The New York TImes has a flattering piece today on Angela Merkel and her enormous popularity in Germany. The NYTimes attributes her strength in the polls to Germany's better economic performance (Aufschwung) and her embrace of status quo politics. Her popluarity comes at the expense of the SPD. According to a poll that was published today, Merkel is 41 points ahead of her SPD rival - Kurt Beck. And then there was this report that caught my attention last week:
"The SPD has suffered a major shock in the German state of Saxony in a new poll conducted by the Forsa Institute. In results that is bound to reverberate across the whole of Germany, the far-right NPD has overtaken the SPD for the first time ever in an opinion poll."
"The fact that poll shows the NPD ahead of us cannot be," Martin Dulig, the SPD's parliamentary faction leader in Saxony told German news magazine Der Spiegel's Web site. "I cannot be compared with Nazis."
What happened to the fortunes of one of Germany's major Volksparteien when even the neo-Nazis are outpolling it in the east? The economist Albrecht Müller, who worked for the successful SPD campaigns of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, has an interesting perspective in his blog NachDenkSeiten. He contrasts the ability of Angela Merkel to appeal to different constituencies to the ideological rigidity of the SPD. The SPD expends an enormous amount of energy demonizing DIe Linke ,even as that party has successfully outflanked the SPD on the left and is gaining voters.
Angela Merkel hat begriffen, dass eine Volkspartei wie die Union oder die SPD Wahlen nur dann erfolgreich bestehen kann, wenn sie viele Gruppen bedient - mit faktischer Politik oder mit programmatischen Formulierungen oder nur mit als glaubwürdig vermittelten Worten. Nur wenn sich Menschen aus vielen verschiedenen Gruppen mit sehr verschiedenen politischen Anliegen wiedererkennen, sind Wahlergebnisse von über 40% für eine Partei überhaupt denkbar.
In a very deft move today, Chancellor Merkel praised her Social Democratic predecessor - Gerhard Schroeder - for implementing the neo-liberal reform program Agenda 2010, reminding voters who was behind the original attack on the German Sozialstaat while she herself has abandoned some of the harshest measures. This further confuses the identity of the SPD in the minds of German voters: who are the the true social democrats?
Comments