Germany: Where Right Meets Left; Socialist? Conservative? In Berlin these days, such labels mean little. Everyone's singing the same tune.

Byline: Stefan Theil

With a long history of government ownership and political meddling, it's small wonder that Airbus is in crisis. Yet now that a [euro]2 billion cost-cutting plan threatens some of the jet maker's 22,000 jobs in Hamburg and Lower Saxony, what does a chorus of German politicians propose? An increase in government ownership. That the idea is getting heavily pushed by key conservative leaders, such as Lower Saxony governor Christian Wulff, is especially piquant. After all, his party came to power promising to ... privatize and deregulate.

When it comes to "saving" German jobs these days, conservative politicians seem to be falling over one another to abandon their noble principles. Take the case of BenQ, the Taiwanese mobile-phone maker that recently announced it would close two German plants it took over from Siemens last year. From Chancellor Angela Merkel on down, politicians, labor unions and the media took turns bashing Siemens CEO Klaus Kleinfeld for allegedly not taking care of his responsibilities toward his former workers. "The people's trust in the social market economy will suffer," Merkel reminded him. Never mind that Siemens paid BenQ substantially more to take over its struggling factories than it would have cost to lay off the workers. Succumbing to the collective pressure, Kleinfeld duly anted up a hardship fund of [euro]35 million.

With German workers clamoring for protection from the effects of globalization, Germany's conservatives, never very comfortable with Merkel's early attempts to move the party toward a more free-market, pro-reform track, now seem to be racing the socialists to the left. Why? One ...