German voters send a message to the time-wasters of Berlin

Angela Merkel: ‘I carry responsibility both for the successes and for the failures’. Picture: AFP

“The time has come to open a new chapter,” Angela Merkel said yesterday, confirming reports she would not run again as party leader. She will remain German­y’s chancellor for now, but said this would be her last term, saying publicly for the first time what had long been suspected. That means she will step down as chancellor in 2021 at the latest, and probably a bit earlier in order to let a successor bed in.

Merkel had intended to stand for re-election as party chairwoman at the next party conference of her centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) in December. But on Sunday the CDU suffered a major blow in regional elections in the German state of Hesse. The chancellor’s announcement is being seen as a dignified attempt to stage-manage her own exit.

Germany’s most recent chancell­ors have all been pushed out of office, after clinging on to power too long. Merkel has said this is a fate she is keen to avoid. “As the chancellor and the chair of the CDU, I carry responsibility both for the successes and for the failures,” Merkel said in Berlin.

In Hesse the CDU lost 11.3 percentage points compared with its score in 2013. It won the most votes, with 27 per cent, giving it the right to form the next coalitio­n government.

And Merkel’s close ally, Minist­er President Volker Bouf­fier, will probably stay as state premier. But this was not a vote of dissatisfaction with Hesse’s region­al government. The econo­my there is booming and the alliance between the conservatives and the centre-left Greens has proved unexpectedly harmonious and effective. It was instea­d a slap in the face for the central government in Berlin. Voters in Hesse punished Merkel’s conservatives and the Social Democratic Party for a serie­s of rows and scandals in Berlin, where the two parties, along with the CDU’s much smaller sister party from Bavaria, form the federal government.

The coalition parties have spent much of this year in spats over migration or squabbles over top jobs in Berlin. Voters are fed up and appear to have used these regional elections to send a message to the central government to that effect. Now pressure is growing on the SPD’s leaders to leave the national coalition. This would bring down the government and probably spark fresh elections.

Left-wing members believe compromise with Merkel’s conservativ­es is destroying the party, and each disastrous poll strengthens that feeling.

The centre-left SPD was an even bigger loser, scoring 19.8 per cent, also down about 11 percentage points: proportionally the resu­lt was even worse for it.

As in Bavaria two weeks ear­lier, the big success story was the Green party. It came in neck and neck with the SPD for second place, which meant a gain of almo­st nine percentage points.

The coalition wrangling now begins and there are various permut­ations possible between the six parties in parliament. (The hard-right Alternative for Germany did well, tripling its vote share to about 13 per cent.) Most likely the Greens will be able to carry on in government with the CDU, although, because of conservative losses, possibly now in a three-way “Jamaica” coalition with the free-market Liberals.

On the evening of the Hesse vote, an ashen-faced SPD party leader Andrea Nahles faced journ­alists and spoke of crisis, saying “the state of the government is not acceptable” and that something must change. She said she would start talks yesterday, a sign she wants to prevent panic breaking out within the party and that she will not quit the coalition immediately. But the mood is so bad within the party that a coup against her uninspiring leadership is not out of the question.

Neither the SPD nor the CDU is ready for another election. The polls are gloomy and future leadership questions are unresolved.

It took six months to form a coalition after last year’s election, and since then the government has been embroiled in time-wasting in-fighting. The calculation may well be that voters would punish any politician seen to be creating more political paralysis.

That suggests Germany’s coaliti­on may well limp on. But with Merkel apparently now fully aware of the weakness of her position and the dissatisfaction over her second “grand coalition” with the SPD, German politics has ­entered a time of great uncertainty. After 13 years, the age of Merkel is drawing to a close.

Now the race is on for her successor. In December, CDU delegates will begin the process by voting in the new party leader. Health Minister Jens Spahn has already announced he will run. Young, ambitious and outspoken, he has been a vocal conservative critic of Merkel’s refugee policy.

CDU general-secretary ­Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer will also run. She is a centrist in the Merkel mode, and is viewed as the Chancellor’s preferred candidate. But Merkel has said she did not believe in anointing successors, so she will let rivals fight it out. Whoever does take over the country’s most powerful party will not only determine the direction of the CDU, but also of Germany and indeed Europe.