GERMAN FOREIGN minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has kicked off his campaign to unseat Chancellor Merkel in September’s general election with a promise to help crisis-hit firms and save jobs.
But, a week after a disastrous European election result, Mr Steinmeier conceded to party delegates in Berlin yesterday that the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) were demoralised and had been unable to seize the political initiative in the financial crisis.
“The state is not the better businessman, nor should it try to help everywhere. But employment is better than insolvency, that’s what we believe in,” said Mr Steinmeier, in a clear nod to the public debate in Germany over public bailouts of ailing companies following Berlin’s rescue of Opel.
Although Mr Steinmeier described the election as “open”, he faces an uphill struggle to polling day in September against a popular German leader.
A ZDF public television poll on Friday showed that twice as many people would prefer to see Christian Democrat (CDU) leader Angela Merkel stay on as chancellor.
She has a clear lead on Mr Steinmeier on six different fronts, the poll suggested, from political competence to personal likeability.
At the party conference in Berlin, SPD officials insisted that their candidate still has a chance despite poor poll numbers and just 21 per cent support in last weekend’s European elections – a post-war low in a nationwide poll.
With time so tight to election day, the various party wings have agreed to hold off criticising party leaders or Mr Steinmeier for fear of scaring off voters.
Behind the scenes concern is growing that Mr Steinmeier, a career technocrat who is contesting a Bundestag seat in September for the first time, comes across as stilted compared with a media performer like Gerhard Schröder, who closed a 10-point lead in the last weeks of the 2005 election campaign.
With just 100 days to the election, polls show the SPD lingering in the lows 20s, nearly 20 points behind the Christian Democrats.
Moreover, although the real campaign has yet to begin, a CDU coalition with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) is already seen as the most likely election outcome.
This is where the SPD will target its campaign attack. Mr Steinmeier presented September’s election as a choice between a “market radical” CDU-FDP government and a Social Democratic-lead government as guardian of workers’ rights.
Delegates in Berlin accepted a left-tinged manifesto promising a four-point cut in the base tax rate to 10 per cent, financed by higher taxes for top earners and a 0.5 per cent stock market tax.
The party promises to introduce a standard minimum hourly wage of €7.50 and increased subsidies for workers facing unemployment.
Although the election campaign has yet to get under way, taxpayer- financed bailouts of ailing German firms will dominate the campaign.
The government in Berlin and the wider German public are divided over whether the Opel bailout justifies further interventions or has opened up a Pandora’s box of state aid. Already a who’s who of German firms have applied for financial aid from Berlin.
First in the queue is Arcandor – owner of the Karstadt retail group, Berlin’s KaDeWe department store and Thomas Cook – which filed for insolvency last week.
CDU politicians blame the company’s woes on years of mismanagement, but SPD leaders have suggested the company deserves help if it saves the jobs of the company’s 70,000 workers.
“We’ll never tell a worker: ‘you’re not system relevant’,” said Mr Steinmeier.
But the ZDF poll showed that more than two-thirds of Germans, including SPD voters, are opposed to state assistance for Arcandor.