Michelle FITZPATRICK
Corruption allegations and a series of pandemic setbacks have plunged German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives into turmoil, just days before two regional polls kick off a key election year.
Support for Merkel’s CDU/CSU alliance has fallen to a one-year low at around 30 per cent, surveys show, as Germans sour on its pandemic crisis management.
“The corona bonus of the largest ruling party is melting away,” said the top-selling Bild daily.
Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats and their Bavarian CSU sister party are bracing for a drubbing on Sunday, when voters in Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Wuerttemberg states choose new regional parliaments.
Both ballots are seen as the first test of the national mood in what media have dubbed a “super election year” of several regional votes and a general election on September 26 — the first in over 15 years that will not feature Merkel.
Germany’s ruling coalition, made up of the CDU/CSU and their junior partner the Social Democrats (SPD), won praise for taming the first Covid-19 wave last spring, when the nation rallied behind former scientist Merkel’s virus measures.
Merkel’s own popularity soared and support for the CDU/CSU jumped to almost 40 per cent.
But a Covid resurgence in late 2020 proved more difficult to suppress. Frustration has grown after months of wearying shutdowns, and the country’s 16 federal states have increasingly gone their own way, leading to a patchwork of rules.
A scandal over the procurement of face masks early on in the pandemic has added to a toxic mix for the conservatives.
MASK SCANDAL
A CDU lawmaker and another from the CSU were forced to resign in recent days following accusations they pocketed hundreds of thousands of euros for acting as middlemen in mask contracts.
The apparent profiting from a crisis has triggered widespread outrage, giving the SPD and opposition parties ample ammunition ahead of Sunday’s polls.
In a move to clean house, the CDU/CSU alliance on Wednesday ordered all of its MPs to declare any financial benefits gained from the pandemic by Friday evening.
Senior CDU lawmaker Gitta Connemann said the alliance was facing its “biggest crisis” since a slush-fund controversy in the 1990s that damaged former chancellor Helmut Kohl’s reputation. The revelations come on top of mounting public anger over the sluggish pace of Germany’s Covid vaccinations, held up by distribution problems and red tape. — AFP
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