SALON

Sunday, May 13, 2012 8:45 AM UTC

Merkel risks setback in German state vote

By

Topics: From the Wires,

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s most populous state holds an election Sunday, with polls showing good chances of victory for a center-left regional government that Chancellor Angela Merkel has sought to label as irresponsibly spendthrift.

About 13.2 million people are eligible to vote for the state legislature in North Rhine-Westphalia in western Germany, which includes Cologne, Dusseldorf and the industrial Ruhr region.

Sunday’s election is the third state-level vote this year. It comes a week after a regional coalition of Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and the pro-market Free Democrats — the parties that make up the national government — lost power in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein.

It also follows setbacks for Merkel’s austerity-led response to the eurozone debt crisis in French and Greek elections last weekend.

North Rhine-Westphalia, a traditional center-left stronghold, is voting three years ahead of schedule after its current minority government, made up of Germany’s main national opposition parties, narrowly failed to get a budget passed in March.

Opposition leaders declared that the vote would send an important signal ahead of national elections due in late 2013. Merkel said it offered an opportunity for the region to elect a government that wouldn’t take on “ever more debt.”

While national polls show Germans backing Merkel’s pro-austerity line in Europe, surveys suggest that the regional government of Social Democrats and Greens led by popular governor Hannelore Kraft has a good chance of emerging strengthened, with a majority in the state legislature.

Conservative challenger Norbert Roettgen, Merkel’s federal environment minister, has had a lackluster and sometimes gaffe-prone campaign. He faced criticism for not committing himself to stay in state-level politics and for saying on a television show, in an apparent attempt at irony which backfired, that “regrettably” voters rather than his party would decide whether he became governor.

Roettgen irritated his party by declaring that Sunday’s election would decide “whether Angela Merkel’s course in Europe is strengthened or whether it is weakened by the re-election of a pro-debt government in Germany.” Merkel said it was an important state election, “no more and no less.”

The struggling Free Democrats’ main aim is to win the 5 percent of votes needed to retain their parliamentary seats, building on a surprisingly strong performance last weekend in Schleswig-Holstein.

The upstart Pirate Party, which has surged in recent months with a platform of near-total transparency and Internet freedom but lacks policies on many issues — including the debt crisis — hopes to enter its fourth state legislature. That could complicate the center-left’s chances of winning a majority.

While Germany’s opposition will claim tail wind for next year’s national vote from a victory, Sunday’s election — unlike North Rhine-Westphalia’s last vote in 2010 — won’t change the national balance of power.

Two years ago, Merkel’s coalition lost the state after five years in power there. That erased the national government’s majority in the upper house of Parliament, which represents Germany’s 16 states, and its position there has since weakened further.

Current national polls consistently show Merkel’s conservatives as the biggest party. However, they forecast a parliamentary majority neither for her center-right coalition — which has become notorious for infighting on a wide range of policy issues — nor for the Social Democrats and Greens, who ran Germany from 1998 to 2005.

When the national election comes, Merkel’s chances of holding on to power still look decent, though perhaps with a new coalition partner.

More Geir Moulson.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments are not enabled for this story.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Slave descendants seek equal rights from Cherokee Nation
58 points59 points | 3 comments
vote
Oklahoma senator who voted against federal funding for Hurricane Sandy victims: Tornado aid “totally different” from Sandy aid
40 points41 points | comment
vote
"Apparently, we have deserving and undeserving disasters, Oklahoma senators James Inhofe and Tom Coburn explain"
28 points29 points | 2 comments
vote
Obama opposes GOP bill on Keystone XL oil pipeline: The White House said Tuesday that the bill “seeks to circumvent longstanding and proven processes” by removing a requirement for a presidential permit. The legislation also says no new environmental studies are needed.
23 points24 points | 2 comments
vote
"Slave descendants seek equal rights from Cherokee Nation": long, detailed narrative of legal and historical complications in red-white-black relations
19 points20 points | comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations