BERLIN — Nontraditional and upstart political parties are threatening established, centrist parties across Europe, as returns from the European Parliament election underscored this week. Their rise is eating away at an increasingly endangered political establishment.
Adding to the uncertainty is a generational divide clearly visible in the voting, in which the Greens drew significant support from younger voters.
Germany is no exception.
A national election is not scheduled until 2021, and Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she intends to serve out her full term. But in the aftermath of the European vote, the two parties in Germany’s governing coalition are frustrated and weakened, and speculation is rising over how long their unpopular government can last.
Support for both the chancellor’s conservative party and its center-left partners declined in the election. The chancellor’s party, the Christian Democrats, lost five seats, earning only 28.9 percent of the vote. Their partners, the Social Democrats, endured their worst national showing ever, with support from only 15.8 percent of the voters.
The Greens pushed the Social Democrats into third place in Germany. They finished behind the Christian Democrats, with 20.5 percent of the vote, and drew large numbers of voters in western and urban areas, as well as younger people who think the conservatives have failed to uphold their commitments to international climate accords.
The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won slightly less than 11 percent of the vote, a little less than its showing in 2017 national elections. Nevertheless, the party emerged on top in Brandenburg and Saxony, both states in the former Communist East Germany, which are currently governed by one of the traditional, centrist parties. Both states will elect new governments in September.
The result is a political conundrum that has left both Ms. Merkel’s party and its center-left partner unhappy with their roles in the centrist government, known as the grand coalition. They agreed to the partnership in March 2018, though only after other governing options failed to materialize. Neither party is well positioned to head into a snap general election, vulnerable from the left by the Greens and from the right by Alternative for Germany.
“The weakness of the traditional parties of the center is simultaneously making the end of the grand coalition more and less likely,” said Marcel Dirsus, a fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. “More likely because an increasing number of people in the parties believe that things just keep getting worse over time. Less likely because ending the grand coalition right now might mean things get a whole lot worse very quickly.”
Ms. Merkel remained surprisingly absent from the discussions about the European election results. Her first comments came in an interview with CNN that was released Tuesday, two days before she was to travel to the United States to receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard University and give the commencement speech to the class of 2019.
In the wide-ranging interview, she did not try to hide her differences with President Trump, whom she had welcomed into office with a blunt reminder of the “common values” of democracy and respect for the dignity of others, saying, “He has his opinions, I have mine.”
The best way to fight Europe’s populists, the chancellor said in the CNN interview, is to show “why we are for democracy, why we try to bring about solutions, why we always have to put ourselves into the other person’s shoes, why we stand up against intolerance, why we show no tolerance toward violations of human rights.”
The Greens’ strong performance, she conceded, poses “a challenge now” to her own party, which has struggled to reduce Germany’s use of coal and continued to champion the combustion engine in the face of attempts by Brussels to limit emissions.
Recent comments by Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who replaced Ms. Merkel as the Christian Democrats’ leader last year, have not helped, either. She has come under fire for comments viewed as seeking to rein in the internet, after the fallout of a video by a German YouTuber known as Rezo, who urged the country’s youth to abandon the Christian Democrats because, he argued, their policies are harmful to young people and will endanger their future.
Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer criticized the video in a news conference on Monday, dismissing it as “spin” in the run-up to the election.
She insisted that her party would take the offensive on what rules should be applied to the digital sphere, which brought criticism from journalists and digital rights activists, who said her remarks were tantamount to suggesting limits on free speech.
It was the latest blunder for the conservative’s new leader, who has been seen as the chancellor’s likely successor, but whose popularity has dipped in recent months. Questions have been raised about who might replace Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer, Ms. Merkel’s chosen heir, if she were to be forced out as party leader.
The conservative party’s leaders are meeting behind closed doors on Sunday and Monday, which has unleashed speculation in the German news media over whether it could spell the end for Ms. Merkel’s chancellorship. She has sought to suppress such speculation, insisting she plans to serve out her term, but the poor election showing has only fueled the uncertainty.
Andrea Nahles, the head of the Social Democrats, also faces mounting pressure to step aside after her party suffered dual defeats, both in the European vote and in losing control of the country’s smallest state, Bremen, for the first time in more than seven decades, in an election held on Sunday.
It was the latest failure for the center-left party, which has struggled to define itself since it first entered into a coalition with Ms. Merkel’s party in 2005. Since then, with the exception of four years spent in the opposition, from 2013 to 2017, its political profile has been weakened by compromises that led to diminished support.
Some of the party’s more left-wing members believe that the only way for the party to win back voters would be to quit the coalition with the conservatives.
But a call this month by the leader of party’s youth wing, Kevin Kühnert, to consider collectivizing large companies — he named the automaker BMW — and permitting people to own only the apartment in which they live, appeared to do little to attract voters last weekend, raising questions about whether leaving the governing coalition would help.
“They can’t succeed in asking the right questions and raising the right issues,” said Emanuel Richter, a professor of political science at Aachen University, who thinks the Social Democrats will use their position in government to move into election mode. “It’s not long until 2021.”
Source : Nytimes
