This is the question the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the International Forum of Deutsche Bank, dedicated to this year’s conference in its series of conferences “Foresight – Strategies for Tomorrow’s Society”, attended by 160 opinion makers from politics, business, research and the media in Berlin in the middle of March 2006. Commissioned in advance, forsa’s survey provided an empirical basis for the conference topic.

At the start of the conference, Rainer Neske, Spokesman of the Management Board of Deutsche Bank Privat- und Geschäftskunden AG, stated that the loss of trust is not just a political problem. “For bankers, trust is the key basis of their business,” said Neske. In response to the question posed by forsa, which institutions do Germans trust, banks were actually in the lower third, with 33%, but still ahead of insurance companies (23%), trade unions (24%) and political parties (17%). A democracy is based on trust. Through the elections to parliament, the sovereign, that is the people, entrust their political representatives with power for four years. They do this on the basis of promises politicians have made to them and in the expectation that those elected will conduct themselves in a prescribed framework of rules the people are familiar with.

The Duisburg-based political scientist Karl-Rudolf Korte warned what can happen when breaching this framework does not remain the exception, but rather becomes the rule. Our “attention-getting democracy” rewards those who break the rules with media presence and a greater reputation, but not those who guard their basic principles, said Korte. The result is that politicians and political institutions have lost credibility and, in the worst case, can no longer reinstate the basis of trust necessary to be able to take unpopular decisions requiring a majority. Thus, the risk is growing that the people will turn away from what they believe to be dishonest and inefficient institutions and turn to “popular rabble-rousers”.

Furthermore, a “culture of neglect” was something that Wolfgang Nowak, Spokesman of the Alfred Herrhausen Society, has observed both literally and in politics. Whereas in Germany’s capital, Berlin, graffiti, vandalism and reckless bike riders set the scene, the center of political power was characterized by patronage and rule breaking, which have been met with a “shrugging powerlessness”. Even more: some of those in government work on making rule breaking the norm.

The “new dimension in a need for trust”, as Germany’s former Minister of the Interior Gerhart Rudolf Baum (FDP) called it, is probably not so much the legacy from the last coalition government (SPD/Greens), but rather the result of a phase of fundamental transformations, which are affecting not only Germans. Here, we can see a paradox. The growing loss of confidence in politicians is in stark contrast to an increasing need for trust. This is a result from, among other things, the experience of not being able to control processes anymore, because they are, for example, no longer taking place at the nation-state level. For example, over 50 percent of all the laws are now decided on in Brussels. The lack of trust in politicians’ ability to shape the future is affecting other areas, too. Whereas in 1979 four out of five German citizens could agreed to the sentence: “When things are going well for the economy, things are going well for me, too”, today only every fifth person concurs. But how can trust be regained in times of actual contempt for politics? Wolfgang Clement, who was Federal Minister for the Economy and Employment until 2005, called for a “new honesty”: instead of denying economic developments, one should deal with their consequences and find a new balance between economic development, on the one hand, and social security, on the other.

Not always is the loss of trust negative for a political system. Franz Walter, a political party researcher based in Göttingen, indicated as much in his polemic. Frequently, the reason for the foundation of new political parties – for example, the SPD and Greens – was the mistrust of groups of society vis-à-vis the established political parties, which they no longer saw themselves sufficiently represented by. Another example of this was the speech on June 30, 1960, by Herbert Wehner, SPD politician and party fraction leader back then, in which he declared a radical change in the direction of his party’s foreign policy. “A clear breach of trust,” said Walter. The Managing Director of Scholz & Friends AG, Sebastian Turner, considers mistrust to be not just an opportunity, but also a necessity: “An enlightened population can be recognized in that is mistrustful.”

According to Heiner Geißler, what is lacking above all is a visionary concept that dispels people’s fear of the future. Another trust-building measure, said Geißler, would be to sweep away political fantasies of omnipotence. “Politicians create the impression they can influence everything, but in reality they can influence much less than in the fifties,” said Geißler, who had already warned of the pending collapse of the social security system as General Secretary of the CDU (1977 to 1989). In Geißler’s opinion, members of parliament are exposed to an increasing incapacitation – through the political parties’ executive leadership, government and a lack of discussion in parliament. Important decisions were no longer made in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, but rather by committees of people “who are not affected by the decisions they take.”

However, Geißler’s hypothesis of a loss of power on the part of parliament is something the current President of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert (CDU) did not want to accept. To back up his statement that the parliament has not lost its core competency and that it is still where laws are enacted today, he only needed to read from the parliament’s current agenda. Lammert’s conclusion: “It certainly is not that too little is decided, but rather too much.” Less than twenty percent of all the draft laws the Bundestag passed were without any changes. “The Bundestag is certainly not powerless, but it also isn’t omnipotent,” said Lammert.

Furthermore, the conference speakers went beyond the examination of just the causes for the lack of trust. During the second part of the conference, they tried to provide stimuli for renewed confidence. The head of the Berlin broadcasting studio of ZDF, Peter Frey, called for a decelerated reporting. The media could restore the portion of mistrust politicians suffer from caused by the media by “resisting the intoxication of speed” and by making political processes understandable and transparent through careful reporting and analyses. Oswald Metzger, political advisor and former budgetary policy spokesman for the Bündnis 90/Die Grünen fraction, sees the introduction of referendums similar to the Swiss model as a means of decelerating politics in the habit of daily political action. Werner Schulz (Greens) called on the consciences of his colleagues in politics by posing the question: “Am I a conformed loser, or can I go home with a good conscience?”

A precondition to restoring trust in politics, however, is the willingness on the part of citizens to leave the role of passive consumers. Former U.S. President John F. Kennedy formulated this in a now legendary sentence: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” With this in mind, Christoph Keese, Chief Editor of the “Welt am Sonntag” newspaper, called upon the people to leave their role as spectators. Above all, this will be the task of those in their forties, the “excluded generation”, who are now moving into key positions, following the post-war and “68” generations. Not only do they have to regain trust, but they must also fundamentally renovate the social security state with reduced resources, and thereby render it sustainable. Alfred Herrhausen, who the Society is named after, is said to have held a quote from the writer Ingeborg Bachmann in high regard. It could serve as the motto for a new generation of politicians: “People can handle the truth.”