Merkel eyes coalition with SPD, Greens

Bid to rally rank-and-file for 2013 election battle

BERLIN, Dec 2, (Agencies): German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who aims to win a third term in 2013, said on Sunday she would talk to the opposition Greens and Social Democrats (SPD) on forming a coalition if she cannot rule with her present partners the Free Democrats (FDP).

Opinion polls signal exactly such a scenario, with a survey by Emnid on Sunday showing Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) winning 38 percent of the vote and the FDP Liberals winning just 4 percent and thereby falling short of the 5 percent threshold required to win parliamentary seats.

The poll put the SPD on 28 percent and the Greens at 14 percent, leaving them similarly unable to reach a majority.

Merkel told Bild am Sonntag newspaper in an interview she would speak to the SPD and Greens about forming a coalition as a “matter of course” if the FDP fell short.

“I’d lose all credibility if I, as a Chancellor who led a ‘grand coalition’ with the SPD, said I wouldn’t talk to them. But I don’t desire to have a ‘grand coalition’, rather I want to continue the Christian-Liberal government,” she said.

Merkel ruled with the SPD from 2005-2009 but then formed a government in her second term with the FDP, which won a record 14.6 percent of the vote before entering a deep slump which has seen them ejected from a string of regional assemblies and now facing parliamentary extinction.

In the interview Merkel emphasized a new closeness with the Greens.

Normalised

“Our relationship with the Greens has developed over the years, or you could say it has normalised,” Merkel said. “Whereas in the past there were insurmountable differences and CDU politicians had to explain themselves if they so much as ate a pizza with the Green, today there is a different tone and conversation is uncomplicated. That pleases me,” she said.

The Greens are also in turn opening up to a possible alliance with the CDU, long their political arch enemy.

An election in the state of Lower Saxony on Jan. 20, currently ruled by a CDU-FDP coalition, will send vital signals on the state of the political landscape and will help set the tone for the election year.

With general elections looming in less than a year, Merkel will address the rank-and-file of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) at its annual two-day gathering in the northern city of Hanover.

Even after seven years at the helm of Europe’s top economy, the 58year-old enjoys a level of domestic popularity unseen by any post-war leader before her despite heading a fractious centre-right coalition.

During Europe’s economic woes, she has become the ‘go-to’ leader — named by Forbes magazine as the world’s most powerful woman for six out of the last seven years — but has also been maligned for her pro-austerity mantra on the streets of crisis-ravaged eurozone nations.

She is expected to be re-elected head of the party she has led since 2000 at the congress.

Merkel recently set the campaign tone boasting hers was the “most successful government since reunification” in 1990, as Germany weathers Europe’s protracted crisis better than many of its neighbours.

In an interview with Sunday’s Bild newspaper, Merkel said Germans were better off today than three years ago but much still had to be done.

“Fortunately we have more people in work than ever and clearly fewer unemployed than before my time in office — that’s not only, but also, to do with clever politics,” she said.

Signs

However, she may now face choppier waters amid signs that Germany is beginning to feel the pinch with slowing growth in the third quarter and rising unemployment in November. Germans tend not to vote primarily for personalities but the CDU will focus its battle for re-election on the current chancellor, political scientist Gero Neugebauer of Berlin’s Free University said.

Her party, he noted however, is also in a “favourable position”. “It has the so-called strategic ability to form a majority, that means no government can be formed against it or without it,” he told reporters.

Despite dwindling public appetite for stumping up more cash for struggling eurozone countries, Merkel has repeatedly won parliament’s backing for crisis-fighting measures over the past three years. Germany’s two main opposition parties again supported the government on Friday in approving Athens’ latest multi-billion euro rescue aid amid headlines such as “The Never Ending Story” in mass circulation Bild daily. But if the crisis drags on, Merkel’s credibility could be hit, Neugebauer said.

“The worse the crisis gets and thus the worse the effect on German budgetary and fiscal policy and it also becomes clear to the voters that less money is available for national projects — that can harm Mrs Merkel,” he said.

Raised in former East Germany and the daughter of a Protestant preacher, Merkel rose through the CDU ranks as an outsider in a party of mainly Roman Catholic family men from the wealthy southwest.

She has shaken up the party with a change in direction on education and family policy, support for a form of minimum wage, as well as scrapping conscription and phasing out nuclear energy, Neugebauer added.