German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition faced a renewed setback with a resounding defeat in a state election and its main ally wavering over support for the government.
Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) plummeted nearly 12 percentage points from 2014 to 21.8 percent in an election for state assembly in the eastern state of Thuringia, according to preliminary results published early yesterday.
At the same time, the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party more than doubled its standing and marginally beat the CDU at 23.4 percent.
The Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel’s junior coalition partner, also lost ground, shedding about 4 percentage points to 8.2 percent.
As a result, the incumbent Left party, which won the election with 31 percent, would no longer have sufficient support to govern Thuringia with its current alliance that also includes the Greens.
The result in the eastern German state reflects the increasingly splintered political spectrum in Germany, where traditional centrist parties have been losing steadily.
The refugee crisis, climate protests, and more recently an economic slowdown and geopolitical tension in Europe’s backyard have fueled rifts among and even within political parties.
“Since 1949, we have not had such a result, where the parties of the democratic center in Germany are unable to form a government,” CDU candidate Mike Mohring told reporters in Erfurt on Sunday night. “This is a really bitter result.”
It is the latest sign of trouble for Merkel in the twilight of her chancellorship. Europe’s largest economy has slowed sharply and is forecast to rise only 0.5 percent this year, from 2.5 percent two years ago.
At the same time, her designated successor, Minister of Defense Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer has failed to gain traction in her party, while repeatedly stumbling as she seeks to win back voters from the far-right.
Kramp-Karrenbauer, who replaced Merkel as chief of the CDU late last year, fueled animosity in the coalition when she proposed a peacekeeping force for northern Syria involving German troops without consulting the SPD.
“Given the strong showing by the far right, the CDU debate about the best path into the post-Merkel world is set to continue,” Carsten Nickel, analyst at Teneo Intelligence in London, wrote in a research note.
On Saturday, the SPD failed to end months of debate over whether to leave government. Minister of Finance Olaf Scholz, the only candidate who unequivocally backed staying in government, won a first-round party leadership ballot, but had only a narrow margin over the runner-up.
Taken together, various candidates of the leftist camp that favor easing Germany’s fiscal rigor and exiting the coalition got more than half of the vote, versus Scholz’s 22.7 percent. The run-off vote is scheduled to conclude on Nov. 30 and the party is to decide in December whether to stay in the coalition.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
RSS