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The Week in Germany: Politics

August 12, 2005

Race tightens as campaign goes into high gear: Poll

Angela Merkel and her conservative allies have lost ground in their bid to end the seven-year reign of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's center-left government in general elections slated for September, according to new opinion polls.

Merkel has been hampered by an awkward television demeanor, an unpopular plan to raise Germany's sales tax and — not least of all — sky-high expectations. dpa photo

Merkel's opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) and their likely coalition partners, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), still hold a healthy lead over Schroeder's ruling Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens in the latest forsa poll for Stern newsweekly.

But for the first time since Merkel was unveiled as the conservative candidate for chancellor, her coalition has lost its majority.

The CDU and its Bavarian sister party CSU would now get 42% of the vote, down three percentage points from last week, according to the new poll. The FDP is at 7%, as are the Greens. The SPD meanwhile scored 28%, up two points from last week.

Merkel has been hampered by an awkward television demeanor, an unpopular plan to raise Germany's sales tax and — not least of all — sky-high expectations.

"She has long been regarded as a chancellor-in-waiting," wrote Berlin's conservative daily Die Welt. "In this situation, she can only lose."

Critics, however, say that Merkel has made some avoidable strategic blunders.

She refused, for example, to participate in more than one U.S.-style television debate with her opponent, creating the impression that she had gotten cold feet at the prospect of going head-to-head with the media-savvy chancellor.

She also struggled to stem the negative press coverage that followed her seemingly trivial confusion of the economic terms "gross" and "net" when discussing wages in two recent interviews.

Schroeder: "Merkel tax, that'll be expensive." bpa photo

The SPD has meanwhile gone on the offensive with a negative, but witty, campaign targeted squarely at Merkel, whose personal popularity pales in comparison to that of the gregarious chancellor.

An SPD bumper sticker plays on the German word for "candidate," asking "Angela Merkel — Kan di Dat?," or "Can she do it?" in northern German or Berlin dialect.

A poster shows Merkel smiling brightly in a long evening gown as she walks the red carpet at the glitzy Wagner festival in Bayreuth, contrasted with Merkel's assertion that "things have never been so bad in Germany."

Another poster, a mock advertisement for computers showing the additional cost of Merkel's planned sales tax hike, features the rhyming slogan: "Merkel tax, that'll be expensive" (Merkelsteuer, das wird teuer).

"There is going to be a lot of plain-talking in this election," Schroeder's chief strategist, Kajo Wasserhoevel, told dpa news agency.

Still, Schroeder will need to make good on his reputation as the "comeback kid" of German politics if he is to win a third term in office — especially if a new party led by two veteran left-wingers fulfils poll expectations and emerges from the upcoming vote as Germany's third-strongest political force.

Click above for our latest reports from the campaign trail.

The recently formed Linkspartei, an alliance between the political heirs to the communist party that once ruled East Germany and western-based SPD defectors, is currently polling at 12%.

Its sudden rise has increased the chance that the neither the SPD nor the CDU will have the seats needed to form a coalition government, raising the possibility that the two parties could be forced into a "grand coalition" for the first time since the 1960s.

Neither party is especially keen on the idea of joint administration, but some analysts are seeing a silver lining in such a scenario.

"The unavoidable continuation of painful economic reforms can only be accomplished if the SPD and the CDU join forces," wrote the Bonn daily General-Anzeiger.

Others say that a "grand coalition" is simply a recipe for gridlock. "A grand coalition would not solve Germany's economics," the managing director of Germany's influential BDI industry federation, Ludolf von Wartenberg, told the Financial Times. "The SPD and CDU programs are incompatible."

Links:

Decision 2005 (from Germany.info)

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