Letter From Berlin: Forget Saving the World--Save Our Jobs

It's just after noon at Cafe 103, one of the trendier spots in a trendy neighborhood, and young Berliners are indulging in three of their favorite vices: coffee, cigarettes and politics. A generation ago, smoke-filled establishments like these were hotbeds of debate about environmental catastrophes and the risk of nuclear war. But the patrons' obsessions have grown slightly more mundane. "The tax system here is driving us all to hell," says Max Wirtz, 37, the owner of an event-management agency. "Everything is too regulated." His friend Matthias, 37, nods in agreement and says what attracted him to the conservative Christian Democratic Party was a radical idea: a flat tax. "I wasn't thinking of voting for them up to that point," he says. "But that tax idea was cool!"

The fact that an issue like tax reform generates so much excitement says a lot about the zeitgeist in Germany today--and helps explain why the government of Gerhard Schröder was voted out last month after seven years in power. Following weeks of wrangling, the country's major parties agreed last week to form a coalition government headed by Angela Merkel, 51, who stands to become the first female Chancellor in German history. The victory of Merkel and her Christian Democratic Party marks a generational shift in German politics. Young voters who once were worried about social issues say they are far more concerned about reviving Germany's stagnant economy. As a result, German leaders like Schröder and his Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who came of age during the social tumult of the 1960s, are giving way to a younger, more conservative crowd. Says Michael Naumann, a former Cabinet minister under Schröder: "The torch is being passed."

Many Germans welcome the change. The 1960s and '70s were a particularly intense time in Germany as young people threw off the social straitjacket of the 1950s and the legacy of Nazism. Fischer, who among other assorted jobs worked as a taxi driver, brought some of that contrarian spirit into German political life, famously clashing with U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the eve of the Iraq war. Schröder was not a radical but shared his cohort's progressive outlook and freewheeling lifestyle. (Schröder and Fischer have eight marriages between them.) "They all wore suits and ties to the office," says Walter Lindner, a Fischer aide. But "in their heads they saw themselves as from the counterculture."