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If we wonder if Germany can function without the leadership of Angela Merkel after the chancellor withdraws after the September parliamentary elections, seeing which parties and politicians can take over the leadership of the country, we can easily conclude that this is unthinkable.
Is Germany ready for the post-Angela Merkel era, knowing that the chancellor will end his political career with the September parliamentary elections? – Constanze Stelzenmüller, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, asks the question in a Financial Times article. From your analysis, it seems difficult. Germany was still a bastion of stability in Europe a few months ago and was looking forward to 2021 with confidence.
Merkel’s popularity rating was high because the Germans saw her government handle the coronavirus epidemic professionally. The German presidency of the EU proved to be a success story in the second half of 2020: dismantling the Hungarian and Polish resistance, adopting a crisis management package based on the first joint debt of the Union and the next seven-year budget, avoid a hard Brexit at the last minute and sign Merkel’s contract. EU-China investment agreement.
According to opinion polls, the Chancellor’s party, the conservative CDU and the Greens, are the two most popular political forces in Germany. Society seemed to like to see a coalition of this composition at the head of the country after a tired large conservative-social-democratic coalition. After all, there is a range where this has worked. Furthermore, Western countries, led by current US President Joe Biden and his government, were optimistic that the new German leadership could open a new tab and could be more proactive in the country’s security policy.
Damn epidemic
However, the second wave of the coronavirus epidemic disturbed this view, as rising infections forced Merkel to extend Germany’s shutdown, and a controversy emerged between coalition parties, who were already winking at elections, due to the slowness of vaccination and insufficient vaccination supplies. The nation’s mood has turned from confident to bitter, so the political possibilities may be changing.
The first factor of uncertainty is the presidential elections in the CDU, whose candidates fought on a circular motion among themselves in early January. It was a bad omen before the vote that the polls did not show a clear opportunity. Heated in the background by Markus Söder, chairman of the sister party, the CSU, Prime Minister of Bavaria, who believes that he has successfully managed the epidemic in his own province, which may be a major reason for him to be the candidate for chancellor of the CDU / CSU couple. The only problem is that there are not many supporters of this idea in the CDU.
Left-handed travel
The Social Democratic SPD continues to show a special talent for improving the perception of the CDU through its clumsiness. However, there are politicians in charge, such as Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, the party’s chancellor candidate and a popular pragmatist. One of the party’s ideas that is difficult to interpret is that the SPD leadership is considering a eurosceptic, purely left-wing anti-NATO coalition with the Greens and the East German Left, the successor party to the former state party.
In part, this explains why the Greens are more popular than the SPD. The young leader of the party, which emerged from an originally anti-elite movement, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock are centrists and have no political scratches. However, the base of the Greens is not really stable, prone to endless political debates, so it is questionable whether it is credible enough to be a pillar of a coalition.
Ultimately, the radical right-wing eurosceptic alternative to Germany failed to permanently win over a substantial part of the CDU’s voter base, and its popularity appears to have peaked in the low double-digit range. At the same time, it can and will remain a party to collect protest votes to test the resilience of democracy. In general, you can be a lasting participant in German public life. His participation in the governmental coalition is hardly conceivable, even considering the change of power that is taking place in the United States.
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