Germany’s most interesting election season in memory kicks off on Sunday, as pandemic problems and graft allegations add wild cards to the race for a new government in Berlin and a successor to Angela Merkel as chancellor.
September’s federal election for a new Bundestag parliament is the climax of a race that begins on Sunday with two regional polls – both expected to end badly for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Voters in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, an industrial heartland with twice Ireland’s population and a third more economic heft, are set to re-elect Winfried Kretschmann of the Green Party as minister-president.
A decade ago the 72-year-old caused a political sensation as the first-ever Green state leader, who reconciled his environmental policies and social liberal views with his beloved diesel car and Catholic faith.
That balancing act has made him a beloved father figure with leftists and business leaders alike in a conservative state that is home to automotive and engineering giants such as Daimler and Bosch.
He took power in 2011 by breaking the CDU’s nearly six-decade hold on power in the state capital, Stuttgart; five years ago he took the party back as a junior partner. It’s not clear if he will extend that arrangement after Sunday, given the Greens have a third of the vote and 10 points on the CDU in final polls.
That lead may widen further if voters respond badly to the resignation of CDU MPs from the Bundestag this week amid claims they took kickbacks worth €850,000 on protective mask procurement deals last year.
By Friday at 6pm, all other party Bundestag MPs were ordered to sign and submit a declaration they had not enriched themselves with lobbying in the pandemic – bad optics for any party ahead of an election.
Double trouble
The CDU is trailing, too, in a second election in neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate, where popular Social Democrat (SPD) state leader Malu Dreyer is likely to be re-elected.
The early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a perceived steady crisis management under Merkel, gave the CDU a poll bounce. But that is now evaporating amid frustrations over a slow vaccine rollout – compared with the UK, Israel and others – as well as disorganised lockdown loosening and multimillion-euro fraud in a chaotic pandemic payments scheme.
CDU leader Armin Laschet, just two months in the job, is likely to insist on Sunday that poor regional polls are not his fault and do not reflect the federal reality, where the CDU holds a 15-point lead over the Greens, its nearest rival.
But the verdict of 7.7 million Germans in the two southwestern states cannot be ignored, and electoral drubbings will not boost Laschet’s hopes of securing the centre-right nomination to be the face of its 2021 federal election campaign.
Laschet has promised a decision on this after Easter after consulting with the other frontrunner, Markus Söder, Bavarian leader and head of its Christian Social Union (CSU), a CDU sister party.
That decision may be moved forward if a slide in support gains momentum and talk in Berlin turns to other coalition options without the CDU/CSU, involving the Greens, SPD and a third party.
“Like Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg is an important state, economically and politically; the Greens have shown here they’re not just a junior partner but can lead a government,” said Oscar Gabriel, politics professor emeritus at the University of Stuttgart. “Armin Laschet made a mistake by postponing the chancellor question until after the Baden-Württemberg vote.”
Kohl scandal
Laschet has dismissed as “absurd” comparisons between the CDU’s current scandal and the 1999 crisis prompted when ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl admitted he received millions in undocumented party donations.
That scandal decimated the CDU and saw Angela Merkel oust then leader Wolfgang Schäuble, who is now the Bundestag president and said on Friday that the idea of MPs taking advantage of the emergency situation last year to enrich themselves was “simply obscene and not compatible with a parliamentary mandate”.
German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier also rowed into the CDU fraud scandal, describing as “shameful” the idea of politicians cashing in on emergency procurement.
The two known cases of mask kickbacks were far more than political misconduct, he said – they were “poison for democracy”.