Merkel rolls up her sleeves
The German election battle is getting heated. Matthew Partridge reports
Retiring German Chancellor Angela Merkel had until recently been staying out of the campaign for the upcoming national elections says Guy Chazan in the Financial Times. But with the CDU/CSU ruling coalition parties floundering, she has started publicly praising the beleaguered Armin Laschet, leader of the CDU, and “lashing out” at his main rival, finance minister and SPD chancellor-candidate Olaf Scholz. The SPD is now leading the CDU/CSU in polls for the first time since 2001, indicating that Scholz “might emerge as winner of the election”. This has led Merkel to warn of the “implications of a left-wing government” on everything from foreign affairs to economic and fiscal policy.
A remarkable rise
The SPD’s rise is remarkable for a party that just a few months ago was being written off as a “battered and bruised” symbol of the “apparently terminal decline of European centre-left parties”, says The Guardian. But this is less down to Scholz than to the fact that Laschet, Merkel’s preferred successor, has fought a lacklustre campaign full of gaffes – he was captured on camera apparently laughing at flood devastation and is becoming “a liability for his party”. Polls suggest that fewer than one in five of voters see him as the best option to replace her.
Still, Scholz deserves some credit, says Melissa Eddy in The New York Times. He has surprised the conservatives with his strong showing and seems to understand that “Germans still value a feeling of security”, focusing his campaign on “pledging to ensure jobs and working to shore up social stability by fighting child poverty and keeping housing prices in check”. He has also reminded voters of the SPD’s role as a “junior coalition” partner to the CDU, influencing policies such as the national minimum wage and Covid-19 relief. Scholz is positioning himself as the “true successor to the chancellor”.
Wolf in the fold
Scholz is touting his candidacy by talking up his role as vicechancellor and finance minister, but that hasn’t stopped the “rattled” CDU from arguing he is a “moderate in appearance only” who would form a coalition of “left-wingers and eco-warriors” bent on taking Germany back to the 1970s, says Oliver Moody in The Times. They argue that Scholz could end up building a government with the far-left Die Linke, a party formed from the rump of the old
East German Communist Party and breakaway elements of the SPD’s left. That may be “anathema” to mainstream voters, but polls show the party may not need Die Linke to form a government.
Ironically, those Germans who wish for Merkel to remain as chancellor may end up getting what they wish for, at least in the short run, says The Economist. Thanks to Germany’s proportional voting system, the “coalition wrangles” that follow election day “will be at least as important, and twice as complex, as the voting that happens on it”. This means that the result could be followed by a “bazaar” of negotiations in which “ministerial jobs, government policy and even the identity of Germany’s next president” would all be up for bargaining. Some party bigwigs think it could take six months to put a government together.