Merkel on the Ropes She could lose, but Germany needs a competitive election.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/merkel-on-the-ropes-1486686608
One of Europe’s last great political certainties is evaporating as it becomes clearer that Angela Merkel could lose the autumn election in Germany. For the first time since 2010 her party fell to a close second place in a poll released this week, and not a moment too soon.
We say that not out of enthusiasm for the opponent who’s upstaging Mrs. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) got a boost when it selected former European Parliament President Martin Schulz as its leader. Mr. Schulz is an orthodox tax-and-spend, pro-European Union social democrat, but he has the advantage of not being tarred by the previous leadership’s 2013 decision to form a grand coalition with Mrs. Merkel.
Mrs. Merkel needs some serious political competition. Absent a vibrant center-left, Mrs. Merkel positioned herself as a pragmatic centrist of the European status quo. Most controversially, the lack of a challenger for centrist votes led Mrs. Merkel to assume she could count on that part of the electorate to support her open-door migration policy despite opposition from her right within the CDU. This fueled the popularity of the far-right, euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Now voters inclined to vote for a social democrat appear to be returning home to Mr. Schulz because he really is one. Polls show the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, together virtually tied with the SPD at around 30% support. This is forcing Mrs. Merkel back toward the right. Witness the tougher new policy to deport some migrants—and to step up security surveillance while migrants are in Germany—she unveiled Thursday. This is a sign she’s no longer taking for granted the support of the CDU faithful.
It’s significant that Mrs. Merkel is being harried not by a euroskeptic but by another “good European.” Perhaps the message is that voters have turned to fringe parties such as AfD not out of dislike for the EU but out of frustration with mainstream parties that don’t compete against each other vigorously enough.
In which case, here’s hoping Mrs. Merkel continues her rightward drift. Maybe she can even embrace economic-reform ideas such as the tax cuts for which some members of her party are agitating, while Mr. Schulz pushes his proposals for more government spending. The result would be a genuine mainstream choice for German voters—something too many of their European peers have been denied in recent elections.
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