GERMANY’S SUPER-election year, set to redraw the political map, could get even more complicated with a snap election likely in the country’s most populous state.
Voters in North Rhine-Westphalia may be asked to return to the polls this summer – just a year after electing a minority Social Democrat (SPD) administration – after the budget was thrown out by the state’s highest court.
The supplementary budget, planned by the minority SPD-Green coalition, foresees €2.8 billion in fresh borrowing but was dismissed as a breach of state debt guidelines.
North Rhine-Westphalia’s constitutional court judges said they would only permit the extra borrowing on a one-off basis if the government could prove the state’s economic stability was threatened.
Lawyers for the government of SPD leader Hannelore Kraft were unable to make a convincing case for the extra €2.8 billion. Nearly half the borrowed money is needed to prop up the state’s ailing WestLB bank and its Dublin subsidiary.
The budget challenge was launched by the local CDU party headed by leader Norbert Röttgen, the environment minister in Berlin and a favourite of chancellor Angela Merkel.
Already tipped as a possible future chancellor, his stock would rise considerably if he could trigger fresh elections in North Rhine-Westphalia and snatch back the state – home to one in five Germans – a year after losing power there.
A CDU win would reconfigure Germany’s complicated federal arithmetic and give Dr Merkel a fighting chance of winning back a law-making majority in the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat. The ruling SPD is undecided, with some nervous a fresh poll will return it to opposition.