Angela Merkel should stay chancellor, but the coalition could change
“THE launch pad is not as good as we had imagined,” said Peer Steinbrück, the finance minister. That is an understatement. Mr Steinbrück’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) won just 20.8% of the vote in the European election, its worst performance in a countrywide contest since the war. Victory in the federal election on September 27th is improbable. So the SPD’s Frank-Walter Steinmeier, foreign minister in the grand coalition, is unlikely to replace Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), as chancellor.
The CDU’s share of the vote fell from 36.5% in 2004 to 30.7%. It did badly in local elections on June 7th. But it is still the largest party. Its sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), traumatised in September when it lost its absolute majority in Bavaria for the first time in 46 years, feared it might be out of the European Parliament, but easily cleared the 5% threshold. And the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) doubled its share of the vote, to 11%. If these results were repeated in September Ms Merkel could dump the SPD for a “bourgeois” coalition with the CSU and FDP.
Yet she cannot count on that. A turnout of only 43%, close to a record low, suggests that only the most intrepid voted. These include older voters, who lean to the CDU, and prosperous do-gooders who back the Green Party, which came third, with 12% of the vote. Turnout in September may be 30 points higher, bringing back traditional supporters of the SPD (and of the ex-communist Left Party). In a parliament with five parties (counting the CDU and CSU as one) the only pair that can be sure of a majority is a grand coalition.
The SPD has built its campaign around Mr Steinmeier, a competent but colourless ex-bureaucrat who has never run for any office, and on the notion that it can cope best with the economic crisis. It claims credit for the government’s stimulus package and for bail-outs of big employers such as Opel. It paints the CDU as a reluctant partner in such rescue operations; if allowed to govern with the liberals, it says, the CDU will reveal its true heartlessness. The CSU’s aristocratic economy minister, who resists corporate bail-outs, is the “baron from Bavaria” in SPD-speak. With similar tactics, the SPD came surprisingly close to defeating the CDU in 2005.
Yet this time they do not seem to be working. More than half the voters want Ms Merkel to remain chancellor; only a quarter favour Mr Steinmeier. The SPD is being punished for pursuing “no consistent political course,” says Matthias Jung of Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, a pollster. Voters remember the Agenda 2010 labour-market reforms by the previous SPD-led government as the height of heartlessness, so its recent turn towards tenderness does not convince them. The European defeat has reignited a debate over whether the party has turned too far left or not far enough. Ms Merkel has not been much more consistent, bowing repeatedly to SPD demands for more “social” policies. But voters seem to trust her to know where to draw the line: she said yes to the Opel bail-out, but no to Arcandor, which filed for bankruptcy on June 9th (see article).
The Germans shunned Eurosceptics and the far right. In crisis they like parties offering economic competence, not utopias. That may change with rising unemployment. But voters are now deliberating between the status quo and a new constellation even friendlier to capitalism.