GERMAN CHANCELLOR Angela Merkel is coming under pressure from the influential business wing of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to promise tax cuts ahead of September’s general election.
In a 24-page programme, the CDU business wing has urged the party to sharpen its conservative contours to staunch the flow of voters disillusioned with its centrist approach in government to the liberal Free Democrats (FDP).
“This isn’t an attack on the chancellor,” Kurt Lauk, head of the party’s business wing, said yesterday.
The leaked paper is more frank, however, calling on the CDU to “represent business interests in an appreciable way, so [voters] won’t have to go to the FDP”.
Its central demand, to ease the burden on middle-class voters with tax breaks costing about €20 billion, is said to be at odds with early drafts of the CDU election manifesto.
Dr Merkel has already dismissed the proposals, for practical and political reasons.
She told party colleagues that the increasingly desolate budget situation in Berlin left little room for such giveaways, and that there was no more time before September’s election to “work through wishlists”.
“The polls show that a majority want a more social CDU,” she reportedly said.
Dr Merkel has learned to her cost the political price of pushing policies perceived as unsocial or neo-liberal.
In 2003, she promised to prune Germany back to economic good health, ignoring the resulting “wailing and gnashing of teeth”.
Her election campaign in 2005 offered a milder version of her 2003 neo-liberal self, and almost cost her the election.
Four years of compromise with the Social Democrats (SPD) in the grand coalition has given time for Dr Merkel to reconsider her position, and to lodge the CDU firmly in the middle ground vacated by her coalition partners.
Now, with five months to the general election, an internal party struggle is the last thing the CDU leader needs on her hands.
Party leaders worked quickly to play down the paper’s contents yesterday as an internal party matter.
But the debate about the direction of the CDU is unlikely to go away and could fill the vacuum until party’s election manifesto is presented in July.
Many of the pro-business wing’s proposals mirror positions of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the CSU.
Its leader, Horst Seehofer, is an old sparring partner of Dr Merkel and always happy to sow discord in the CDU/CSU ranks in the interests of scoring points back home in Munich.
Recent polls show the CDU hovering around the 36 per cent mark, a comfortable 10 points ahead of the SPD but little improvement on the disastrous 2005 election result.
Hopes are fading in the CDU headquarters that the party can reach its traditional 40 per cent plus result.
The lower the CDU vote, the better for the FDP. A good election result for the liberals could see them shunning the CDU in favour of a three-way coalition with the SPD and Greens.