German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday was under pressure after her party suffered a poll defeat in her home state, two years before she faces voters nationwide.
Merkel’s center-right coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU) and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) were dealt what mass circulation daily Bild termed a “sharp slap.”
This year’s state elections are seen as a litmus test of support for the ruling coalition.
In contrast, the main opposition parties — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the ecologist Greens — made significant gains in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
“The election in her homeland ... has made governing even more difficult for Chancellor Angela Merkel,” the Stuttgarter Zeitung regional daily said yesterday.
The CDU’s vote share dropped to 23.3 percent, an embarrassing fall of more than 5 percentage points compared with five years ago.
Angered by her reaction to the eurozone debt crisis and turned off by internal squabbling within the governing coalition, voters this year have delivered a series of electoral drubbings to Merkel and the CDU.
The most humiliating of these came in March in the wealthy state of Baden-Wuerttemberg that the conservatives had ruled without interruption for nearly six decades.
Moreover, Merkel is unlikely to gain any traction from the seventh of this year’s regional elections, in the city state of Berlin, where polls show the SPD will romp to victory.
With about 8.5 percent of the vote, the Greens won representation in Mecklenburg Western Pomerania’s parliament for the first time, capping a meteoric rise that has seen them recapture their role as a major force in German politics. The Greens are now represented in all of Germany’s 16 regional parliaments, with the party’s co-leader Cem Ozdemir hailing the result as a “real sensation.”
As expected, the SPD were the clear winners of the vote in Merkel’s home state, a scenic, but poor region in the former communist East Germany, where unemployment rages at nearly twice the national average.
The SPD captured 36.5 percent of the vote, according to exit polls, a gain of about 6 percentage points from their last result in 2006.
The third-strongest party was the far-left Linke party, which won 18 percent of votes cast.
The far-right NPD party, which achieved its best-ever result in the economically depressed state in 2006, appeared to have scraped back into parliament, albeit with a lower share of the vote at 5.9 percent.
However, the “clear losers” of the vote, according to Bild, were the governing coalition partner, the FDP, polling a paltry 2.8 percent.
They have crashed out from the state legislature as parties need to reach 5 percent to enter.
There is already media speculation that German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, a former head of the FDP, could lose his job as a result of the defeat.
After guiding the FDP to power with its best-ever result in national elections in 2009, Westerwelle is widely seen as the reason for the party’s fall from grace.
“It is looking increasingly likely that Westerwelle will be chucked out,” the Saarbruecker Zeitung daily said.
CDU parliamentary leader Peter Altmaier acknowledged that the debt crisis had weighed on the election.
Parliament will this week start debating the latest European rescue fund put forward by Merkel amid bickering among her own backbenchers.
A number of them have threatened to abstain or vote against extending the European Financial Stability Facility, which is meant to help alleviate the eurozone debt crisis.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of