The Hanoverian connection

STARTING with the Angles and Saxons and continuing with the Hanoverian kings, people from Lower Saxony, one of Germany’s 16 states, have played a big role in British history. And vice versa. After the second world war, Lower Saxony was part of the British zone and Gordon Macready, a Scot, ran it. In 1946 he came close to achieving something unheard-of in Lower Saxony: a balanced budget. Clearly, only another Scot could balance it again, if given a chance after the next state election on January 20th.
Or so implies, tongue in cheek, David McAllister, the premier of Lower Saxony. He is fighting to keep his job in a vote that is widely seen as a test run for Germany’s federal election next September. Mr McAllister is indeed a dual citizen, with a Glaswegian father and German mother. In some countries that might be a problem in politics. Not in Germany, where Mr McAllister, aged 41, is seen as a possible heir-apparent in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the centre-right party of Angela Merkel, the chancellor.
His fans brandish signs reading “I’m a Mac”. One of his television ads has a narrator singing “Our chieftain is a Scot and we are a strong clan” over the sound of bagpipes. When Mr McAllister drew the rhetorical arc to Sir Gordon Macready at a recent CDU convention, it brought the house down. “Scots have a great brand in Germany” for their thriftiness, says Mr McAllister. In any case, he adds, “better Scot than Greek” on a German campaign trail.

Such frivolity is allowed, indeed encouraged, in Lower Saxony because without it an election there would be intolerably dull. As in most of the rest of Germany, the state has barely felt the euro crisis so far. The largest employer, Volkswagen (a carmaker part-owned by the state government), is doing well. So is agriculture, the economy’s other mainstay. An old controversy about making a temporary storage site for nuclear waste permanent is bubbling under quietly.
Nonetheless, Lower Saxony gets attention because it is in almost exactly the same political situation as the whole country. Both are run by coalitions led by the CDU and the smaller Free Democratic Party (FDP). Like Mrs Merkel and the CDU in Berlin, Mr McAllister and the CDU in Hanover lead the polls, with roughly 40%. But in country and state alike, the FDP is polling below the 5% threshold required to enter parliament, which threatens to deprive the CDU of its long-time partner.
Mr McAllister could thus lose his job even if he wins the most votes, if the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Greens, both on the centre-left, get more than 50%. Unless, that is, he can form a coalition with one of them. The scenario in fashion among the pundits is an alliance between the CDU and the Greens.
Such talk only “helps the Greens, not the CDU”, retorts Mr McAllister. “Why should we as the big, proud CDU run after the Greens?” Yet if, on the evening of January 20th, his alternatives are leaving government or sharing it with Greens or SPD “reds”, Mr McAllister, whose clan tartan contains both those colours, may discover a sudden flexibility. Then all Germany could spend the next eight months speculating about whether Mrs Merkel might have to do the same if, come September, the FDP is thrown out of the federal parliament as well.