Best
frenemies forever: Angela Merkel and Horst Seehofer
The
chancellor needs Bavarian support if she wants to win a third term
next year.
By JANOSCH DELCKER
9/30/16, 5:35 AM CET Updated 9/30/16, 7:34 AM CET
BERLIN — Joined at
the hip for 65 years, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and
Bavaria’s Christian Social Union are trapped in a love-hate
relationship with little affection on display recently.
That’s about to
change as the conservative allies gear up for next year’s federal
elections when they will face an unaccustomed challenge from an
upstart party on the far right that is appealing to the widespread
unhappiness with the German chancellor’s refugee policy.
A show of unity is
desperately needed. The trouble is: This is precisely where the CDU
and CSU disagree.
Support for the
Union, as the combined CDU/CSU are known, has plummeted to 33 percent
in opinion polls, down 10 percentage points from a year ago.
Meanwhile, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), has
climbed to record highs of 15 percent and now has seats in 10 of the
country’s 16 state assemblies. Certain to break into the Bundestag
next year, it has forced the conservatives to rethink their strategy.
Founded three years
ago as a protest party during the eurozone crisis, the AfD had only 3
percent support half-way through 2015. Then came the refugees,
enabling the tweedy Euroskeptics to rebrand themselves as an
ultra-conservative opposition force.
The rise of the AfD
has belatedly forced the CDU and CSU to bury the hatchet, in public
at least, after a year of recriminations over Merkel’s decision in
August 2016 to let in hundreds of thousands of refugees. After a
string of CDU state election losses, she came close enough to
contrition last week for the Bavarians, meeting in a monastery, to
moderate their tone.
What’s for sure is
that she will need the support of the CSU.
“Crucial issues
can only be solved between the chancellor and me — and this is what
we want to do,” CSU chief and Bavarian state premier Horst Seehofer
told the state assembly in Munich on Wednesday, slipping in just a
mention of the “bitter and difficult months” gone by.
When CDU and CSU
national lawmakers met in the Bundestag earlier this week, there was
a marked improvement in the atmosphere, according to one CDU official
who attended.
Although Merkel’s
aides emphasize that all the established parties have lost voters to
the AfD, they privately acknowledge that, for the first time in
Germany’s post-war history, a far-right party has managed to
establish itself to the right of the Union. This is the core of a
conflict between the CDU and CSU that Merkel can’t afford if she
wants a third term, though she dodges questions about whether she
will run.
What’s for sure is
that she will need the support of the CSU. Currently, 56 of the 310
seats of her conservative group in the Bundestag are held by the
Bavarians.
“We are the best
example that keeping the AfD at bay can work if we take the concerns
of citizens seriously,” said one CSU lawmaker in Munich, speaking
on condition of anonymity. In Bavaria, the CSU is polling at a
comfortable 45 percent, with AfD at around 9 percent.
It’s not that
Merkel spent the past year ignoring the demand of Seehofer and the
conservative wing of the CDU: She brokered the EU-Turkey refugee
deal, introduced tougher asylum laws, pushed for faster deportations,
campaigned for tighter protection on the EU’s external borders, and
denied free passage to refugees stranded in Greece before the deal
with Turkey took effect.
Instead, it was the
chancellor’s tone that annoyed the Bavarians. Refusing to adopt or
adapt far-right slogans to lure back voters from the AfD, she got CDU
general secretary Peter Tauber to repeat over and over that the CDU
was the “party of the political center.” It was enough for
Seehofer, whose party is traditionally more conservative than the
CDU, to see red.
German Chancellor
Angela Merkeljokes beside Horst Seehofer | Christof Stache/AFP via
Getty
German Chancellor
Angela Merkel jokes beside Horst Seehofer | Christof Stache/AFP via
Getty
His first salvo from
Bavaria was to invite Merkel’s most outspoken European opponent,
Hungarian Prime Minster Viktor Orbán, to a CSU party meeting. He
humiliated the chancellor when she was his guest at the CSU’s
annual conference in Munich; he accused her of imposing the “rule
of lawlessness;” and he threatened to sue her government in the
constitutional court.
Seehofer felt
vindicated when the CDU suffered in one state election after the
other, though some inside Merkel’s party blamed the constant
Bavarian sniping for the setbacks.
The chancellor’s
response was to use her party’s disastrous performance in Berlin’s
regional elections in mid-September to build bridges with the CSU,
while not quite admitting that her own refugee policy was to blame.
Using uncharacteristically emotive language, she said in a news
conference that she wished she could “turn back time by many, many
years, so that I could better prepare myself and the whole government
and all those in positions of responsibility for the situation that
caught us unprepared in the late summer of 2015.”
Then, earlier this
week, she told party colleagues during a meeting in the Bundestag she
would henceforth refrain from repeating the “We can do it” mantra
with which she had tried to rally the public behind her welcome for
the refugees. If these words annoyed her allies, she was prepared to
drop them, she was quoted as saying by one lawmaker who attended the
meeting.
Party colleagues say
Merkel remains convinced she did the right thing by granting safe
passage to refugees stranded in Hungary a year ago, and the gesture
is likely to secure the 62-year-old chancellor a place in the history
books. But from how until the 2017 election, the pragmatic former
physicist knows it is all about Realpolitik.
“Germany will
remain Germany with everything we hold dear,” she told parliament
in a speech in early September — a vague statement perfectly
tailored to the conservative party faithful, which could become the
motto of an election campaign likely to focus on domestic security, a
traditional strong suit of the CDU.
The ceasefire with
Seehofer will hold until the elections, but from that moment on
Merkel — or whoever is leading the CDU by then — should brace for
new attacks from the CSU prepares for its own Bavarian parliamentary
elections in 2018.
Authors:
Janosch Delcker
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