Angela Merkel’s re-election as head of her Christian Democratic Union at a CDU conference in Hanover last week – with a record 98 per cent of the vote – is a massive endorsement of the German Chancellor by her party. This was the seventh time Merkel had been re-elected CDU party leader.
Merkel is the CDU, the CDU is Merkel- Anthony Manduca
The score was her best since becoming party leader in 2000 and the highest since her mentor Helmut Kohl won by over 99 per cent in 1975. Only Konrad Adenauer, the greatest German Chancellor ever and a true statesman and political giant managed to beat this result: in the 1950s he was three times re-elected with 100 per cent of the vote.
Merkel is very well respected both within her party and the country, (and within the EU) mainly due to her handling of the eurozone crisis and the German economy, and her popularity ratings nationwide are close to 70 per cent. With a federal election being held late next year, Merkel remains the CDU’s greatest asset, and the party will no doubt be running a presidential-style campaign highlighting the Chancellor’s achievements as she faces a challenge from the Social Democratic Party’s candidate for chancellor, Peer Steinbrueck.
“Never before has a CDU party conference been so tailored solely to Merkel,” Michael König, a journalist with Süddeutsche Zeitung, the largest German national daily newspaper, said last week. “Merkel is the CDU, the CDU is Merkel,” he said after the CDU conference vote. König’s comments are in fact amply proven by the CDU’s campaign slogan: “It all comes down to the Chancellor”.
Merkel is now aiming for a third term as Chancellor, something the CDU only achieved when led by Adenauer and Kohl.
The Chancellor told the party conference: “These are turbulent times and sometimes we find ourselves in stormy waters. But it is the German CDU that has the clear direction to steer our country through these seas.”
In her speech she claimed that her government was “the most successful since German unification in 1990”, pointing out that Germany currently had the lowest unemployment rate and the highest employment rate for more than 20 years, and that the country was the motor of Europe.
At the height of her popularity, Merkel looks unstoppable as she goes to the polls in 2013. Germany’s economy is in a healthy state, the economic indicators are good and the jobless rate is low.
Merkel’s cautious but firm management of the eurozone crisis, which initially did lead to some grumbling within both her party and her coalition partners, the FDP, has generally been applauded.
Furthermore, Merkel has positioned her party firmly in the political centre and convinced the CDU to support a minimum wage, increased pensions for the poor and the phasing out of nuclear power by 2021. These are all issues championed by the opposition social democrats and Greens, and could rob these parties of potential votes in next year’s election.
It is also true that Merkel suffered some setbacks during this legislature, including a number of electoral defeats in some key state elections, the most recent one in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, last May. In that election Merkel’s CDU saw its support plunge to just 26.3 per cent of the vote, down from 35 per cent, and the worst result in the state since World War Two.
The result is that state has been largely attributed, however, to the poor performance of Merkel’s Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen, who was the party’s candidate for state premier.
Merkel’s party also lost ground in other state elections, mainly for local reasons, such as massive opposition to a new railway station complex in Stuttgart and well as increased anti-nuclear feelings in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster in Japan.
However, German voters seem to have put these issues behind them. According to the latest survey by Emnid, the German opinion poll agency, Merkel’s CDU is leading with 38 per cent of the vote, followed by the Social Democrats with 28 per cent, the Greens with 14 per cent and – bad news for Merkel – the Liberals (FDP) with just four per cent. This means that the Chancellor’s coalition partners would fall short of the five per cent threshold required to win parliamentary seats, thus denying Merkel a parliamentary majority.
The FDP’s unpopularity is in fact the biggest threat to Merkel’s re-election and the Chancellor has made it clear that she would talk to the opposition Greens and Social Democrats on forming a coalition with either of them if the FDP was eliminated from Parliament.
Merkel already governed with the SPD from 2005-2009 but then formed a government in her second term with the FDP. Merkel’s next test is an election in the state of Lower Saxony on January 20, currently ruled by a CDU-FDP coalition.
This will give us a good indication of Merkel’s chances of a third term later next year, and all eyes will be on not only the CDU’s performance, but crucially the FDP’s.