Barely two years after the formation of a slender minority executive, North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous German state, is ready to return to the polls in mid-May. After the collapse of the coalition government of Liberals, Greens and Christian Democrats in Little Saar last month and after new elections are called for this spring in Schleswig-Holstei, that of North Rhine-Westphalia is the third regional parliament to dissolve in a few months. And thus Germany plunges back into an electoral campaign climate, just over a year before the political elections for the renewal of the Bundestag. Without considering the recent resignation of Christian Wulff, overwhelmed by a long series of allegations of alleged illicit behavior. He has just been replaced by the evangelist pastor Joachim Gauck, a human rights activist at the time of the GDR.
In Nordreno the situation had been precarious for some time, given that iLocal government between social democrats and ecologists relied on the external support of the radical left. On Wednesday, on the occasion of the approval of the budget for the Ministry of the Interior of the Land, the Düsseldorf parliament rejected the executive draft, forcing the Minister-President, the Social Democrat Hannelore Kraft, to resign. Budgetary issues have been gripping for some time the Land, one of the most indebted in Germany. Already last year the executive risked collapse, when the local Constitutional Court declared the changes to the budget for 2010 null and void. The Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia had in fact given the go-ahead for additional debt to that originally foreseen (equal to just more than 6,6 billion) in the order of almost 2 billion euros, to be allocated largely to the umpteenth settlement of the accounts of WestLB, one of the Landesbanken that have drained the most taxpayers' money in the history of the Federal Republic.
Now the plans of the red-green coalition have been blocked by the votes of the left (Die Linke) and the liberals (FDP), the very two parties which, according to polls released by the public network, would no longer be able to pass the threshold of 5 % and to join the Landtag. For some time, even at the federal level, the two parties have been suffering from a strong crisis of popularity. While, however, the radical left maintains a strong electoral base in the former East German Länder, the Liberals are now firmly stuck at 3% across the country. Even if the latest polls indicate a reconfirmation of the red-green government, the CDU could take advantage of it to recover consensus. In fact, Mrs Merkel deploys one of her henchmen, the Minister of the Environment, Norbert Röttgen, known in the press reports for often and willingly winking at the greens. If the Christian Democrats, currently nailed to 34%, were to manage to overtake the Social Democrats, at the top with 37%, they could relaunch the unprecedented black-green alliance, which closed badly a year and a half ago in the Land of Hamburg. The Chancellor herself, after having cornered and reduced the liberals to irrelevance, is in fact looking for a new electoral partner in view of the September 2013 appointment.
