In recent weeks, the Italian press (and, to tell the truth, partly also the German one) has given great coverage to the thesis according to which a defeat of Mrs Merkel in tomorrow's elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous German Land with the largest listed companies, could lead to an early dissolution of the Bundestag, just as happened in 2005 when Gerhard Schröder was in the Chancellery. In reality, the differences with that particular moment in German political history are many.
The Social Democratic leader lost a Land that had been in the hands of the SPD for years. Today, a victory for Hannelore Kraft would only represent a reconfirmation for the Social Democrats and a fairly obvious defeat for the Christian Democrats. Not to mention that seven years ago Schröder had just approved a package of structural reforms of the welfare state that unleashed a wave of protests throughout Germany. Today, however, around 60% of Germans say they are satisfied with Mrs Merkel's work and no major demonstration on the Federal Republic's European policy has ever taken place since the beginning of her mandate.
So all right? Not exactly. The CDU, the Chancellor's Christian Democratic party, holds up well in federal polls, but loses support in local elections. This makes the Christian Democrats increasingly open to blackmail in the Chamber of regional executives (Bundesrat), where Mrs Merkel does not have a majority. So far only the meteoric rise of the Pirates has allowed the Christian Democrats to continue to govern in coalition. This happened first in the Land of Berlin and then in the Saarland. In Schleswig-Holstein, last Sunday, the SPD and the Greens, on the contrary, seem to have succeeded in the enterprise of regime change, but only because the Danish minority, traditional ally of the red-greens, is allowed not to exceed the 5% threshold.
Here too, as in the two Länder mentioned, the Große Koalition represents the fallback solution, if the alliance between the three parties – which would have only one majority vote in the Kiel parliament – does not remain standing. In reality, far from being just a way out of the impasse due to the impossibility of forming alliances with the liberals of the FDP, the grand coalition is a way like any other for the CDU to move onto the platform of social conservatism in sight of federal elections. Already today, Mrs. Merkel's cabinet is filled with personalities belonging to the left wing of the party, such as Ursula von der Leyen, Minister of Labor and Norbert Röttgen, Minister of the Environment. The latter, not surprisingly, also became the candidate of the Christian Democrats in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Röttgen hopes that this time too the numbers are not enough for a red-green alliance and proposes itself as a partner capable of helping one or the other, depending on the case. In reality, in recent weeks, the gap between the CDU and the SPD has widened and the polls now speak of an almost certain reconfirmation for the cabinet of Hannelore Kraft, rewarded for having chosen to go to new elections last March, after the rejection by of the extreme left and liberals of some proposed changes to the budget of the local Ministry of the Interior. Röttgen also made several missteps, two of them in the last week of the election campaign. At first he defined the consultation as a vote on the Chancellor's European policy (not a little irritating Mrs Merkel) and then, in an interview with the ZDF broadcaster, he let it slip that "unfortunately it is not the CDU that decides , but the voters". The unpopularity of the Christian Democrat candidate translates into growing support for the FDP and its lead candidate, Christian Lindner. With this round, the liberals, galvanized by the good performance of Schleswig-Holstein, could leave behind the strong consensus crisis into which they plunged immediately after entering the government with Mrs Merkel.
