Global News Journal

Merkel fights back with drop-dead argument

Chancellor Angela Merkel and the leader of the opposition Social Democrats squared off in one of the more riveting debates in parliament seen in ages on Wednesday, treating their respective camps to some fiery rhetoric that may galvanize support and help each side recover from steady erosions in opinion polls. After SPD chairman Sigmar Gabriel threw down the gauntlet and spent 40 highly entertaining minutes ripping into Merkel and her centre-right government, the chancellor rose to the challenge — spending the next 40 minutes with a spirited defence of the performance since taking power 10 months ago and attacking the centre-left opposition for such things as putting Germany’s long-term energy security at risk with “ideologically driven energy policies.” Merkel, who may well face off against Gabriel in the next federal election due in 2013, whipped out a drop-dead argument that will probably make it difficult for anyone from either the SPD or from inside her own somewhat disenchanted conservative party to knock her out of office: unemployment has fallen by nearly two million to about three million since she took office in 2005.

Merkel’s popularity has nevertheless plunged since her re-election last year – due in part to incessant squabbling within the coalition and a perception her government has made little headway in moving the country forward. The centre-right government trails the centre-left opposition by about 10 points in opinion polls, an astonishing reversal of fortunes after they won the election last September by about 15 points.

“The most important thing is that the labour market is in robust shape,” Merkel, 56, said to cheers from her centre-right coalition of Christian Democrats and liberal Free Democrats sitting on the right half of the parliament floor who were clearly relishing their leader on the attack for a change. “Unemployment has fallen back to the level it was at before the financial crisis started two years ago. Five years ago it was nearly five million. This year we’ll possibly slip below the three million mark. That’s the mark of success for this Christian-Liberal coalition. We’re the growth engine of Europe.”

Gabriel, 52, had opened the debate in fine form, accusing Merkel of being a lapdog to lobbyists – her government gave hugely unpopular tax breaks to hotel owners and defied public opinion by agreeing to the demands of utilities to extend the use of nuclear energy. Gabriel also criticized what he called an increasingly unfair distribution of wealth in Germany under the centre-right government and the government’s habit of “giving tax breaks to the wrong people.”

He said the government has paid too much attention to saving private banks and not enough on education reform.

“The reason for your disastrous first year is that you don’t have a clue about which direction you’re taking the country in,” Gabriel said. “You’re primarily interested in catering to special interests. Never has a German government been so subservient to big business. You don’t have a clue about the damage your doing to Germany.”

Both political heavyweights scored points for good shots at each other but they also studiously ignored their own weaknesses. At the end of the day it was impossible to pick a winner – except perhaps the national TV audience and spectators in the Reichstag who got to see a really good battle for a change.

New SPD leader has tough job: saving his party

Two years ago Sigmar Gabriel came into the Reuters office in Berlin for an interview about climate change, the environment, renewable energy policies and the state of his Social Democrats.

The burly minister, who was elected leader of Germany’s struggling centre-left SPD party on Friday, had clearly lost weight on his summer holiday that had just ended so, while my colleagues were still streaming into the conference room, I asked: “You’ve lost some weight, haven’t you?”

Gabriel smiled briefly. Colleagues later told me they were horrified that I had asked him about his weight. It was merely an attempt to break the ice. There was, after all, another German political leader a few years ago who was once even heavier and lost more than 50 kg with an intensive jogging and diet programme that began one summer: Joschka Fischer of the Greens.

“Yeah, I did,” Gabriel said. “I got some exercise on my holiday. But I won’t be able to keep it off if people keep putting things like this in front of me like you’ve done here,” he added with a laugh as he munched on some cookies.

Gabriel soon regained the few kilos he had lost – so did so did Fischer.

Gabriel, who even then was clearly one of the most ambitious politicians of his generation, has a bigger worry right now.

How do you save Germany’s oldest party? The SPD won just 23 percent of the vote in the September election and left government after an 11-year run. That was down 11 points from four years ago and a staggering 18 points off the 41 percent they won when winning the chancellery in 1998. About 10 million voters who backed the SPD in 1998 have abandoned the party.

Will former minister’s stab in the back hurt Germany’s SPD?

The last time Germany went to the polls, Wolfgang Clement was deputy head of the Social Democrats (SPD), and one of the most powerful figures in government: the “super minister” in charge of both economic and labour market policy, who had previously governed the SPD heartland of North-Rhine Westphalia, home to 18 million people.

