Angela Merkel begins fightback as election clock ticks

Christian Democratic Union (CDU) general secretary Peter Tauber used an unfortunate turn of phrase on Sunday evening before the Berlin press pack.

Tauber insisted it was not the chancellor’s migration strategy that had plunged her party to historic lows in Berlin’s state election, ejecting them from power. No, he said, it was political blow-back from its incompetent coalition partner, headed by Berlin’s Social Democrat (SPD) mayor, Michael Müller.

“It’s a well-known fact that the fish stinks from the head,” said Tauber.

His assertion left many wondering about the odour hanging over Monday’s CDU election postmortem, chaired by the party ’s head, chancellor Angela Merkel.

One in four voters in Berlin said their priority in Sunday’s election was the migration crisis that saw 1,000,000 people file for asylum last year in Germany – and more than 300,000 so far in 2016.

Through a series of state election slap-downs in the past year, Merkel repeated her migration “we can manage this” mantra. But millions of Germans chose not to believe her, making a link instead between the migrant crisis and the risk of Islamist attacks.

Apology

On Monday, the chancellor apologised for her handling of the migration crisis and said she was retiring “we can manage this” because “so much had been interpreted into it”.

Some people felt “provoked” by the phrase, she said, even though she meant it in an encouraging way.

Her apology sounded profound but was, on closer inspection, conditional. Germany, she said, would still honour its asylum obligations under international law. The apology was, in fact, a political gesture and peace offering to her aggravated Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU).

On the front lines of the migration crisis, the Bavarians have demanded for months that the chancellor admit how unlimited migration overwhelmed the country. Merkel’s conciliatory gesture is a first effort to find a common position in the run-in to next year’s state and federal polls.

It was also a bid to challenge the rise and rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Three years ago, when the AfD emerged as a euro zone protest party, Merkel urged her allies to ignore it, insisting it would last no longer than the euro zone crisis. But that crisis segued into the migration crisis, reviving the party’s flagging fortunes to score 14 per cent in Berlin, its 10th successive state election triumph.

For the party’s Berlin head, Georg Pazderski, the AfD is Germany’s “biggest democratic project of recent decades”. Senior party allies said their ambition for 2017 was to turn the federal election campaign into a referendum on Merkel.

Barring accidents, most political analysts say the AfD is unlikely to vanish before the 2017 federal election. It has learned how to reverse-engineer voter concerns – currently the migrant crisis – and sell back to voters populist anti-immigrant politics in concerned- conservative packaging.

Serious threat

The CDU lost almost 40,000 Berlin voters to the new party, the largest party defection, while 29,000 SPD voters walked over to the AfD. But its biggest voter bloc on Sunday, almost 70,000 voters, were Berliners who stayed home last time around.

That poses a serious threat next year to Merkel’s favourite campaign strategy, one that secured her re-election in 2009 and 2013. Dubbed “asymmetric demobilisation”, it worked by focusing the campaign on the chancellor’s unquestioned political power, leaving non-Merkel supporters so disillusioned that they stayed at home.

If the AfD can reactivate non-voters angry with Merkel, the chancellor has a problem – one that cannot be put right by the slow revival of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP). Her former coalition partner crashed out of the Bundestag in 2013 yet polled almost 7 per cent in the Berlin poll.

As her SPD grand coalition partners sniff around for new coalition options, Merkel has launched a fightback campaign: skipping the UN General Assembly in New York to rebuild political trust lost ahead of her CDU party conference in December.

“It’s Merkel’s migration politics that have driven people to the AfD,” said Prof Karl-Rudolf Korte. “Merkel’s changed her original [migration] path considerably but she hasn’t made that clear, so now is the time to do that.”

The clock is ticking.