Angela Merkel spends the last remnants of the electoral campaign granting interviews; first on the public television ARD, then on the broadcasters Deutschlandfunk and Phoenix. Calm and nonchalant, the Chancellor knows she has all of her numbers on her side. Yet she is not guilty of arrogance. She behaves as usual: she answers questions, jokes when necessary, remains impassive in the face of allusions and pitfalls of journalists. As already happened in the 2009 campaign, Mrs Merkel is well aware that she is loved by the vast majority of Germans. Throughout the legislature you were the most popular politician in the Federal Republic of Germany. Even in her opposing blocks there are those who respect her. A recent Forsa poll, carried out in collaboration with the business newspaper Handelsblatt, highlights that as many as 45 percent of Green voters hope that the Chancellor will remain in office for another four years. The percentages of support by category are also high: 63 percent of civil servants, 62 percent of self-employed and 59 percent of employees want a third Merkel cabinet. Those are record numbers. Her challenger, the Social Democrat Peer Steinbrück, never exceeds 30 percent in voter approval, whatever the baseline chosen. In short, the game seems to have already been won from the start.
In reality, things are more complicated. If, on the one hand, it is rather obvious that Mrs. Merkel will continue to hold the role of Chancellor of the Federal Republic also in the next legislature, on the other, the color of the coalition that she will lead is still uncertain. Although in recent weeks the numbers for a new edition of the Christian-liberal alliance seem to have materialized again, the margins still seem rather narrow. According to the latest opinion poll of August 42th, the CDU/CSU of the Chancellor sails at 37 percent, the SPD and the Greens together barely reach 25 percent (12 and 5), the liberals of the FDP are close to the threshold of 8 percent and the far left exceeds 2005 percent. Should the liberals fail to field deputies in the Bundestag, the coalition hypotheses for Mrs Merkel would be reduced to two: a grand coalition with the defeated social democrats or an unprecedented alliance with ecologists, for now only tested at the local or regional level . The CDU/CSU is ready to negotiate. The most reluctant to unite with the Christian Democrats remain the Greens, strongly divided between the reformist and maximalist wings. Even the Social Democrats, on the other hand, don't seem so well disposed towards a hypothesis of a Große Koalition, since they risk a new cannibalization by the Chancellor, like what happened in the 2009-XNUMX legislature. In short, if the liberals were to stay out of the picture, the picture would become more complicated and the parties represented in the Bundestag would enter a tight phase of negotiations destined to last at least the entire month of October. Obviously the Chancellor will have the upper hand, thanks to an exceptional result for the Christian Democrats.
