German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s embattled challenger warned of social injustice and unrest if her coalition of choice wins today’s poll and predicted its lead would vanish on election night.
Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier urged Germans to vote to put his Social Democrats back in government and scupper Merkel’s favored center-right alliance.
“The union is getting more nervous by the day,” Steinmeier told a crowd estimated at 10,000 people at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, referring to Merkel’s conservatives.
PHOTO: AFP
“The big lead they had has melted like ice in the sunshine. We will keep fighting for every vote until the last second on Sunday at 6pm” when the polling stations close, he said.
Merkel, seen as a shoo-in to be re-elected as chancellor, currently governs in an unwieldy “grand coalition” between her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Steinmeier’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).
She aims to dump the SPD and link up with the smaller, pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), which advocate slashing taxes and extending a deadline to close all of Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants.
Her favored center-right coalition had a strong lead in the polls until early this month and would have to scrape to form a ruling majority, the latest surveys showed. If it comes up short, the most likely option is another grand coalition.
Steinmeier warned that voters who saw Merkel as a moderate would be in for a rude awakening with a CDU-FDP government.
“You will see clear-cutting of the social welfare system,” he said, forecasting weaker worker protection laws, the elimination of hard-fought sector-wide wage agreements and the expansion of temporary jobs at the expense of permanent ones.
“That will mean fewer qualified workers and more joblessness,” he said.
Steinmeier predicted a return to the at times violent mass demonstrations against nuclear power if Germany went back on its pledge to close its reactors by 2020, and an end to the “principle of solidarity” if the FDP were able to claim the health ministry.
He said the SPD had kept Merkel on the straight and narrow during the economic crisis by fighting to protect jobs with policies such as a “cash-for-clunkers” scheme to prop up the auto industry.
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