 Four years on, Clement is urging the public to vote for one of the centre-left SPD’s most bitter rivals, the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP).

 In a newspaper advertisment on Friday, Clement said he was backing FDP leader Guido Westerwelle in Sunday’s federal election.

 An admirer of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Westerwelle has branded the SPD socialists, and wants to end their 11 years in office to form a centre-right coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives.

Though Clement had long had a fractious relationship with the left of the SPD, the endorsement was unprecedented, said Josef Schmid, a political scientist at the University of Tuebingen.

 ”The man is no fool but to act like this is just idiotic,” he said of Clement, a former journalist who spent nearly 40 years in the party. “I can remember nothing like it.”

 The 69-year-old Clement left the SPD last November after a row blew up over his criticism of the party in the state of Hesse.

Merkel smiles through pre-election jitters

Pressure? What Pressure?

That was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s message during a 90-minute grilling in Berlin by journalists at her last major news conference before the Sept. 27 election. Even though opinion polls show a narrowing in her re-election campaign and amid a growing nervousness in her conservative party, Merkel was a picture of tranquillity.

Although some of her conservative party allies are pushing for her to raise the volume and intensity of what has been an exceedingly cautious campaign, Merkel made it abundantly clear that she is not at all worried. Perhaps it was all a good bit of acting. But she answered even the most surly of questions from the pack of 100 journalists with a nationwide TV audience watching with smiles and jokes along with the usual assortment of evasive answers.

Like she has so often in the last four years, Merkel managed to find a shimmer of optimism in just about every query hurled her way. She turned each question about opinion polls showing the lead of her preferred centre-right alliance narrowing upside down by pointing out the centre-right still has a lead.

“The opinion polls are quite encouraging for us,” Merkel said even though the centre-right’s lead over a trio of left-leaning parties has shrunk to just two points in two polls and disappeared into a dead heat in a third. Two weeks ago, the centre-right had a six- to eight-point lead in those same polls over the Social Democrats, Greens and Left party. Four years ago, Merkel’s centre-right alliance also had a big lead before the election that evaporated on election day. The conservatives are particularly nervous after having seen their support plunge in the final days of the last two campaigns in 2002 and 2005.

Merkel also skated over questions about her shaky performance in a TV debate on Sunday against her rival Frank-Walter Steinmeier, her decision to go on a long summer vacation last month rather than campaign and her trip to Pittsburgh late next week just before the vote to attend a G20 summit.

“I treated myself to a two-week holiday because I felt it was appropriate and important – so that I could be happy and available right up to the end of the election campaign,” she said at one point. “I actually was quite satisfied with my performance in the TV debate,” Merkel said, disagreeing with the view of even many in her party that Steinmeier got the upper hand because she took such a cautious approach.

Less content, more Merkel in campaign posters

With two weeks to go before Germany holds an election, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives have unveiled a new set of election posters, depicting Merkel, Merkel, and more Merkel.

Rather than campaigning on the issues highlighted in their election programmes, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) are keeping it simple and hoping to capitalise instead on the popularity of their leader, Germany’s first female chancellor.

“The key question is whether Angela Merkel, who has intelligently guided Germany throughout the crisis, should continue to govern,” said Ronald Pofalla, general secretary of the CDU, at a press conference in Berlin.

“With the new posters, we want to make clear to people that they will only get Merkel again as a chancellor if they vote for the CDU.”

The posters show only Merkel, smiling benevolently against a minimalist black background, and feature slogans like: “We vote for the Chancellor” or “We vote for confidence”.

The latest posters are emblematic of the conservatives’ general campaign, which has focused less on hard-hitting issues such as tax cuts and atomic energy than on popular personalities like Merkel and the Economy Minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg.

On previous posters, Guttenberg and other well-known conservative politicians were shown against a blurry background, alongside vague slogans such as “economy with reason”, “strong families” and “good education”.

Merkel ally insult of Romanians, Chinese an internet scoop

In the “old days” of journalism, before the rise of the internet, an alert journalist might pick up on a politician’s gaffe in the middle of an election speech or somewhere on the campaign trail and publish or broadcast a story with the potential to change the dynamic of a race.

Nowadays, it could be instead the political opponent or citizen journalists armed with cell phone cameras or small hand-held cameras who can upset the applecart with a YouTube videos, blog or website report documenting a serious verbal blunder.

