Virus collides with politics as German election year starts
BERLIN » The coronavirus pandemic is colliding with politics as Germany embarks on its vaccination drive and one of the most unpredictable election years in the country’s post-World War II history.
After months of relatively harmonious pandemic management, fingers are being pointed as the centerleft junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government takes aim at what it says has been a chaotic start to vaccinating the population.
The discord is likely a sign of the times to come. An electoral marathon in Germany starts in midMarch, when two of six state elections scheduled this year will be held, and culminates on Sept. 26, when voters choose a new national parliament. Germany’s choices will help set the tone for Europe in the coming years.
Merkel, who has led Germany since 2005, plans to step down at the September election. It’s the first election since post-war West Germany’s inaugural vote in 1949 in which there is no incumbent chancellor seeking another term.
Surveys have shown high approval ratings for the 66- year- old Merkel during the pandemic. She has taken a science- led, safety-first approach that has helped her center-right party into a strong poll lead, although Germany has struggled since the fall to get the coronavirus under control.
“We can be glad in Germany and Europe to have such an experienced chancellor as Angela Merkel in this pandemic,” Health Minister Jens Spahn said Wednesday.
But with the new year, the end of the Merkel era is
looming closer. This week, the center-left Social Democratic Party, which only reluctantly entered a coalition with the longtime leader after Germany’s last election, latched onto frustration with the slow start of vaccinations to open political hostilities.
“It was always clear that the start of vaccinations
would be the point at which we would see the end of the tunnel,” the party’s general secretary, Lars Klingbeil, said. “And now we see that we are in a much worse position than other countries. We ordered too little vaccine. There is barely a prepared strategy.”
The responsibility for that, he said, lies with
Spahn, a rising star in Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, who is Merkel’s vice chancellor and the Social Democrats’ candidate for chancellor in this year’s federal election, reportedly sent Spahn a list of questions about vaccinerelated issues.
Spahn rejected the criticism, saying politicians must learn from mistakes but that Germany’s vaccination campaign is going according to expectations.
“It has been clear for weeks and months ... that we would have too little vaccine in the beginning” because production capacities are still limited, he said, not because too little was ordered.
The health minister also noted that a deliberate decision was made to vaccinate the most vulnerable people in nursing homes first, and that process is relatively time-consuming.
Germany had vaccinated nearly 477,000 people by Friday, a week-anda-half after it started giving shots against the coronavirus. That’s a better showing than in several European countries, but critics point to faster progress in the U.K., the United States and Israel.
Some in the governing coalition and elsewhere have accused the European Union of bungling the ordering of vaccines. But Merkel insists that having the EU take the lead in ordering doses was and is the right thing to do.
Germany’s management of the public health emergency was a relative bright spot in Europe during the early phase of the pandemic. However, virus-related deaths increased significantly in the past two months, and the government this week extended and tightened the country’s second lockdown.