Huge setback for Angela Merkel and her CDU party. Baden-Wurttemberg had been a Christian Democrat bastion since 1953, and now it looks like it will be getting Green state minister. The chancellor made several strategic blunders ahead of the election:
Angela Merkel will share the blame for her Christian Democrats' election rout in the German conservative heartland despite her government's bid to portray itself as hapless victim of events in Japan and Libya.
Merkel handed the Greens victory in Baden-Wuerttemberg with her mishandling of the nuclear issue, likely resulting in the humiliation of the Greens installing their first state premier on CDU turf; but it is unlikely to cost the chancellor her job.
This is the "beginning of the end" of Angela Merkel's chancellery. as Jakob Augstein points out in Der Spiegel ( A Chacellor Made of Pudding, Not Iron).
She is much diminished at home – even from within her own party. Ex-CDU defence minister Volker Ruehe was quoted on the cover of the conservative Welt am Sonntag newspaper as saying that abstaining on Libya was a "serious mistake of historic dimensions".
And she is much diminished on the world stage. The decision to abstain from a humanitarian intervention in Libya – playing to the pacifism of the German electorate – was seen as an act of betrayal by Germany's allies. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a member of the European Parliament, made this comment in a Huffington Post interview:
"Angela Merkel is Germany's great disappointment. She has no political orientation. She is a callous strategist, and obviously not very good at it. She has a tendency to change things around right before elections are coming up. She denied support for Greece because there were federal state elections in North-Rhine-Westphalia lying ahead, then she switched on nuclear energy as a result of a defeat in the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, and now she is playing the great pacifist with her foreign minister. It shows you very well that she is a technician of political power, but the spine is missing."
Perhaps most damning of all was the criticism leveled at her by the rebels in Libya:
Am Rande des Freitagsgebets in der ostlibyschen Hafenstadt Bengasi kommt es immer wieder zu Sprechchören, die sich sehr kritisch mit der deutschen Enthaltung im Uno-Sicherheitsrat zur internationalen Militäraktion in Libyen beschäftigen. "Kanzlerin Merkel sollte sich schämen", skandierten Gruppen von Männern, "Deutschland hat uns im Stich gelassen". SPIEGEL-ONLINE-Reporter Matthias Gebauer und andere deutsche Reporter wurden immer wieder und teils aggressiv aufgefordert, die deutsche Regierung scharf für ihre Position zu kritisieren. "Frau Merkel sollte wissen, wie wichtig die Freiheit ist", schrie ein älterer Mann, "der Fall der Mauer wurde auch massiv vom Ausland unterstützt". Nun aber habe Deutschland die Libyer allein gelassen.
(At the edge of the Friday prayer in the East Libyan port city of Benghazi people voiced their views on Germany's abstention vote in the UN Security Council with respect to military intervention in Libya. "Chancellor Merkel should be ashamed," said one group of men, "Germany has abandoned us." Spiegel Online reporter Matthias Gebauer and other German reporters were again and again – sometimes aggressively – called to account for the position of the German government. "Frau Merkel should know how important freedom is," cried an older man, "the fall of the Berlin Wall was also massively supported by foreign nations." But now Germany has abandoned the Libyan people.)
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“Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a member of the European Parliament, made this comment in a Huffington Post interview: …”
A politician of a rival German party, B’90/die Grünen, doesn’t agree with Merkels politics?
I’m shocked, shocked!
Btw.: Must have slept through to those bombing runs against Honecker. I don’t even know who to thank anymore, Hasselhoff for singing the wall down, Reagon for talking it down or was it the entire west with their niece speeches. Massively supported? In what Universe exactly?
I really do wonder how you and those “rebels” would have reacted if Germany had actually said no.
It seems that the voters yesterday were not so happy with the “appeasement chancellor” nor her “Prince of Peace” Westerwelle.
As I mentioned in my post, some of the harshest critics of Merkel’s Libya decision were from within her own party.
Yet there’s two years to go for Madame, maybe there will be the right war at the right time for her.
“You can’t always get what you want but if you trie some time you’ll sometimes find what you need.” M.Jagger
@Strahler,
What is your take on the elections yesterday? The biggest loser seems to be Die Linke. But I don’t know what expectations they had, if any in conservative BW.
David you do realize that firstly this was about regional votes first and foremost, secondly that the CDU is still strongest party by far in Ba-Wü, and those lost votes are more about Mappus then Merkel, and has actually won votes in Rein.-Pfalz, right?
And those harsh critics from within her own party are just trying to improve their own profile, come on you know how that works.
It seems to me that the voters aren’t actually all that displeased with our chancellor.
I’m just curios on what side of the Iraq question were you on again?
In both of the states the Left faced minor losses, in deed the biggest losers have been the liberals from the FDP. In B-W many who would have voted for the Left before decided to vote for the Greens in order to kick out MP Mappus.
Nice to see Germany abstaining from the ongoing revival of imperialism/fascism.
The libyan “rebels” are the old Al Quaida cadres from Afghanistan and Algeria. Besides the islamists, there are the tribal rednecks who have already killed many black people in their “noble” uprising. The western intervention will in the long run only bring down these western neo-fascist regimes, the truth can not be hidden for long nowadays.
Frau Merkel really did all she could with the at least temporary shutdown of german nuclear reactors, otherwise it would have been much worse for her in these elections.
The Mr. Cohn-Bendit you cited is an ugly bigmouth representing the worst aspects of the german greens: a strong right-wing tilt which, when you get to see its proponents in real life, is actually the closest mimicking of many old Nazi ideas yet.
I have been watching Al Jazeera English and there is widespread support for the international intervention in Libya on the Arab street – just the opposite of the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Most of the world appreciates that a bloodbath was averted by the multilateral action. The biggest critics are the Tea Party Jihadists in the US and the German Left – blinded by reflexive hatred of America.
In my case, it’s not a reflexive hatred of America – I deeply distrust France, reject their military leadership in the WEU. Said that before, won’t repeat the reasons here.
Besides, Emil: There is no Al Qaeda, that’s a fiction invented by G.W.Bush.
@David:
Does calling the Tea Party ‘Jihadist’ mean that they are a peaceful movement dedicated to introspection and self-improvement? If not, why would you use that word, Jihadist? Is Jihad a bad thing? Isn’t that perpetuating Islamophobia?