New faces, politics – and accents: Germany’s next coalition | Germany

GGermany’s next coalition government, which will be sworn in on Wednesday, will come up with new faces, new political priorities and a new dose of energy. It will also speak with a distinctive accent.

Olaf Scholz, the center-left politician who will follow in Angela Merkel’s footsteps, is not only a man from the north of Germany in terms of his upbringing, but also of his voice. When the former Mayor of Hamburg recently warned the Bundestag that Covid-19 had not yet been defeated, he leaned into the elongated fricative typical of Germany’s second largest city: Scholz pronounced the word defeated how smeared.

Meetings of his cabinets tend to open with a casual murmur good Morning than Goodbye Greetings exclusively for the states of the south. In Scholz’s chief of staff Wolfgang Schmidt (also from Hamburg), Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck (from the Plön district in Schleswig-Holstein), Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Labor Minister Hubertus Heil (both Lower Saxony), several leading voices come from the northern third of the country.

Regional representation is of paramount importance in Germany’s decentralized political system, and governments are working hard to give each of the 16 federal states their fair share of the seats in Berlin.

But a shift in equilibrium under Scholz can already be seen. For one thing, his cabinet will be the first in the country’s post-war history without a Bavarian minister. Germany’s largest and southernmost federal state ended up “on the sub-bankâ€, complained the Secretary General of the ruling CSU this week.

The northward drift of German political power goes against the grain in many ways. The south dominates the country economically: it has most of the large companies registered on the German stock exchange, offers more start-ups a home, employs more IT specialists and applies for more patents than the north. It rules German football, where traditional northern clubs like Werder Bremen and Hamburger SV have fallen into disrepair, while Bayern Munich wins trophy after trophy.

But since the relocation of the parliamentary seat from Bonn in the Rhineland to Berlin, the political focus has shifted quietly to the north. After Merkel, who was born in Hamburg and grew up in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and Gerhard Schröder from Hanover, Scholz is the third North Chancellor in a row; the last four MPs are all from the northern states.

The strength of the north results in part from the weakness of the south and southwest, where the conservative party bloc is particularly vulnerable to power struggles. If the CSU had overcome its complicated relationship with its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, the Bundestag might have sworn in on Wednesday, CSU chief Markus Söder, as Federal Chancellor.

Tom Mannewitz, political scientist at the Federal University of Public Administration, said: “With the festering factions within the party and the historical split between CDU and CSU, the conservative bloc in southern Germany has a strategic disadvantage.”

Nevertheless, accents play a surprisingly important role in German politics. Scholz’s speech still has distinctive northern accents, but it is far from the strong Hamburg dialect of his idol Helmut Schmidt. As with Merkel and Schröder, most Germans would likely refer to his accent as High German or Standard Germanwhich gives it a quality for everyone that politicians south of the so-called Uerdingen line, which separates the “high†and “low†of German, can hardly achieve.

“We are increasingly seeing that the North German-speaking type of politician who speaks High German is gaining more acceptance nationwide,” says Jürgen Falter, political scientist at the University of Mainz. “In contrast, politicians from the south often find it difficult to shake off a touch of provinciality.”

The last two contenders for the top spot, the Social Democrat Martin Schulz in 2017 and Merkel’s designated successor Armin Laschet in the election in September, both come from Aachen, near the old power center of the Bonn Republic, and sounded like that when they spoke.

Their popular appeal, a boon at the national level or in the European Parliament, became a burden as they tried to storm the national stage, generating stereotypes of happy but dubious carnival fools: Laschet’s ratings plummeted spectacularly after he was filmed during a joke grim event in a city hit by the summer floods.

Michael Elmentaler, Professor of Linguistics at Kiel University, said: “After the Second World War there were a number of strong German leaders whose regional accents were accepted as part of their identity, from Konrad Adenauer to Ludwig Erhard to Kurt Kiesinger and Helmut Kohl.

“But what we are seeing now is that tolerance towards regional dialects is decreasing. If a German politician like Adenauer spoke today, people would laugh at him. “

Linguists like Elmentaler have mapped the disappearance of regional dialects not only from the German Bundestag, but also from town halls and television stations, in which the language of the news presenters has become more casual but also more standardized. Linguistic peculiarities associated with certain cities have given way to broader “regiolects”.

If Scholz’s Nordic identity helped him claim the chancellery, will it also shape his administration of the country?

“There is a strong stereotype of a certain type of North German politician, the Hanseat “, said Christoph Strupp, historian at the Hamburg Research Center for Contemporary History. “They should be sober pragmatists, humble in public appearance, with autonomy in line with the city state and a flair for compromises. “

While large federal states such as North Rhine-Westphalia have different centers of power whose interests can only be reconciled with difficulty by a single politician, in Hamburg there is “a proximity of politics, business and the media that can facilitate consensus building,” said Strupp. .

“Scholz does justice to many Hanseatic clichés,” said Strupp – in both a negative and a positive sense. “He has proven that he is able to hold together a red-green coalition that is not lacking in conflict. He managed to find decisive and practicable solutions to simmering problems in the city, such as the over-budgeted Elbphilharmonie concert hall or the housing shortage. “

The Hamburg City Hall borders the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce, a skyway bridge connects the two buildings – a symbol, some say, of the closeness between politics and business that has created a culture of backroom business. In 2011 Scholz ran for the Hamburg mayor’s office, simply recruited the President of the Chamber of Commerce as his Senator for Economics – and won.