Voters were driven to the environmental party due to Fukushima. But the CDU is unlikely to see the trend spread nationwide, writes DEREK SCALLY
GARY LINEKER once defined soccer as a game where 22 people chase a ball and Germany wins.
For half a century, elections in Baden-Württemberg functioned along similar lines: eight million voters in the prosperous southwestern state turned up every five years and re-elected the Christian Democrats (CDU).
Sunday was different: three decades after emerging as an pro-environment, anti-nuclear party, the Greens won the right to appoint a state premier, their first.
At first glance, it is a humiliation for CDU leader Angela Merkel: to lose last month’s snap state election in Hamburg was unlucky, to lose control of her party’s political homeland after half a century seems careless.
Merkel was not wrong yesterday to blame the Fukushima disaster for the result – it definitely skewed the result – but she’s not completely right either.
Sunday has exposed once more Merkel’s political Achilles’ heel: she lacks a power base at grassroots level to keep CDU voters loyal.
Governing has got just that bit harder for the German leader, and Sunday’s defeat has extinguished her last hope of regaining a law-making majority in the upper house, the Bundestag. For the next three years, every Merkel project will be one long political negotiation with the opposition.
Painful as Sunday was, though, Merkel remains untouchable. She can ignore the general grumbling yesterday in the CDU ranks, secure in having seen off every senior challenger to her throne. The only potential contender, environment minister Norbert Röttgen, has been making populist noises to shut down nuclear power quickly – but he is far too young to take on the chancellor.
After doubling their vote, the Greens were undoubtedly Sunday’s success story, but winning may be a mixed blessing.
It will be a challenge to make the Social Democrats (SPD) acknowledge that they are now the junior coalition partner. And Green enthusiasm could evaporate if the new coalition has to rubber-stamp the controversial redevelopment of Stuttgart train station, the cause that helped rally Green support last autumn.
In the end, analysts agree that there were too many special factors in Baden-Württemberg – starting with fears over Fukushima – to allow the Greens repeat Sunday’s result elsewhere.
The Green campaign was led by Winfried Kretschmann, who is not just a Green but a conservative practising Catholic to boot. The 62-year-old with the grey buzz-cut is a vote-winner, no mistake, but the Green Party has no one else like him in reserve.
And a non-representative television poll for new station N24 yesterday showed two-thirds of Germans not convinced that the Greens have what it takes to be anything more than a junior coalition partner in government.
With the dust settling yesterday, it was clear that the real loser of Sunday’s election was Angela Merkel’s coalition partner, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP).
They have been in freefall since the 2009 general election; on Sunday, their vote collapsed by half to just 5 per cent, only just scraping them into the state parliament in Stuttgart.
Six months after brazening out the last resignation call, FDP chief Guido Westerwelle is bracing himself for the next leadership heave.
Well-connected FDP sources say that, to reverse his fading fortunes, a desperate Westerwelle may go for broke and embark on a populist, vote-winning campaign. The most likely front would be a euro-populist attack on the recent euro zone bailout deal.
That would be damaging not just for Merkel but for recent recipients of German largesse: Greece and Ireland.