Angela Merkel’s conservatives face a struggle to retain power in Germany’s windswept north tomorrow, knowing a defeat in Schleswig-Holstein’s state election could give vital momentum to the opposition and dent the chancellor’s 2013 re-election hopes.
Dr Merkel’s stance through the euro zone crisis has left her personal popularity intact. But her national centre-right coalition is in jeopardy after sliding public support for her junior coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP).
To have any chance of fulfilling her hopes for a third term in power, the chancellor must find new allies for her Christian Democrats (CDU) and hope a dismal run at regional level for her party and the FDP is at an end.
“The chancellor is going to have to rethink her coalition options; her present one has not been successful,” said Klaus Schubert, politics professor at the University of Muenster. Ironically, Dr Merkel had an easier time in a “marriage of convenience” with the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) in her first term from 2005-2009 than what should have been her “marriage of love” with the FDP. Schleswig-Holstein’s voters are almost certain to eject the CDU-FDP alliance that has run Schleswig-Holstein since 2009.
The question is whether the CDU can remain the largest party in the largely rural state of 2.8 million people on the Danish border and cling to power in a different coalition.
That would give the party vital second wind, in particular as a week later there will be a vote in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), where the CDU trails the SPD. Opinion polls for Schleswig-Holstein show the CDU and opposition Social Democrats (SPD) neck-and-neck at 31 per cent. The most likely outcomes are a so-called “grand coalition” of the two largest parties, or a three-way coalition dubbed the “Danish traffic light” between the SPD, Greens and the South Schleswig Party (SSW), which represents the Danish minority.
A grand coalition in Schleswig-Holstein or in North Rhine-Westphalia could point to another grand coalition at national level. “Germans like the harmony of a grand coalition. The SPD is unlikely to become the largest party in Germany as a whole, which would leave no alternative but a grand coalition, and no alternative but for Merkel to lead it,” said Prof Schubert.
As in North Rhine-Westphalia, unemployment and state debt have dominated campaigning. Schleswig-Holstein’s jobless rate of 7.1 per cent is one of the highest in western Germany, but the question of how to reduce its €28 billion debt has become paramount. The latest national opinion polls put the CDU on 36 per cent and the FDP struggling to reach the 5 per cent needed for seats in the Bundestag (parliament). The SPD and their Green allies slipped to 25 and 12 per cent respectively, losing ground to the unconventional Pirates, who stormed on to the political scene last year and have proved a big hit with first-time voters, polling 11 per cent. The Pirates were founded in 2006 and but were long dismissed as a niche party obsessed with copyright reform and online privacy,
The party won 8.9 per cent of the vote in Berlin’s regional election and 7.4 per cent in Saarland, and look set to sail into the Bundestag in 2013. The Pirates’ surge has made it less likely that the SPD and Greens can form majority governments – at regional and national levels, an unexpected boon for Dr Merkel.