The 1994 German federal election was held on the 27th June 1994 to elect the 13th Bundestag, and saw the CDU/CSU-FDP coalition led by Wolfgang Schäuble seeking re-election to a second term.
Schäuble had led a government which mainly focused on foreign affairs. He sought to continue European integration and work towards the adoption of a single European currency zone, advocated for the expansion of the European Community and subsequently the European Union to new member states, and vocally supported anti-communist and democratic movements in eastern Europe.
Despite this, he quickly turned from widely popular to being somewhat controversial. On New Year’s Day 1992, when he met with Russian President Boris Yeltsin Schäuble gave a speech with him in which he declared, ‘Russians should be proud, for you chose freedom!’, which was met with praise in Germany and much of the West but mockery from many Russians in the following difficult decade for the country. He also attracted criticism for his advocacy for European relations reform, particularly with his government’s handling of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and the decisions to force Italy and the UK out of it in late 1992.
The major legacy of Schäuble’s government was successful in terms of achieving his goals, however. He helped successfully shepherd the Maastricht Treaty to ratification, turning the European Community into the European Union, despite it only narrowly being ratified in referenda in France and Denmark, and oversaw Austria, Finland, Norway and Sweden planning referenda to join the EU in 1994 (all four would join, though narrowly in Sweden and very narrowly in Norway). He also introduced a more austere budget which cut taxes on businesses and funding for public services, though his Finance Minister Theo Waigel kept up aid funding to Eastern Europe and the Gulf War coalition.
The SPD was taken over in opposition by Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein Björn Engholm, who had won a commanding victory in his home state’s 1988 and 1992 elections. His leadership suffered from tensions on the national stage between him and other prominent SPD figures like Gerhard Schröder and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, and in 1993 he was forced to resign after a scandal broke revealing discrepancies over the scandal that helped him win his 1988 landslide.
Engholm was succeeded by Minister-President of the Saarland Oskar Lafontaine, who surprised observers by proving hostile to bipartisan cooperation with the CDU/CSU to a far greater extent than had been characteristic of German politics beforehand. With the economic downturn of the early 1990s, Lafontaine lambasted Schäuble for his austerity measures, and though he did not oppose Schäuble’s pro-European policy stances, he argued that his business-centric policies threatened the livelihoods of ordinary Germans, and supported tax harmonisation with other EU member states (which angered Eurosceptics who were unwilling to fund higher taxes in their countries).
While Lafontaine’s leadership had reinvigorated the SPD, the rest of the left had declined during the parliamentary term. The Greens had been severely shaken by the murder-suicide of Petra Kelly by her husband Gert Bastian in 1992, and the party’s new leader Marianne Birthler had tried to distance it from the KPD even if allying with it were the only way to form a new left-wing government. Meanwhile, the KPD had replaced Gregor Gysi as party leader with Hans Modrow, who helped defeat a motion to remove ‘Communist’ from the party’s name and argued that the party ‘must give new life to communism’, rhetoric which damaged public trust in the party even as it maintained a Eurocommunist policy platform.
As a result of this, the 1994 campaign was dominated by efforts by Schäuble to portray a Lafontaine-led government as extremist. Helping him was Lafontaine leading a poor campaign, as he tried to defy his reputation by supporting more business-friendly economic policies and arguing that Germany needed to take in fewer asylum seekers, hurting his reputation with the left, and made it clear he wished to protect German industry in states like his own, alienating the Greens. Schäuble was also widely considered to be the better Chancellor, and was much more popular than Lafontaine with the public even before the campaign.
The Schäuble government was re-elected by a reduced margin against the SPD compared to 1990, but the minor parties all lost seats and votes (leading to the resignations of Birthler and Mordrow) and the government retained an overall majority, allowing Schäuble to secure enough support for a second term in the Bundestag.
(Sorry for the long delay between updates on this TL btw, work has been hectic!)
