Germany Swings to the Center-Right

by Soeren Kern
German Chancellor Angela Merkel cruised to victory in federal elections on Sunday with enough votes to form a new center-right government with her preferred partner, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP). Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), won nearly 34 percent of the votes, according to preliminary returns. At the same time, the classical liberal FDP won nearly 15 percent of the votes, the party’s best showing ever. With a combined total of around 49 percent, the CDU/CSU and the FDP won a stable majority in Germany’s multiparty system. This will give Merkel the green light to ditch the awkward four-year-old “grand coalition” between the CDU/CSU and her party’s main rival, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), and replace it with a center-right CDU/CSU-FDP coalition. In fact, the SPD was by far the biggest loser on Sunday, winning only 23.5 percent of the votes, its worst performance since World War II. The result will cast the SPD into the opposition for the first time in 11 years. It will now work to rebuild itself and probably choose new leaders. During the campaign, Merkel repeatedly stressed that she wanted to govern with the business-friendly FDP, which has been out of power since 1998, in order to cut taxes in a bid to further revitalize a German economy that has been hit hard by the global recession.
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