2017 was expected to be Merkel’s toughest campaign yet: to start, it’s the year when Europe’s far-right populist parties, including the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), have sought to showcase their electoral strength amid a growing backlash against globalization and Europe’s refugee crisis. When Merkel announced her reelection bid last December, she did so battered by more than a year of tough criticism over her open-door policy toward refugees, and facing a certain degree of voter fatigue after hitting her 12th year in office.
And then came Merkel’s main challenger, Martin Schulz, a political “newcomer” from the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) initially lauded as a charismatic and effective contrast to Merkel. After Schulz entered the race in January, support for her party dropped into the low 30s, putting her dead even with the SPD for the first time in more than five years. The German political world was abuzz over the “Schulz effect”: the new candidate’s widespread appeal and ability to take on Merkel to give the country new blood in the chancellery. “We were getting a little bit afraid and uneasy at the beginning of the year when Martin Schulz was introduced as a candidate,” Peter Beyer, a member of the Bundestag from Merkel’s CDU, told me. “The polls were completely different … he was a star.” [...]
What’s more, since the SPD is currently serving in a “grand coalition” with the CDU in Germany’s parliament, Schulz has struggled to explain just how his party differs from Merkel’s and why voters should change the status quo for something that appears on its face relatively similar. “Because the Social Democrats are part of that coalition government, that is always a very difficult situation,” Alexander Mauss, a Berlin-based political pollster, told me. “You can’t really oppose the politics or the policy of the governing coalition because you are part of it.”
That challenge for Schulz was apparent in three state elections across Germany in the spring, all of which were seen as potential bellwethers for September, and all of which delivered victories for the CDU (and by extension for Merkel). In Saarland, a tiny western state along the French border that voted in March, Merkel’s party expected to face a tough challenge, but instead gained 5 points over its previous performance there. And in May, the CDU ousted SPD governments in both Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state and an SPD stronghold. “For us it was extremely good to learn that we are able to actually win again, elections on the Länder [state] level,” Beyer, who hails from North Rhine-Westphalia, said.
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