[ad_1]
As she might fear, Angela Merkel is expected to be weakened from the regional election held this Sunday in Hesse, Germany. Its center-right party and its social-democratic partner are leading the poll, but are suffering heavy losses. A situation that endangers the chancellor's coalition government.
Read also Germany: Hessen elections threatening Merkel
According to the polls conducted at the exit of polling stations by the public television channels ARD and ZDF, the Chancellor's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is at the top of the Hessian state-region poll with 27 and 28% of the vote, but this score represents a drop of about ten points compared to the previous elections of 2013. She had then obtained 38.3%. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) is just as exhausted by polls with 20%, against 30.7% five years ago in Hesse, where is the financial capital of Germany, Frankfurt, according to polls.
This double sanction for the parties of power at the federal level in Berlin, badociated in a "grand coalition" difficult to set up in March, is bad news for Angela Merkel at a time it is already politically weakened.
2nd setback
This is the second disappointing regional election for the German conservative camp, after an election in Bavaria two weeks ago that saw him lose the absolute majority he held there for decades. This situation may fuel the debate in the CDU party on the future of Angela Merkel, which seems worn out by 13 years of power. Its popularity has steadily declined since its decision to open the country's borders to more than one million asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016, while the far right has been gaining success by taking advantage of the fears migrants in the opinion.
Read also Germany: how the AfD has woven its web
The alternative party for Germany has tripled its score in Hesse with around 12% and will enter the last German regional parliament where it was not yet represented. Faced with this development, the critics of Angela Merkel in his camp are calling for a helm right and ask that she prepares her succession. The Chancellor will face in this context a crucial test at the beginning of December at a congress of the CDU where she is supposed to postpone her position as president of the party at stake.
It has, however, limited the damage in Hesse because, in view of polls leaving polling stations, the outgoing regional chief of government, Volker Bouffier, a close friend of Angela Merkel, seems able to remain in office at the head of a coalition whose contours remain to be defined. A loss of the Land of Hesse would have placed it in an untenable position. In the immediate future, the most serious danger for her could suddenly come from her social-democratic partner of coalition who, poll after poll, does not stop sinking.
Greens success
In Hesse, he is overtaken by the Greens, who with a head of list of Arab origin double their score of 2013 to 20% and seem well left to stay in the local government in badociation with the conservatives. The trend of siphoning the social democrat electorate by environmentalists is becoming a serious trend across the country and some SPD executives fear a slow death of their movement if they stay in power for too long with the right.
Read also The return to grace of the German Greens
As a result, the left wing of the SPD is calling more and more clearly for an exit from the coalition government in Berlin – undermined by internal quarrels – to rejuvenate the opposition. Such a scenario would mark the end of the current government and probably that of Angela Merkel's political career, with new elections at the end.
"Hesse will blow up the grand coalition" between conservatives and social democrats who governs in Berlin, asked Sunday the newspaper most read of Germany, Bild.
"No one can say 100% how stable things will be" after this election because of the "dynamics at work in the parties," warned in advance the number two party CDU, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.
Source link
