Since the start of his election campaign in the autumn of last year, Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democratic candidate for the Chancellery, has made very few moves right. Perhaps the only one, at least from the point of view of a politician who must try to offer a radical alternative to Mrs Merkel's popular "quiet force", dates back to just one year ago, when the Bundestag succeeded in putting cornered the Chancellor, attacking her on crisis management.
At the time it seemed that the SPD should embrace European policy proposals more in line with those of the other European progressive parties. Steinbrück even went so far as to define the Chancellor as a worthy follower of Heinrich Brüning, the Chancellor of the Weimar Republic who, having long advocated austerity policies between 1930 and 1932, plunged Germany into depression.
Today Steinbrück has dropped the clothes, which were indeed very tight for him, of the anti-Merkel social democrat. After veering sharply to the left in an attempt to steal votes from the far left, the former finance minister is now veering back to the centre, in the hope of at least being able to snag a government seat in a new grand coalition. Although he has denied having in mind a re-edition of the red-black alliance of 2005, his most recent statements reveal a clear opening to the Christian Democrats. These also include the statement released to the Reuters news agency last Wednesday. “With interest rates this low, inflation is eating away at the savings and investments of thousands of Germans. I have many doubts that Mario Draghi's strategy of maintaining such a low interest rate is sensible", said Steinbrück, arousing the amazement of those on the left who would never have dreamed of attacking Draghi in such a delicate moment of the crisis of the Eurozone.
In short, the paradox is that Mrs. Merkel is among the main supporters of the president of the ECB, while the SPD, almost fifteen points behind in the polls, tries to elicit some easy applause (hardly a few votes) among the most angry voters with the policy of the euro-bailout carried out, despite a thousand uncertainties, by the Chancellor. As the editorialist of the weekly Der Spiegel, Wolfgang Münchau, has argued on several occasions, the social democratic party should have aimed at a radical critique of the interpretation of the crisis given by the Chancellor. On the contrary, conditioned by an increasingly distrustful public opinion, the SPD is now also winking at the Eurosceptic electorate.
