BERLIN – German Chancellor Angela Merkel braced for a bitter setback Sunday as voters in a state her party has ruled for half a century headed to the polls in an election clouded by events in Japan.
Merkel’s conservatives have ruled Baden-Wuerttemberg in southwestern Germany since 1953, but anger over her nuclear policy as well as decisions on Libya and the euro suggest voters could turf her Christian Democrats (CDU) out of power.
A poll released Friday indicated a potential coalition of Social Democrats and the resurgent Greens were poised to unseat Merkel’s CDU and their coalition partner, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP). The independent TNS Emnid institute survey showed the opposition could win 48 percent of the vote in a state that is home to industrial giants Daimler and Porsche, versus 43 percent for state premier Stefan Mappus’s ruling alliance.
This would mark a debacle for Merkel, 56, after drubbings in North Rhine-Westphalia in May and Hamburg in February, with three more state polls to come this year. “The election day that is making black-yellow tremble,” ran a headline in mass circulation Bild am Sonntag, referring to the colours of Merkel’s coalition.
Beyond a crushing blow to morale in Berlin, a defeat could make it even harder for Merkel to pass legislation in the Bundesrat upper house of parliament and prompt fresh calls for her to shore up her rightist credentials. “Losing power in Baden-Wuerttemberg would be the worst defeat yet for Merkel as party leader,” wrote the weekly Die Zeit.
Recent campaigning in the state has been dominated by the nuclear catastrophe in Japan, where officials Sunday discovered high radiation levels in water leaked from a stricken reactor at the Fukushima plant. Calling Japan’s crisis a “turning point”, Merkel suspended for three months an earlier decision to extend the lifetime of Germany’s nuclear reactors. Four of them are based in Baden-Wuerttemberg.
She also temporarily shut off the seven oldest reactors pending a safety review. Nuclear power is unpopular in Germany, but polls indicated that voters saw Merkel’s zigzagging as an electoral ploy: it has cost her support while boosting the anti-nuclear Green party.
An Emnid poll Sunday in the Bild am Sonntag suggested the Greens were flying high at a national level, gaining two percentage points to 20 percent.
