Merkel’s Bavarian frenemies cause coalition trouble

Before Jamaica, Angela Merkel needs to take care of Bavaria.

کد خبر: ۷۳۳۸۵۲

تاریخ: ۰۵ مهر ۱۳۹۶ - ۰۸:۳۵

After Germany’s chancellor secured a fourth term on Sunday, her conservative allies from the southern state — who are often her harshest critics — have turned hard-line demands into conditions for taking part in Merkel’s next government.

That will make it more difficult to seal a deal between Merkel’s conservative bloc, the liberal Free Democrats and the environmentalist Greens for a "Jamaica coalition” — so-called because the parties’ colors match those of the Caribbean nation’s flag.

The underlying message from Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU), the sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats, is clear: When everyone sits down for coalition talks, the chancellor will find some of her toughest opponents within her own camp.

"There must be a clear upper limit of refugees in Germany,” Joachim Herrmann, the CSU’s lead candidate in the election, said Tuesday, reviving a two-year-old demand to cap the number of people granted asylum in Germany each year — a demand that has always been opposed strongly by the chancellor and has also been rejected by the FDP and the Greens.

"This needs to be discussed with our coalition partners, but the CSU is not willing to do without it,” Herrmann said.

The Bavarians blame the lack of a clear-cut conservative profile under Merkel’s leadership for a slump in their vote on Sunday — the second-worst result in their history.

Although Merkel’s CDU/CSU alliance came first on Sunday with 33 percent of the vote, they were down more than eight percentage points on their 2013 result and lost more than a million votes to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which became the first far-right party to win seats in the German parliament since World War II.

"Right-wing populists and extremists are entering the German parliament,” CSU deputy party chief Manfred Weber, the leader of the European People’s Party group in the European Parliament, said in a video message on Twitter. To respond, Weber argued, "there needs to be an upper limit to the number of refugees in Germany.”

A senior CSU official in the Bavarian state parliament in Munich said the party was acting no differently than other potential coalition partners.

"The Greens say climate protection is not negotiable, the FDP says they won’t go along with cross-subsidies in the European Union,” the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told POLITICO. "But when we come up with a red line, everyone goes ‘Oh, the Bavarians again.’”
Southern discomfort

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the CSU, led by Bavarian premier Horst Seehofer, are two separate parties but they traditionally form a single parliamentary group in the Bundestag. They have a long history of close cooperation laced with bitter disputes.

While CDU candidates stand for election in 15 of Germany’s 16 states, the CSU fields candidates only in Bavaria.

In a joint history going back almost 70 years, few things have led to as much tension between the two sister parties as Merkel’s controversial decision to temporarily open Germany’s borders to refugees stranded in Hungary during the 2015 refugee crisis.

The two parties called a truce on the issue for the duration of the general election campaign — on the understanding that Merkel would be willing to push through some Bavarian demands after the vote.

Now the time has come to cash that check, the CSU believes.

"If you promise your girlfriend you’ll always be faithful,” another CSU official said privately, "and then, once you’re married, you tell her that, ‘You know, in life, you have to be willing to compromise,’ that won’t go down well.”

Such metaphors, from inside the CSU-dominated state parliament in Munich, suggest that the wounded Bavarians will be among the most unpredictable and dangerous factors for Merkel during the coalition talks.

With "Jamaica” apparently the only even half-way viable coalition after Sunday’s election, both the Greens and FDP have sent signals they are willing to take this option seriously despite their differences — with each other and with Merkel’s CDU.

CSU officials in Munich have taken note of this apparent rapprochement and are concerned that Merkel’s CDU leadership in Berlin could already be promising concessions to the FDP and the Greens while ignoring conservative demands from Bavaria.
Campaign continues

That would be the last thing the CSU needs with another election on the horizon — a poll even more important to the party than Sunday’s national vote. Next year, likely in the fall, Bavaria will elect a new regional parliament.

With one rare exception, the CSU has held more than half the seats in the state assembly since the early 1960s. Maintaining this hegemony next year is crucial to the party.

That’s why pressure has been mounting on party chief Seehofer since Sunday’s election, in which the far-right AfD won 12.4 percent of the vote in Bavaria and the CSU lost more than 10 percentage points on its 2013 result. On Tuesday, a member of the Bavarian state parliament openly demanded his resignation.

The 68-year-old Seehofer, one of Germany’s most experienced politicians, has reacted by trying to shift much of the blame to Berlin.

During the first meeting of the new CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag on Tuesday, he won applause by saying that the conservatives must not carry on as usual after Sunday’s election and the center-right bloc had to become a home for deeply conservative voters again, according to the DPA news agency.

The German election campaign may have ended on Sunday, but the Bavarian campaign has just begun — for concessions from Merkel in the coalition talks, and for another absolute majority in the state parliament next year.