Merkel’s party wins German state election in rival’s heartland
GERMANY - Angela Merkel’s conservatives have won a state election in their centre-left rival’s heartland, in a stinging blow to the challenger in September’s national vote.
The western state of North Rhine-Westphalia is Germany’s most populous and has been led by the Social Democrats (SPD) for all but five years since 1966. It is also the home state of Martin Schulz, the Social Democrat seeking to deny Merkel, the German chancellor, a fourth term in the election on 24 September. Schulz had been hoping for a boost after two previous state election defeats sapped his party’s momentum. Instead, Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won 33% of the vote in the election for the state legislature, with the Social Democrats on 31.2%. SPD governor Hannelore Kraft’s coalition lost its majority as her junior partners, the Greens, won only 6.4%. The conservative challenger Armin Laschet, a deputy leader of Merkel’s party, was poised to replace Kraft. “The CDU has won the heartland of the Social Democrats,” said the conservatives’ general secretary, Peter Tauber. Schulz, who was not on the ballot, told supporters in Berlin: “This is a difficult day for the Social Democrats; a difficult day for me personally as well. I come from the state in which we took a really stinging defeat today.”
He urged the party to focus on the national election. “We will sharpen our profile further we have to as well,” he said. “We will continue fighting; the result will come on 24 September. The SPDs’ national ratings soared after Schulz, a former European parliament president, was nominated in January as Merkel’s challenger. But defeats in two other state elections since late March punctured the party’s euphoria over Schulz’s nomination. The SPD result in last weekend’s election, the last before the national vote, was the party’s worst in North Rhine-Westphalia since the second world war. In the state’s previous election, in 2012, the SPD beat the CDU by 39.1% to 26.3%. The pro-business Free Democrats won a strong 12.6% of the vote on Sunday after a campaign headed by their national leader, Christian Lindner. That gave the party, with which Merkel governed Germany from 2009-13, a solid base for its drive to return to the national parliament in September after it was ejected four years ago.
(Theguardian.com)