Print

Mail

wiki links

German parliament dissolves; elections to be held Sept. 18

German President Horst Koehler announced on Thursday that he had dissolved the German parliament and called for early national elections, moving the vote for chancellor forward by a year.

Speaking on national television on Thursday night, Koehler agreed with an unusual proposal by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who announced nearly two months ago that he could no longer govern effectively and would seek a new mandate in early elections.

The announcement, which ended weeks of speculation and suspense about what his decision would be, means that elections, which normally would have been held in the fall of next year, now must be held within 60 days. Koehler said the election date would be Sept. 18.

"Our country is facing gigantic challenges," he said. "Our future and that of our children are at stake."

Koehler said that with Schroeder holding only a slim majority in parliament and his party threatened by "abstentions and resignations" from within its own ranks, the government no longer had a "steady and reliable" basis for governing.

At a time when millions are unemployed and Germany is facing what Koehler called "fierce competition" from abroad, "our country needs a government that can pursue its aims with continuity and vigor."

Under German law, the president is the only person who can dissolve parliament.

The public opinion polls for the last several months have shown Schroeder's opponent, Angela Merkel, head of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, to be a strong favorite in the election, even though she trails Schroeder in personal popularity.

According to the most recent polls, her conservative coalition, which is paired with the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, is preferred by about 44 percent of voters, compared with 27 percent who support Schroeder's Social Democrats.

In addition, defectors from Schroeder's own party, who are led by a former German finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, have joined forces in recent weeks with the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the old East German Communist Party, to form a new leftist movement that could draw support away from the Social Democrats.

Schroeder's call for early elections came after a string of defeats in state elections in Germany, culminating in his party's loss of control of the country's biggest and most industrialized state, North-Rhine Westphalia, which had been controlled by the Social Democrats for 39 years until the Christian Democratic victory there in May.

Despite those losses, there has been much speculation why Schroeder would seek early elections that could result in a loss of power for him a year early.

Some political analysts believe that Schroeder had become genuinely discouraged with his inability to win support within his own party for his policies.

The policies include a series of cutbacks in social welfare benefits, known as Agenda 2010, which the chancellor has said are necessary for the near moribund German economy to recover its competitiveness.
This story has been viewed 1479 times.