parliamentary majority and passed important but controversial legislation such as the new emergency laws but faced increasing "opposition on the streets" in the form of "APO" ("außerparlamentarische Opposition" outer-parliamentary opposition) and the 68 student movement. The era of this first Grand Coalition was also the only time the openly far right NPD entered West German parliaments. Kiesinger had been a member of the Nazi party and was publicly slapped by Anti-Nazi Beate Klarsfeld to draw attention to this

Willy Brandt (1969-1974)
Brandt's five years as chancellor were a tumultuous era. He formed the first social democrat led German government since 1930 despite a good showing of the CDU/CSU in the 1969 elections and had to face snap elections in 1972 due to members of his party defecting in the face of Brandt's "change through rapprochement" "New Eastern Policy" which broke with previous West German consensus and de facto acknowledged post-war realities in exchange for better relations and easier cross-border travel. Brandt was hugely popular particular among younger people and is to this day sometimes cited as an inspiration for political leaders. After being forced out due to an espionage scandal (Günter Guillaume, a close personal employee of Brandt worked for the East German Stasi) he stayed head of the SPD and the Socialist International for decades.

Helmut Schmidt (1974-1982)
Schmidt is often contrasted to the visionary Brandt as the more pragmatic politician and he took the SPD on a more confrontational course in foreign policy with the decision by NATO to station short and mid-range missiles in Europe and Germany as response to the Soviet Union doing the same in its sphere of influence. While the 1980 election which Schmidt ran as a "Stoppt Strauß" campaign against CSU leader and right wing darling Franz Josef Strauß ended in a narrow victory for the SPD-FDP coalition in 1982 the estranged coalition partners broke up with the FDP enthroning Helmut Kohl via a constructive vote of no confidence leading to fresh elections in 1983. The opposition to increased militarization of the Cold War, which came from within the SPD itself was also one of the contributing factors in the rise of the Greens, which entered federal parliament for the first time in 1983. After leaving office, Schmidt remained a commentator on current events until dying in 2015.

Helmut Kohl (1982-1998)
Promising a "turn" ("Geistig moralische Wende") upon being elected chancellor in 1982, Kohl was often derided as a provincial with an audible dialect and fondness of Pfälzer Saumagen. He managed to outlast many of his critics and detractors, even those who had written premature political obituaries at the end of the 1980s, when reunification "saved his chancellorship". Winning easy reelection wins on the East German vote in 1990 and 1994, Kohl lost the 1998 election and shortly thereafter had to endure a temporary fall from grace due to a scandal involving political donations. Kohl died in 2017.

Chancellors of reunified Germany
Helmut Kohl is known among supporters as the "Kanzler der Einheit" or "chancellor of Unity" as reunification happened under his watch. Since him there have been two chancellors

Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005)
Schröder won the 1998 elections at the head of a Red-Green coalition, the first explicitly "left wing" democratic government in German history. After leading German troops to fight in Kosovo in 1999 Schröder and his foreign minister Joschka Fischer refused involvement in the Iraq War which is cited as one of the reasons for the upset win of Red-Green in the 2002 elections. Having lost several state and local elections, Schröder called for snap elections in 2005 narrowly losing them due to several members and voters of the SPD abandoning his party over controversial neoliberal labor and unemployment reforms often called "Hartz IV". The new "Left Party" that denied Schröder victory in the 2005 election was led by Oskar Lafontaine, a personal enemy of Schröder who had been minister of finance under him from 1998 to 1999. Schröder is alive and controversially working for Russian company Gazprom as of 2019.

Angela Merkel (2005- )
Declining to run for chancellor in 2002 in favor of Edmund Stoiber (CSU), Merkel who had been head of her party since 2000 led her party to an unimpressive result in the 2005 election that was still enough for her to lead a Grand Coalition until 2009 when she could form a majority government with the FDP until 2013 when she entered another Grand Coalition. Merkel has adopted a "leading from behind" approach and a fairly middle of the road profile during much of her chancellorship that is often compared to Kohl under whom she had served as minister (1990-1998). Despite being born in Hamburg, Merkel grew up in East Germany as the daughter of a protestant minister. Controversial aspects of her chancellorship are her involvement with austerity in the wake of the financial crisis in Greece and her pro-refugee stance epitomized with her sentence "Wir schaffen das" ("We can do this") in the wake of the arrival of roughly a million refugees in 2015.