Berlin. For the black-red coalition and especially Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU), the survey results are devastating: only 14 percent of people in Germany still think he is the right head of government, 78 percent do not, as an online survey by the opinion research institute Insa on behalf of “Bild” showed. Even a majority of Union voters reject Merz.
Another Insa survey for “Bild” paints a similarly sobering picture from the government’s perspective. The AfD achieved 29 percent, an increase of one point compared to the previous week. The Union remains at 20 percent and is nine points behind. The SPD ends up at 13 percent.
After the crushing election defeat in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD won more than twice as many votes as the CDU, Merz admitted mistakes and promised to better explain the federal government's policies. You have to reach “people in all their emotionality” more.
However, in a speech on Wednesday in the Bundestag, Merz primarily focused on dealing with the AfD, which he also accused of wanting to carry out "ethnic cleansing" based on origin and skin color with regard to the term "remigration" it used.
A week before the next state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin, important representatives of the CDU and CSU are not openly questioning Merz. However, long-term competitor Markus Söder defends the Chancellor with a conspicuous dispassion. When asked whether Merz was still the right man, the CSU leader replied briefly in a “Bild” interview: “Yes, he supports the reforms.”
When asked, the Bavarian Prime Minister said that any alternatives would face the same problems. The CSU will not overthrow the Chancellor. “I am not responsible for the CDU, I am not the chairman.”
For some in Merz's CDU, their nerves are clearly on edge. The chairman of the influential middle class parliamentary group in the Union faction, Christian von Stetten, angered the coalition partner SPD with a sharp attack on its leadership.
Federal Labor Minister Bärbel Bas (SPD) is “no longer acceptable,” said the CDU MP to “Bild”. “For months she has been blocking the reforms that our country so urgently needs.” He accused the SPD co-leader of delays in legislative proposals for social reforms. “Sustainable reforms do not fit the ideology of the SPD party politics,” said von Stetten.
Bas' co-boss, Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, also got his fat off. Von Stetten described the budget he presented for the coming year as “not capable of approval”. Klingbeil did not implement the necessary austerity measures and “instead proposed new taxes and an incredible record level of debt.”
Klingbeil didn't put up with that. "What's the point? We're in damn difficult times. We have to stick together in a government," he said in Celle, Lower Saxony.
Klingbeil accused parts of the Union of sawing away at the coalition's branch. There is a “second majority” in the Bundestag alongside the Union and the SPD, namely the Union and the AfD, said the SPD leader. "But I don't want that. And I hope that many in the CDU don't want that either, but when I hear comments like yesterday, I ask myself: Where are some people in the CDU actually headed?"
Von Stetten's broadside caused heads to shake even within his own ranks. “Public coalition disputes help no one, except perhaps for your own profile and certainly for the populists in our country,” said the Parliamentary Managing Director of the Union faction, Hendrik Hoppenstedt (CDU), to the German Press Agency in Berlin. “This constant public denunciation of people and projects must end.”
The CDU can at least look forward to the House of Representatives election in Berlin: there it could succeed in beating the Left and appointing the governing mayor.
But in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the CDU is threatened with its worst result to date in a state election: it has recently fallen to 7 percent in surveys there. The AfD is ahead, but Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig's SPD has caught up in the last few weeks.
Weaker parties like the Greens – and more recently the CDU – have to fear being crushed in the duel between the two frontrunners and perhaps even missing out on entering the state parliament.
CDU General Secretary Franziska Hoppermann accused Schwesig of weakening the political center as a whole with a highly self-tailored election campaign. “Manuela Schwesig puts her party political interests above the interests of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania,” Hoppermann told the dpa. “Your attempt to keep the CDU down with a personalized election campaign weakens the political center and ultimately helps the AfD.” That is “irresponsible”.
