Merkel Looks to Recharge Her Ratings - The New York Times
Europe|Merkel Government Sees Steep Drop in Ratings
Merkel Government Sees Steep Drop in Ratings
BERLIN  For a head of government barely nine months into a second term, Chancellor Angela Merkel faced an unusual question in her annual summer news conference on Wednesday: how much longer she expected to remain in charge.
The grilling Mrs. Merkel took from the news media in the capital was inspired by an opinion survey showing approval ratings for her governing coalition plunging to record lows among German voters after months of infighting and disagreement over unpopular budget cuts, health care changes and broken promises to reduce taxes.
“Right now it’s fun for me, and we’ll leave it at that,” Mrs. Merkel said of her job as chancellor, as reporters returned time and again to the government’s recent difficulties. “I decide step by step, and at the moment you can be quite certain that you will see me again after the vacation.”
For Mrs. Merkel, the summer vacation could not begin soon enough, but the future of her reign as chancellor could well be decided by how quickly the government can regain its footing when Parliament returns from its recess in September.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany faced the media before her annual summer news conference in Berlin on Wednesday. Credit...Hannibal Hanschke/Deutsche Presse-Agentur, via European Pressphoto Agency
Mrs. Merkel does not face a party-financing scandal, as does her French counterpart, President Nicolas Sarkozy, dealing with the fallout from claims of envelopes full of money in the so-called Bettencourt affair. And unlike President Obama, she can take heart from the fact that the unemployment rate here has fallen to lower levels than before the economic crisis began.
But the rebounding German economy has done little to bolster the fortunes of her struggling government. A poll released Wednesday by Forsa, the independent polling institute, found that the governing parties together mustered just 34 percent support, according to a representative sample of 2,500 Germans, compared with the more than 48 percent of the vote they received in last September’s election. The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
That was the lowest level for the conservative coalition since Forsa began regular surveys for the magazine Stern in 1986. In contrast, two left-wing opposition parties, the Social Democrats and the Greens, had climbed to 47 percent, potentially a large enough share of the vote to win a majority in Parliament if early elections were called. That is something Mrs. Merkel will do everything in her power to prevent.
Mrs. Merkel’s party has been plagued recently by a series of high-level departures. The head of the city-state of Hamburg, Ole von Beust, announced Sunday that he would step down, making him the sixth state premier from Mrs. Merkel’s party to resign over the past year. That followed the surprise resignation of President Horst Köhler in May.
While some, like his replacement as president, Christian Wulff, moved into new posts, Mr. von Beust joined the powerful state premiers in Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia in announcing his retirement.
Last week the left-wing parties there managed to form a tenuous minority government. As a result, Mrs. Merkel’s coalition lost its majority in the upper house of Parliament, which has to sign off on legislation passed by the Bundestag, or lower house, making it that much harder for her to win major legislative victories in the fall.
Putting the best face on her situation, Mrs. Merkel said that she was “quite certain” that her government would survive the next three years to see out the end of its term.
“I wouldn’t want to bet on that,” said Frank Decker, a professor at the Institute for Political Science and Sociology at the University of Bonn. But Mr. Decker said it was unlikely that Mrs. Merkel would face a serious challenge to her leadership this year, in part because so many of her rivals within the party had been sidelined in the recent string of retirements, resignations and personnel reshufflings.
“The impression that the government is completely at odds with itself, that all sides are working for themselves and not working together on common goals of government, is growing stronger in the populace,” Mr. Decker said.
Earlier this month the coalition agreed to raise health care premiums to reduce the growing deficit in Germany’s public health system, a move widely criticized here as little more than a stop-gap measure that would burden taxpayers and companies, rather than the kind of broad overhaul that was necessary for the rapidly aging German population.
Mrs. Merkel acknowledged at her news conference that the government had faced several “turbulent” months, including often furious disagreements over how to slice roughly $100 billion from the budget by 2014 as part of an austerity program she championed.
“Voters were displeased with the way we had been discussing things inside the coalition,” Mrs. Merkel conceded. “You can disagree on the issues, but the way that we disagreed was unacceptable.”
In her comments on Wednesday, Mrs. Merkel defended her government’s handling of the economic crisis, saying that the improvement in employment was viewed internationally as “a small miracle.” According to the polls, voters are not yet feeling reassured.
“The uncertainty is still there among the people that the crisis has not yet been overcome,” said Manfred Güllner, director of Forsa. “In such a situation one expects the government not to fight internally. But they’re only fighting.”