German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
Free Democratic coalition partners are begging her party for
help to ensure their survival in this weekend’s national ballot.

FDP leader Philipp Roesler called on backers of Merkel’s
Christian Democratic Union to split their ballot and give the
second vote to his party on Sept. 22. Germans cast two votes:
the first for a candidate in their constituency, and the second
to determine the share of seats each party gets in the lower
house of parliament, the Bundestag.

“Roesler’s move is a ridiculous sign of weakness,”
Friedrich Thelen, founder of Thelen-Consult, a Berlin-based
business advisory group, said in a telephone interview. “The
FDP can’t go around begging for gift votes from another party.”

The gambit underscores the Free Democrats’ struggle for
their very existence in Sunday’s election, a fight that risks
undermining Merkel’s bid to repeat her current coalition and
forcing her into an alliance with the main opposition Social
Democrats.

While Merkel’s bloc leads the SPD by between 11 and 15
points, she needs a coalition partner to govern, and the FDP is
polling right at the 5 percent hurdle needed to win any seats.

She snubbed Roesler’s plea during a campaign rally
yesterday in Lower Saxony. Her party lost the state to the SPD
and Greens in January after Christian Democratic voters gave
their second ballot to the FDP in a failed bid to keep the
coalition led by CDU Prime Minister David McAllister.

No Giveaways

“We have no votes to give away,” Merkel told the rally in
the town of Duderstadt. “We’ll fight for every vote in Lower
Saxony and in Germany,” she said. “Both votes for the CDU,
that’s our slogan.”

Roesler, who is also federal economy minister and vice
chancellor, made his appeal on N24 television yesterday, the day
after his party failed to re-enter Bavaria’s regional assembly
in a state election. While Merkel’s sister party, the Christian
Social Union, got an absolute majority with 47.7 percent, the
FDP fell to 3.3 percent after taking 8 percent in the last
election in 2008.

“I’m telling people to split their vote between the CDU
and the FDP to keep Merkel in power with the FDP,” Clemens von
Saldern, 50, a Free Democratic voter who is managing director of
Saldern GmbH, a Potsdam, Germany-based health products company,
said in a telephone interview. “This is loaning a vote but the
purpose is to help Merkel.”

Under Germany’s proportional representation system, a party
that wins at least 5 percent of the vote gets seats in the
Bundestag even if it fails to win any directly contested
districts. This aspect of the German political system is meant
to give representation to smaller parties and has been crucial
for the FDP, the Greens and the anti-capitalist Left Party.

Internal Rebellion

The FDP, which traditionally served as a “kingmaker” in
post-World War II German governments, entered Merkel’s second-term coalition after taking almost 15 percent at the 2009
election, its best-ever tally.

Support for the party that numbers among its ranks former
Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the co-architect of
German reunification with CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl, has since
collapsed amid infighting, a failure to deliver on its tax-cutting promises and an internal rebellion over euro-area
bailouts during the debt crisis.

Now, “it’s clear the FDP really does need conservative
voters to give the party their second vote to lift it into
parliament,” Carsten Brzeski, senior economist at ING Group NV
in Brussels, said by phone. “The big question is whether
Merkel’s supporters are prepared to do that: She goes to every
rally in Germany telling voters not to give their second vote to
any party but to her party.”

Latest Polls

Merkel’s Christian Democratic bloc dropped by a percentage
point in Emnid and INSA national polls published Sept. 15 to 39
percent and 38 percent respectively. The FDP were unchanged in
both polls with Emnid giving them 5 percent and INSA 4 percent.

The Social Democrats led by Peer Steinbrueck, which are
campaigning on a platform of tax increases, “taming finance
capitalism” with more regulation and reducing the retirement
age to 63 from 67, gained a point to 26 percent in the Emnid
poll and dropped a point to 27 percent in the INSA poll. The
SPD’s Green party allies lost a point, falling to 10 percent in
the Emnid poll and were unchanged at 11 percent in INSA’s poll.

“There’s nothing wrong with a campaign for second votes,”
Wolfgang Kubicki, a member of the FDP’s national executive
committee, was cited as saying in an interview in yesterday’s
Die Welt newspaper. Yet “tactical games aren’t sufficient,” he
said. “Policy positions must be clear, including those that set
us apart” from Merkel’s bloc.

Merkel’s insistence on getting both ballots puts her party
on a collision course with its FDP partners, who are now
“desperate” as they face a possible meltdown, said Joerg Forbrig, an analyst at the Berlin bureau of the German Marshall
Fund of the United States.

“Even if the FDP manages to get into parliament, it may
well fail to win enough to give Merkel a majority,” Forbrig
said in a phone interview. “Things are heading to a repeat of
the grand coalition with the SPD” of Merkel’s first term.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Leon Mangasarian in Berlin at
lmangasarian@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net