The conservative parties won the regional election in economically troubled North Rhine-Westphalia today, ending the almost 40 year rule of the Social Democrats. Turnout was high, up 10% to 60.5% from the last elction in 2000. The election results bring the CDU and its allies near the two-thirds parliamentary majorities necessary to block government legislation. FT:

Together with its Liberal Democratic ally, the CDU was estimated to have garnered 51.2 per cent of the votes, against 43.4 per cent for the SPD and its Green coalition partner, giving the opposition 98 seats in the 181-strong regional parliament…..

Although the poll will bring to 10 the number of Germany’s 16 Länder, or states, to be ruled by CDU-led governments, it will not give the party the two-thirds majority in the Bundesrat, or upper house, needed to block all government-initiated legislation. The opposition already controls the Bundesrat.

According to David Kaspar, the loss in NRW means that the last red-green state government has been booted out. Here is his chart on the vote:

In a surprise move, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder called for early elections. The Financial Times speculates that the SPD may run to the left, though that plan was a loser in the NRW election. In the run-up to today’s elction, SPD head Franz Müntefering assailed global capitalism, seeking to blame high joblessness in part on what he portrayed as unscrupulous business leaders and attacking financial investors he described as “locusts.” WSJ:

Mr. Muentefering told ZDF television that he and Schroeder would propose to party members that national elections, which were expected in the second half of 2006, were advanced by a year. “The chancellor and I have decided … to propose that we aim for parliamentary elections this fall,” Mr. Muentefering said. He added that “Schroeder is the chancellor and the candidate for chancellor.”

Mr. Muentefering cited the conservatives’ increased majority in the upper house of parliament, which represents Germany’s 16 states, following their victory Sunday. He said it was time to address a “structural stalemate” that has often forced the government to seek compromises to get legislation through the upper house. The party’s parliamentary manager, Wilhelm Schmidt, said the party would suggest holding a vote of no confidence in order to clear the way for early elections.

A jubilant Christian Democratic leader, Angela Merkel, celebrated her party’s “sensational result” and indicated that she was open to early elections. “Every day on which the red-green coalition doesn’t govern is a good day for Germany,” said Ms. Merkel, the front-runner to challenge Ms. Schroeder for the chancellorship.

Here are links to Merkel’s thumbnail bio and a sometimes humorous translation of the CDU website. The following is from a 2004 profile of Merkel by Richard Bernstein in the NYT:

Mrs. Merkel herself, though well ahead in the polls at the moment, does not formally admit to being a candidate for the chancellorship. But she has been increasingly visible in Germany, presenting herself as the person who can succeed where Mr. Schröder has so far failed, most important in reinvigorating the German economy and lowering the country’s persistent unemployment rate of about 10 percent.

”Coming from East Germany, I had the idea that I am part of a successful country and not a member of one of the weak countries of the world,” she said in a recent interview in her parliamentary office. ”So I have a strong will to change this situation and to bring Germany’s economic growth to the upper levels of Europe….We have made some progress,” she said, referring to legislation that she has supported to change Germany’s labor laws and cut on social security spending, ”but what counts is our speed relative to other countries.”

One of the striking aspects of Mrs. Merkel’s biography is that until German reunification she showed little interest in politics at all. She is no Vaclav Havel in this respect, the playwright whose anti-Communist dissent in the years before he became the Czech president earned him time in prison.

MRS. MERKEL was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in 1954 in Hamburg, in what was then West Germany, but her parents moved that year to Brandenburg in the East where her father, Hörst Kasner, took a post as minister in a Protestant church. The name Merkel comes from Mrs. Merkel’s first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1982. Still, while not active politically, Mrs. Merkel was ambitious and hard-working. She studied physics, receiving a Ph.D. in 1986 and pursuing a career at the Institute for Physical Chemistry at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin.

It was only in December 1989, after the Berlin Wall had fallen, that she joined Democratic Awakening, the coalition of pro-democracy parties in East Germany. She became the spokeswoman for Lothar de Maizière, the last leader of the German Democratic Republic before German reunification in 1990. Mrs. Merkel won a seat in Parliament in the first national postreunification election in 1991, becoming a cabinet minister just a year later. Then, in 1999, in the midst of a party financial scandal, she was elected chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union, with 96 percent of the delegates supporting her.

”Step by step, no risk and no mistakes, keeping everything under control — this is how Angela Merkel made her way from being an honest minister’s daughter to becoming a powerful politician,” said a recent article in the magazine Focus. ”In the beginning, things just fell into place; in the last few years, she’s been organizing her career according to plan.”

According to the profile, Merkel, an East German with a Ph.D. in physics, is not charismatic in the mode of Schroeder or Bill Clinton. However, Germany clearly needs more than back-slapping, dewy-eyed empathy, and sloganeering to deal with its persistent high unemployment (now 12% according to the WSJ), and anemic growth.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 22nd, 2005 at 11:56 am and is filed under EU, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.