Merkel re-election bid boosted
CHANCELLOR Angela Merkel of Germany received a significant lift to her re-election bid on Sunday when her party finished a clear first in a state election that was widely watched as a test of her strength.
Results from Sunday’s vote in tiny Saarland, which borders France and is home to around 1 million people, showed that Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats had won 40.7 percent of the vote.
The popular Christian Democrat governor of Saarland, Annegret KrampKarrenbauer, who secured the win, is such a close ally of the chancellor that she is often called “the mini-Merkel”. So Sunday’s election also seemed a victory for Germany’s leader.
Merkel is seeking a fourth term in national elections on September 24, a race that has grown more challenging in recent weeks after her centre-left rivals, the Social Democrats, unanimously selected a new candidate, Martin Schulz, to lead them into the fight.
Results from Sunday’s vote in Saarland suggest that Schulz has helped increase the Social Democrats’ appeal. The party won about 29.6 percent of the vote, about 5 percentage points more than polls had been showing before he took over leadership of the party. But the centre-left fell short of its goal of finishing first among Saarland’s approximately 800,000 voters.
One outcome that had been in play in Saarland was a governing partnership between the centre-left Social Democrats and the far-left Left party, in what would have been the first such governing coalition in a western German state. But The Left party won only around 13 percent of the vote, and it is likely that the Social Democrats will again be a junior partner in Saarland in a coalition with the Christian Democrats.
“It was a clear ‘No’ to a Left government,” Kramp-Karrenbauer said.
Another ally of Merkel’s, her chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, who is from Saarland, said the result showed that “straightforward good government” was a winner with German voters.
The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has advanced on an anti- migrant, anti-Muslim platform, got 6.2 percent of the vote, clearing the 5 percent hurdle to get seats, and the party will now sit in 12 of Germany’s 16 state legislatures.
Schulz acknowledged disappointment in his party’s performance, but encouraged his supporters not to waver in the monthslong campaign for the national election.
Although Schulz has lifted his party’s flagging fortunes, most polls show that Merkel, who has almost 12 years’ experience of international leadership and crisis management, is still the preferred chancellor.
But Sunday’s projected victory for her party by no means guarantees that she will retain power in September.
In the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a leading German newspaper, the commentator Nico Fried compared Merkel’s situation to that of a janitor sweeping sidewalks during a snowstorm: “As soon as he has cleared one patch, he can start all over again.”
Fried pointed out that even if Merkel’s party keeps power in Saarland, there are two other state elections looming where he called her chances of victory slim or hopeless. That appears particularly true in North-Rhine Westphalia, a state that is home to almost 18 million people and votes on May 14, just a week after the crucial second round in France’s presidential elections..
Merkel, who at times lately has seemed weary, travelled to Saarland on Thursday to plead with Christian Democrats to turn out for the election and persuade others to do the same.
The national election is still months away, and will probably be decided in the final weeks of campaigning. But in the meantime, as Fried noted, Merkel must keep her fractious centre-right bloc not just together, but in a positive mood.
Some Christian Democrats have grown impatient with what they see as a lack of a clear response by Merkel to the surge in popularity of the centre left. Months of disagreement between Merkel and the Christian Democrats’ sister party in Bavaria over the management of hundreds of thousands of refugees has gnawed at the unity that her bloc will need to win in September.