Merkel favored to win 4th term, polls say
BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel appears favored to win a fourth term, according to analysts and polls, when Germans vote Sunday after the campaign produced few divisive issues but saw smaller parties gain support.
Those parties include the nationalist, anti-migration Alternative for Germany, which is set to become the most right-wing party in Pparliament in 60 years.
Merkel, the chancellor for 12 years, has run a lowkey campaign emphasizing the country’s sinking unemployment, strong economic growth, balanced budget and overall stability in a volatile world.
Pre-election polls give her conservative Union bloc a lead of 13 to 17 points over the center-left Social Democrats of her challenger, Martin Schulz. The two are traditional rivals but have governed together in a “grand coalition” of the biggest parties for the past four years.
Schulz returned to German politics in January after years as the European Parliament’s president. His campaign centered on righting perceived economic injustices for Germany’s have-nots. But it’s been difficult for him to carve out clear differences with the conservatives.
Merkel, during the pair’s only head-to-head debate of the campaign, offered Germans “a combination of the experience of recent years, in which we have achieved plenty, and curiosity for the new.”
Merkel is pledging to get from Germany’s current 5.7 percent unemployment rate — down from 11 percent when she took office in 2005 — to “full employment” by 2025. She pledges limited tax cuts and to keep Germany’s borrowing at zero.
And she has promised to keep a steady hand internationally, with long experience of European Union negotiating marathons, tough talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and now of engaging with President Donald Trump.
Polls suggest that Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and their Bavaria-only allies, the Christian Social Union, will come in a few points short of the 41.5 percent support they had in 2013 — Merkel’s best result yet. They put Schulz’s Social Democrats around or below the 23 percent they won in their worst showing yet in post-World War II Germany, in 2009.
Hans Kundnani, an expert at the German Marshall Fund think tank, said it’s a “foregone conclusion” that Merkel will be the next chancellor.
Forming a new government would be a challenge. Merkel can hope for a narrow majority for a center-right coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats, with whom she ran Germany from 2009 to 2013, or the traditionally left-leaning Greens.
The junior partners, whoever they are, will have “limited influence over the overall direction of policy,” Kundnani wrote in an analysis. He added that “in so far as differences exist between the four parties that could become part of the government, they are a matter of details and nuances.”
Polls show four parties competing for third place, with support between 7 and 12 percent: the Free Democrats, who look set to return to Parliament after a four-year absence, the Greens, the Left Party and Alternative for Germany.
Alternative for Germany has swung right since it narrowly missed entering Parliament in 2013. It has been helped by shrill opposition to Merkel’s decision to allow in large numbers of refugees and other migrants in 2015.
Many of Merkel’s campaign appearances have been marked by loud heckling from pro-nationalist demonstrators.
“This is a kind of intolerance that is very, very difficult,” Merkel said recently.
The strength of Alternative for Germany’s appeal to protest voters, who are dissatisfied with other parties, remains to be seen. If there’s another “grand coalition,” a third-place finish would make it the opposition leader in the next Parliament — a prospect many in Germany view with distaste.
Merkel has regained ground over the past year after gradually shifting to a more restrictive stance on migrants, stressing the need to deport those who have no right to stay and to prevent so-called “economic migrants” from Africa and the Balkans from coming.
But she has kept her focus firmly on the center ground.
Over the years, she has dropped military conscription, accelerated Germany’s exit from nuclear power, embraced the Social Democrats’ demand for a national minimum wage and, in June, cleared the way for Parliament to legalize same-sex marriage. That deprived liberal rivals of one awkward issue before campaigning even began.
Schulz said he still hopes to win over undecided voters, arguing that Merkel has no vision for the future.
“There is someone who wants to administer the past. She is called Angela Merkel,” he said recently. “And there is someone who wants to shape the future. He is called Martin Schulz.”