Merkel’s party suffers setback in state poll
Posted By wboston on February 21, 2011
It might be Angela Merkel’s Obama moment.
Whatever you call it, Sunday was nothing but a headache for the leader some have called the most powerful woman in the world. In a state poll yesterday voters in the tiny city-state of Hamburg ousted her conservative Christian Democrats from power and put the Social Democrats back in power after a decade in the opposition. Now, everyone is wondering if the landslide victory for Germany’s SPD in Hamburg is the beginning of the country’s shift to the left and the loosening of Merkel’s grip on power at the federal level in Berlin.
You have to understand the byzantine workings of German politics to realize why the results in Hamburg – a tad smaller than Houston, with 1.8 million inhabitants it is Germany’s second-largest city – has Germans doing deep analysis today. Hamburg was the first of seven state elections this year. That means that seven of Germany’s 16 Laender, or states, are due to elect new governments this year, changing the balance of power in Germany’s two chamber parliament.
Given the stakes, a comparison to the U.S. midterms seems fair. The elections of German state governments influence the division of power at the federal level. Germany’s 16 states are represented in the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat. Merkel’s coalition of CDU and liberal Free Democrats hold a majority in the lower house, or Bundestag. About two-thirds of the legislation passed by the lower house must be approved by the upper house. Usually this results either in gridlock or in overtime for politicians in a mediation committee of both houses of parliament to thrash out middle-of-the-night compromises on contentious legislation. With the SPD victory in Hamburg, states run by the CDU or a coalition of CDU and FDP now control just 31 seats in the Bundesrat, while SPD-controlled states hold 38 seats. There are another 24 Bundesrat seats up for grabs this year.
Enough German civics. The question everyone in Germany is asking is what the staggering defeat of the CDU in Hamburg means for Merkel. Will it hurt her bid for reelection in 2013? As an isolated event, no one outside Hamburg would really care who people there vote for. But if the trend continues on March 27, when voters in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Wuerttemberg go to the polls, everyone will be talking a about the resurgence of the Social Democrats and the approaching end of the Merkel era.
If nothing else, the election in Hamburg has set the stage for a round of bitter state electoral battles whose outcome could have enormous impact on the policies of the next German federal government and how Germany positions itself in Europe and on the international stage — on how to reform global financial markets within the G20 process, for example.
It should now be clear that under Merkel’s leadership the CDU has lost its political compass. Once the bastion of German conservatism and traditionalism, the party of Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl is adrift, trying to remain relevant to German voters who appear to be drifting to the left or no longer feel at home within the conservative fold.
Hamburg became the test bed for a new, modern, urban CDU in a coalition with the party’s nemesis – the Greens. Talk about odd couples. The experiment was met with much skepticism and in the end fell apart because of the cultural divide between the two partners. They disagreed on everything from education reform to whether to dredge the Elbe River to make it passable for commercial shipping, no small issue in a major port city. The CDU-Greens experiment failed, alienating conservatives and leaving the CDU lost at sea. Tired of the fractious coalition, Hamburg voters on the CDU’s right wing stayed home while the party’s centrist voters switched to the SPD.
“Since Sunday the CDU is in Hamburg what it was for decades: a party without power and without perspective – and that well beyond Hamburg,” wrote the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an election commentary on Monday. “Because what failed is not only the first CDU-Green state government, but rather the first broad attempt to make the CDU attractive for young, urban voters in an alliance with the Greens.”
The message is likely not lost on Merkel. She will work harder to convince CDU traditionalists that the party’s conservative legacy is safe with her. Chances are that Merkel will soon begin making the following campaign promise to her voters: No Experiments. That would be a message to voters that the only way to prevent the SPD from forming a so-called “red-red-green” coalition with Die Linke, the heir to former East Germany’s communist party, and the Greens is to vote CDU. But it would also be recognition that Hamburg permanently buried any idea of a conservative coalition with the Greens.
The election victory in Hamburg is bound to be a big motivator for the SPD, but it also overshadows the dire state of the party. Like the CDU the SPD is considered a so-called Volkspartei, or people’s party, for its broad appeal to a diverse and large spectrum of the electorate. But in the most recent polls, the SPD is trawling along the depths of about 22%, barely larger than the Greens. Heribert Prantl, a commentator for the left-leaning Sueddeutsche Zeitung, suggests that the SPD can thank the CDU for their victory in Hamburg rather than any compelling message of their own that swayed voters. Olaf Scholz, Hamburg’s new mayor, was a colorless politician as labor minister under Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. And no miracles have taken place that suddenly transformed Scholz into a charismatic “winner”, argues Prantl. Was the Hamburg election just a protest vote that favored the SPD? “Scholz and the SPD were able to win gloriously in Hamburg because the conditions were so sensationally favorable for them. It was pure chance,” concludes Prantl.
The conservative daily Die Welt, the flagship of the Axel Springer Verlag publishing group, suggests that the unlikely resurrection of Olaf Scholz could mark the beginning of a power struggle inside the SPD leadership. But Die Welt stretches its analysis a bit when it suggests that the fundamental lesson from Hamburg is voter rejection of any leftist coalition. “The future,” suggests Die Welt, “is not the fantasy red-red-green. Power lies in the center.”
Daniel Goffart, veteran political reporter at the business daily Handelsblatt, argues that the Hamburg result means “No more experiments with the CDU and the Greens” but adds that it is too soon to write off Merkel and the CDU: “The disaster for the CDU is embarrassing. But neither does it lead to the twilight of the chancellor at the federal level nor does the record victory lead to a national comeback of social democracy.”
Merkel’s big test is still to come – the battle for Baden Wuerttemberg. The southwestern state has been ruled by the CDU for decades. A prosperous state, home to Mercedes Benz, the SPD stands a realistic chance of ousting a demoralized CDU. Last year, citizen protests against “Stuttgart 21”, a major urban renewal project and revamp of the central train station, became a living plebiscite against the state government. All eyes will be on the election in Baden-Wuerttemberg. “If the CDU and the FDP lose power in the state, it will get very tight for Merkel in Berlin,” concludes Goffart.
Hamburg is not the end for Merkel, nor is it yet the beginning of the end. But governing for Germany’s Iron Chancellor just got a little harder.
Death came to Wilsdruff, a tiny hamlet in the hills outside Dresden in eastern Germany, on a warm April afternoon. Mario Gnannt was getting his soccer team ready for a match when suddenly the parents who had been watching their sons dart around the field began murmuring to each other on the sidelines. Soon after, the team’s shouts fell silent, the word spreading quickly as only bad news can: far away in the Kunduz river valley in northern Afghanistan, a 25-year-old Wilsdruff native named Robert Hartert had been killed in a firefight with the Taliban on Good Friday. “All of a sudden the war wasn’t just in the newspapers and on television,” says Gnannt, who used to coach Hartert. “It was right here. Robert was the first person from Wilsdruff to die in battle since the Second World War.”
