Merkel to stay low key in German TV debate billed as poll rival’s last chance
Angela Merkel is tantalisingly close to a fourth-term victory when Germans vote in a general election this month, the most recent poll shows.
A head-to-head televised debate with the main opposition challenger tonight is being portrayed as the last chance for Martin Schulz, the Social Democratic Party candidate and her main opponent, to open up the contest.
The latest poll, published on Friday, gave Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union-led coalition 39 per cent, 17 points ahead of the SPD. The centrist Free Democrats were on 10 per cent, meaning she could form a coalition with the pro-business liberals.
But Mr Schulz has not thrown in the towel and has pinned his hopes on floating voters being won over by his more boisterous personality.
“Some 46 per cent of the voters remain undecided. I think we can still turn the tide,” he said.
Known to Germans as the “television duel”, tonight’s show is an established feature of the election. It is expected to attract almost 30 million viewers – or about half of the electorate, a poll by research company Forsa says. One in five of those polled said the debate could swing their vote.
The two candidates speak separately in question-and-answer sessions hosted by television news presenters. Mrs Merkel threatened to stay away after the broadcasters proposed a more adversarial format, leading to accusations that she was afraid of confrontation.
“If an election campaign is defined as good only when people insult each other, then that’s not my idea of what an election campaign is about,” she said.
The chancellor is seeking to defy recent political history with her anti-campaign tactics. Almost all of her campaign stops are in constituencies won by her party in 2013. The danger is that she misses connecting with the voters, a flaw that has cost other campaigners dearly.
Theresa May was called the Maybot for robotic sloganeering that fell flat in the British general election in June. Hillary Clinton exuded an almost pathological dislike of campaigning up close to the voters, which may have cost her key states such as Wisconsin in November’s presidential election.
But Mrs Merkel’s defenders believe she can prosper from a low-key approach.
“For Merkel this is the starting point,” the political commentator Jasper von Altenbockum wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. “The longer she reigns the more of the experience is credited to her, which Schulz does not have and cannot have.
“Merkel exudes this fact through unrestrained calm. This has nothing to do with lulling the electorate or ‘asymmetrical demobilisation’, especially nothing with ‘de-politicisation’. This is politics without a circus.”
Mr Schulz has warned that the chancellor is depriving the country of the opportunity to debate its future direction.
“The CDU has a concept and that’s Angela Merkel,” he said. “That’s supposedly enough for you all. We have a concept for the future of the next generation in this country.”
Pollsters believe there is an opportunity for Mr Schulz to win tonight.
“The TV duel format, like spontaneity and eloquence, is not quite Merkel’s strength,” Forsa head Manfred Guellner said. “Schulz can benefit.”