Merkel set to have last laugh on Schröder

[ECH1969]

THE German conservative leader Angela Merkel appeared to be gaining the upper hand this weekend in the struggle to become the next chancellor, after an inconclusive election result produced one of the most extraordinary weeks in the country’s post-war politics.

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), narrow winners of last Sunday’s poll, insisted yesterday that she must lead a “grand coalition” with Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democratic party (SPD) — the only combination that looks able to secure a majority in Germany’s fractured parliament.

The conservatives’ position seems to have been strengthened by signs within the SPD that it might ultimately be obliged to ditch Schröder, despite his attempts to portray himself as the true victor.

A number of the chancellor’s senior party allies — including some influential state premiers — have begun to hint that he should consider stepping down after seven years in power. “I’ve got the impression that Schröder still needs to come back down to earth after his big election campaign,” said Henning Scherf, premier of the city state of Bremen.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1796020,00.html

[GrumpyGreg]

1. Yikes!

[billbuckhead]

2. Sounds like propaganda from the corporate crowd

[Karenina]

3. That's exactly what it is.

Word on the street...

[Yupster]

4. Anyone know if

the number of seats per party has been fixed yet?

[confludemocrat]

5. Agree with above. Pure Spin. Country is 52% leftist, anti-"thatcherist"

Any failure to recognize that left mandate once the CDU agenda became clear is distorted.

[The_Casual_Observer]

6. If she wants it so bad, let her have the god damned mess

[robertarctor]

7. No. Bad idea.

When you buckle under and let wingnuts take the victory from a squeaker, the next thing you know, thy rig the voting machines, they govern like they got 90 percent of the vote and you're SOL.

Fuck fascists with a rusty dildo.

[Peace Patriot]

9. Well, I don't know about your coda, but I'm with you on not giving any

quarter to wingnuts. Before they know it, they'll have Diebold and ES&S "tabulating" their votes with secret, proprietary programming code, like we have, and one more democracy will be blipped off the map, and its people raided and looted by global corporate predators.

Anywhere they smell a "surplus" accumulated by law-abiding poor and middle class taxpayers; anywhere they see benefits to workers and the poor that can be robbed and added to the piggish profits of the super-rich; anywhere they see any resource that can be squeezed dry for the benefit of the few, and anywhere they see any weakness in the political will of the majority of people, these diabolical entities will strike, like a pack of blood-crazed sharks, as they have done in the U.S. Look out, Germany! You are somewhat protected by your Parliamentary system, but take a warning from us: These corporate fascists are not into compromise or consensus government!

[1932]

10. The proof of that is USA 2000.

You're exactly right.

[Cha]

17. And ain't we the Living

Dead Proof of that?

[Joe Chi Minh]

12. Wow! It's the kind of mess

every country in the world would sell their grandmothers for!

Please can we in the UK have the kind of economic mess Germany's in?

[Kellanved]

8. they are reading too much into it

And copy too much from German papers. The German journalists are clueless as well, it is all show right now.
The special problem with German journalists is that they believe their job not to be limited to reporting, they want to make politics on their own ("Meinungsmacher"). Writing down Schröder is naturally a way to erode the SPD's position.

Scherf is the mayor of a smaller city, calling him an "influential state premier" is a stretch. The people currently giving statements are from the publicity hungry second rank.


As to the situation: Merkel is more likely to get scapegoated by her party than Schröder; ultimately that may happen to both of them. Schröder'S claim to victory is not as fantastic as the commentators make it sound; there is no automatism that gives the strongest party the right to field the chancellor; that wold be the SPD anyway, due to the CDU/CSU's donation doubling scheme.

The chancellor has to be able to lead a stable government, Schröder would be able to do so, Merkel not.

[1932]

11. What was the donation doubling scheme?

[Kellanved]

14. legally they are two parties, politically one

The CDU exists in 15 states, the CSU in Bavaria. While the two act like they were one party most of the time (and reacted rather aggressively to the notion that they might indeed be two parties), they are happy to receive double the basic public party funding, twice the free tv ads, twice the seats in political talk shows and - most importantly - people and companies can donate to the CSU and the CDU, effectively doubling the donations they can receive ( anonymously and/or tax exempt, anyway).

[1932]

15. Damn.

[Solly Mack]

13. Thank you

:)

[reorg]

16. whatever

I agree with Kellanved, this article is premature and pointless.

As to Merkel gaining the upper hand, that is certainly a possibility. She is a "representative of women" (as much as Ms. Rice is in the US), and a representative of the East (as much as Ms. Rice represents Blacks) and seems to be the poster child of industry lobbyists and their press choir: You can make it if you really want ...



Interesting background article on Merkel's career at WSWS:

>> ...

Merkel certainly did not enter politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall as a political novice. Through her father, she had access to influential circles inside the church, which in turn maintained close links with leading government figures in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Since the 1950s, the church had played a particularly important role in the GDR by ensuring that political opposition to the Stalinist regime was kept under control. In the period leading up to the collapse of the GDR, the church was central to keeping the mass protest wave that swept over the country in safe hands that eventually brought about the restoration of capitalism in East Germany and its Anschluss (annexation) by West Germany.

...

Merkel’s father ranked among those church representatives who argued for a policy that combined loyalty to the regime and the church, known as “the church in socialism.” In the early 1950s, the Stalinist leadership of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) had conducted a “struggle” against the influence of the church. However, following the anti-Stalinist uprising by East German workers in 1953, the Ulbricht government adopted a more conciliatory course, which sought to integrate church institutions into the state and utilise them as a means of stabilising SED rule. In particular, the “Weissenseer working group,” in which Horst Kasner participated, was the mechanism by which the Evangelical Church soon moved closer to the regime, and from 1971, officially defined itself as “the church in socialism,” thereby attaining a level of influence that was unparalleled throughout the Eastern Bloc.

...

Inside the GDR, the church and state maintained their own representatives to conduct negotiations and mediate conflicts between the two. In this, a prominent role was played by the high-ranking Evangelical Church functionary Manfred Stolpe, one of the political architects of “the church in socialism,” and by the Undersecretary of State for Church Affairs Klaus Gysi, father of Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) leader Gregor Gysi. Under Klaus Gysi, the relationship between state and church was substantially consolidated, and the church was granted numerous privileges including church broadcasts in the media, state financial support and the building of new churches. Other important intermediaries were legal attorneys, who represented the Christian groups in their dealings with the state. At the same time, many were also informers for the Stasi (Secret Police), including Lothar de Maizière and Wolfgang Schnur, who were not only active Christians and informants, but later Merkel’s first political mentors.

...

After graduating from high school, Angela Kasner studied physics, married and was accepted at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, where she attained a doctorate in 1986. While a student, she was secretary for agitation and propaganda in the FDJ, the East German youth organisation loyal to the SED regime, a position that she now tries to portray as merely that of a “cultural representative.” A Stasi informer at the Institute who was primarily there to spy on the son of dissident Ulrich Havemann also provided information about his office colleague Merkel. In the reports of this Stasi source, there is no trace of the “internal resistance” to SED rule, which Merkel touts in her authorised biography and in interviews about her history. Stern magazine investigated the archives and found that an “unofficial” informant had “nothing politically explosive to report , quite the opposite, another time emphasising Angela’s ‘positive political views.’ Otherwise, he reports mainly about private and personal matters. Concerning her limited, cosseted life.”

... <<

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jul2005/cdu1-j08.shtml