FOR ANGELA Merkel the weekend experience was, as she put it, “very painful”. The chancellor’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) humiliatingly lost its heartland state of Baden-Württemberg, the country’s most prosperous, which it has ruled for nearly six decades. Although the party held on to the poor 38 per cent vote it achieved last time out, a collapse in its liberal (FDP) ally’s vote and a Green surge linked to Dr Merkel’s nuclear power prevarication was enough to tip the balance. A Green surge also deprived the party of power in Rheinland-Pfalz, and last month in Hamburg its vote collapsed.
In Dublin there will be some taking more than a few crumbs of comfort from Dr Merkel’s pain – the electorally battered Greens have seen their sister party in Germany make electoral history by taking a first state premiership, doubling its vote to 24 per cent in Baden-Württemberg. Light at the end of a dark tunnel for John Gormley; Green politics has a future.
But for others in Dublin the chancellor’s difficulties will not come as good news. The CDU’s plight, and the prospect both of a weakened Merkel coalition, with further state defeats coming, is also an important backdrop for the talks on the euro’s – and Ireland’s – future.
With seven regional elections this year, Dr Merkel had sought to reassure voters with a tough line on EU bailouts, her EU-wide competitiveness pact, and, in alliance with France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, the new offensive on Ireland’s corporate tax regime. Her cautious instincts will have been confirmed by defeat and the prospect of her backing off such demands remains dim.
Her lower house majority is likely to remain intact, but questions about Dr Merkel, now in her second term as chancellor, and her continued leadership and succession, are increasingly being raised. Observers say that from her perspective the lack of any serious contender may be a short-term advantage but is a real longer-term challenge for the party.
State elections are far more crucial to national politics than local elections here, both in terms of party prestige but also a government’s ability to pass legislation. The divided coalition of CDU and FDP will totter on but faces the real prospect that it will lose its majority in the upper house, the Bundesrat, if as appears likely the partners lose the next state election in September. For the Liberals this is particularly problematic – the results increase pressure on its increasingly beleaguered leader foreign minister Guido Westerwelle to step aside.
The election is also likely to have a significant impact on the country’s nuclear power policy that other EU states will watch with interest. Startled by the Japanese crisis, voters were unforgiving of Dr Merkel’s promise last year to reverse a previous government’s commitment to close the country’s plants by 2022, a stance strongly supported by the FDP. A clumsy election attempt by the chancellor to reverse that decision was not convincing to voters, and the FDP has now declared for the immediate permanent closure of seven older plants. Ripples from the tsunami on Europe’s shores.