It’s a lesson that Juergen Ruettgers, the conservative state premier of Germany’s most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia and a close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, has now painfully learned.

Ruettgers apologised late on Friday for insulting both Romanian workers and Chinese investors at a campaign rally in the depressed working class city of Duisburg late last month (story here) as the row over his remarks escalated. Ruettgers, who has a track record of statements criticised as xenophobic, suggested at the rally in Ruhr River industrial city that the Romanian work ethic was inferior to Germany’s and he also made derogatory remarks about Chinese investors.

German ‘cash for clunkers’ out of gas just before vote

It was among the 81-billion euro basket of stimulus measures the government put together to soften the impact of the recession and was later copied in many other countries, including the United States.It started out as a 1.5-billion euro scheme but that had to be quickly topped up in the spring as a frenzy swept the country.

My colleague Paul Carrel pointed out in an analysis today that the “cash-for-clunkers” scheme helped private consumption in Europe’s biggest economy grow by 0.1 percent in the first half and without the scheme it would have declined 1.0 pecent compared to the first half of 2008.    

The pressing question now is: What will happen to the car market now? Will demand for cars collapse? Did the “cash-for-clunkers” scheme simply encourage would-be car buyers to pull forward their purchases? Will the market be sucked dry? Or did it help stimulate genuinely new demand from people who otherwise would have held onto their ageing vehicles? Will it prove to be a “Strohfeuer“, a flash in the pan?

Obama calls German election but Merkel knows he’s got it wrong

Barack Obama might have unrivalled expertise about the U.S. electorate. But the American president showed he’s something of a fish out of water when it comes to the complex world of German politics — where the seeming winners sometimes end up losing and the losers can end up in power with the right alliance.

Obama recently told Germany’s conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel to stop worrying about the Sept. 27 election: “Ah, you’ve already won. I don’t know what you always worry about,” Obama told her in comments captured by a German TV camera at the White House as the two were on their way to a joint news conference.

Merkel looked surprised by his comments — she knows that she doesn’t have anything in the bag yet — even with what might appear to outsiders to be a comfortable 12- to 17-point lead in opinion polls over her main rivals, the Social Democrats, with just 7 weeks left before the election.

Why is that?

Because under Germany’s “fiendishly complex proportional system” , Merkel’s conservatives could beat her rival Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s SPD and still end up without the centre-right coalition they want — or even more dramatically they could win the vote but end up losing power completely.

(more…)

Nuclear heats up German election campaign

A technical fault at a German nuclear power station has thrown a spotlight on one of the few issues that divide the two main parties before September’s election — atomic energy.

But the anti-nuclear Social Democrats (SPD), who have shared power with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives since 2005, may be disappointed if they had hoped to win votes from it.

Merkel, forced to accept a phaseout of Germany’s atomic plants under its coalition deal with the SPD, is campaigning on extending the lifespan of nuclear plants which are deemed safe.

By contrast, the SPD is committed to the phaseout which it introduced in a previous alliance with the Greens, and Saturday’s failed restart at the ageing Kruemmel plant in northern Germany has galvanised some of its members into action.

The SPD, trailing Merkel’s conservative camp by more than 16 percentage points and at risk of losing its role in government, is trying to do all it can to mobilise its traditional supporters before the Sept. 27 vote.

SPD Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel pounced on the incident, swiftly taking to the airwaves to push his case that the phaseout should be accelerated. And on Wednesday a Berlin newspaper was strategically leaked a government statement, albeit from 2006-07, which said safety standards at older plants like Kruemmel were not as high as at more modern reactors.

Germans have for decades nurtured an aversion to atomic energy, which supplies just under 30 percent of their power needs.

EU vote result adds to Turkey’s membership woes

The results of European Parliament election have caused deep concern in European Union candidate Turkey, where gains made by conservatives and some far-right parties have been read as a  clear win by the “No to Turkey” camp” and thus a blow to Ankara’s already troubled EU membership quest.

Trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Turkish  Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan dismissed the vote as a “futile effort by those who cannot digest Turkey’s enormity and strategic importance”. He said politicians who vilified Turkey to win votes in the short term would be judged by history.

Erdogan was probably referring to anti-immigration parties  that have openly campaigned against predominantly Muslim Turkey’s accession bid, among them the Dutch Freedom Party of  Geert Wilders who promised that Turkey would not join the  union: “Not in 10 years, not in a million years.”