German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday rejected the caricature of her party as obsessed with debt, instead telling an election rally that her budget record is an act of “generational justice.”
She singled out German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schaeuble as the one who takes most of the flak for belt-tightening in her Christian Democratic Union (CDU). She also lauded the spending plans he has produced.
At a rally of about 5,000 people in Muenster, Germany, Merkel was flanked by German Parliamentary State Secretary Jens Spahn, a Schaeuble ally on the party’s right wing who has challenged Merkel’s more centrist positions.
Photo: Bloomberg
“Jens Spahn knows how much Wolfgang Schaeuble is derided for being ‘the man who can only think about the balanced budget,’” Merkel said in a campaign speech, before intoning her standard position on public debt as a burden on future generations.
“It would be the greatest form of injustice if we hand down ever bigger mountains of debt, so it’s right that we’ve pledged to generate no new debt over the next four years,” said Merkel, 63, who is seeking a fourth term in an election on Sept. 24.
Even as Merkel has been a target across southern Europe throughout the debt crisis for her insistence on austerity, fiscal discipline is a bedrock position within her CDU base. It is an issue that separates the chancellor from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which is calling for more government spending while not prioritizing balanced budgets.
Merkel is running on a pledge of maintaining the balanced budget achieved during her current coalition, which includes the Social Democrats as junior partner.
SPD challenger Martin Schulz this week, citing the latest surplus in tax receipts, demanded that more be spent on education, infrastructure and innovation.
Schulz, 61, opened up another front on the campaign on Tuesday, telling supporters that an SPD-led government would refuse to let the US base nuclear weapons in Germany.
At a campaign stop in Trier, Germany, near the French border, he also renewed his party’s attacks on US President Donald Trump for pressing Germany to boost defense spending.
Support for Merkel’s CDU-led bloc declined 1 percentage point to 38 percent, while support for the SPD rose 1 percentage point to 24 percent in a weekly Forsa poll published yesterday.
The two parties, Germany’s biggest, have governed together for eight of Merkel’s 12 years in office, including the past four.
The anti-capitalist Left and the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany parties polled at 9 percent each, the Free Democrats at 8 percent and the Greens at 7 percent, the Forsa poll showed.
The Forsa poll surveyed 2,501 people from Monday to Friday last week, and has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
In Muenster, a CDU-held city in Germany’s Westphalia region, Merkel addressed a relatively quiet crowd, a departure from several venues last week that featured jeering and whistling Alternative for Germany supporters.
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