Speculation that Germany could elect a grand coalition in September comprising Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and the opposition center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) was dismissed on Wednesday by her main challenger amid surveys indicating a close race.
SPD challenger Peer Steinbrück said he was “not running just for a placing” in September’s federal election. “I am aiming to win and I am not focused on any other scenario,” he told SPD party members at their rally in Vilshofen in Germany’s southern state of Bavaria.
Germany, said Steinbrück (pictured above), was currently engaged in a political battle on whether it would retain its social cohesion.
The SPD candidate, in turn, was sharply criticized by Horst Seehofer, Bavaria’s state premier and Merkel’s ally, for federal debt accumulated when Steinbrück was finance minister in Germany’s last centrist grand coalition. Merkel headed a cabinet comprising her conservatives and the SPD before Germany’s last poll in 2009.
Bavaria’s Seehofer is bidding for re-election
“Steinbrück is not a financial expert. He is the debt king of the federal republic,” Seehofer told supporters of his Bavaria-based Christian Social Union (CSU) party at their traditional Ash Wednesday rally in Passau, the Danube river city in Bavaria where a regional state election is also due in September.
Germany’s 2009 election left Merkel heading Germany’s current center-right government comprising conservatives of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Seehofer’s CSU plus the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP).
The SPD, including Steinbrück, was relegated in 2009 to the opposition benches in Berlin’s Bundestag parliamentary chamber alongside their onetime allies, the ecologist Greens.
‘Lose cannon’
Steinbrück in his Vilshofen speech also accused Merkel’s current cabinet line-up – comprising CDU, CSU and FDP ministers – of being a “cucumber troupe” and described Seehofer as being verbally the biggest “lose cannon” on Germany’s political “deck.”
At the Free Democrats’ rally in Bavarian town of Dingolfing, their leading candidate for Bavaria’s state election, Federal Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said the SPD has placed a “clown’s cap” on the head of Steinbrück, their own candidate.
DW.DE
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In contrast to previous SPD policies on social welfare or tax, Steinbrück would now have to say the opposite of what he and the SPD had once promulgated, she said.
Germany’s ecologist Greens, during their rally in the Bavarian city of Landshut, predicted that Seehofer’s CSU would end up in opposition in Bavaria’s state election in September.
Life was full of historic surprises such as this week’s resignation of the Pope, said the Greens’ leading Bavarian candidate Margarete Bause.
“Here in Bavaria we will also succeed – after 56 years of CSU governance – to send them into opposition,” Bause said.
Jürgen Trittin, who is one of two leading Green candidates for Germany’s federal election in September, accused Seehofer of often making utterances that harmed the CSU’s conservative allies in Merkel’s cabinet.
“When crazy Horst switches to friendly fire, then collateral damage occurs,” said Trittin, referring to squabbles within Germany’s complicated federal system.
Seehofer at his party’s Ash Wednesday rally in Passau again condemned Germany’s post-war system whereby rich states such as Bavaria help finance poorer states such as Berlin.
“That is a daft system and it must be abolished” said Seehofer. “We’re fed up.”
Earlier in February, Bavaria launched proceedings on the issue before Germany’s constitutional court in Karlsruhe.
ipj/kms (dpa, Reuters, AFP)