Germany’s main opposition party piled pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday over a scandal dogging her handpicked candidate for president, calling for new elections if he were to step down. As new revelations emerge almost daily about Christian Wulff, 52, and a home loan affair that has dominated the country’s media for weeks, a senior member of the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) sought to shift the heat onto Merkel.
The party’s secretary general, Andrea Nahles, told the Bild am Sonntag weekly: “If Wulff resigns, then there should be new elections … the Wulff affair is also a Merkel affair.”
“Christian Wulff is not up to the office of federal president. Staying in office, no matter what happens? That behaviour is not acceptable … I have serious doubts that he will survive this affair,” added Nahles.
\The SPD’s parliamentary group leader, former foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, also chimed in, noting Merkel had pushed through Wulff’s election to the largely ceremonial post in 2010.
“She cannot just act as if she has nothing to do with this whole affair and as if the federal president is in a different political sphere,” Steinmeier told Sunday’s edition of the Tagesspiegel.
