According to Der Tagesspiegel on Thursday, 20 percent of Germans are considering voting for the center-right CDU/CSU for the first time in this year’s elections. Why? For 19.1 percent of Green Party and 11 percent of SDP voters considering the switch, the reason is the woman known as Mutti.
With a center-left SDP that many think has no chance of winning even by forming a coalition, a rising far-right, a populist far-left, and identity as the central issue for German politics and people, for many, Merkel is not one more choice. She’s the only choice.
Left-leaning Germans aren’t running down the street proclaiming their allegiance to a woman whose party they’ve long opposed. Raphael Peter, a young German in Marburg, says that even though he considers Merkel “the one chance we have,” he still won’t vote for her, though he understands why other left-leaning voters would. “Many are disappointed with the Social Democrats, the Green Party is caught up in discussions on how to react, the Liberal Party is trying to reinvent themselves, and the Left Party is torn apart to some extent,” he explained to Foreign Policy. But he still isn’t sure how he, as a left-leaning German, should vote. [...]
Indeed, the chance for a coalition — and the structure of the German political system — is one reason that Merkel has gained support from the center left. Some voters see her as having moved the party more to the middle. And while that means she’s facing the threat of defection from the Christian Social Union — Bavaria’s variant of the CDU, more conservative and arguably nativist than the CDU — it also means she’s made the CDU a more palatable option for those who couldn’t imagine voting for it 10 years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment