German election battleground moves to TV studio
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and conservative challenger Angela Merkel square off today in a live televised debate – a crucial encounter that gives both candidates a chance to impress undecided voters two weeks before Germany’s September 18 election.
The 90-minute debate, being broadcast on four channels during prime time, offers the beleaguered Schroeder an opportunity to showcase his strong television skills amid polls giving Merkel’s Christian Democrats a double-digit advantage over Schroeder’s Social Democrats.
Televised debates between incumbent and challenger were held for the first time in Germany before the last election, in 2002. Schroeder was helped by a strong performance against then-challenger Edmund Stoiber, during which he drove home his opposition to a possible war in Iraq.
Although Merkel’s party has a strong lead this time, it is less clear whether it and the pro-business Free Democrats will muster enough votes to form her preferred coalition. If they fall short, Merkel could be forced into a so-called “grand coalition” with Schroeder’s party.
“A shift that leads to a grand coalition after election day is certainly possible” as a result of today’s debate, Manfred Guellner, the head of the Forsa polling agency, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
Schroeder himself appeared keen to play down the encounter, telling the Bonn daily Generalanzeiger that “we should not elevate this debate to a special level”.
Schroeder, who still has an edge in personal popularity over Merkel, will be hard pressed to exceed expectations in the debate.
A poll released on Friday found 48% expecting the chancellor to be the better performer, with only 11% forecasting that Merkel would emerge the winner and 34 percent predicting no major difference.
But the same poll, by the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen institute, put support for the Christian Democrats at 43%, with the Free Democrats on 7% – a combined 50% of the vote.
It found Schroeder’s Social Democrats languishing on 32%, with their coalition partner, the Greens, at 7% and the Left Party, an alliance of ex-communists and former Social Democrats disgruntled by Schroeder’s welfare state reforms at 8%. The poll of 1,305 people gave a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
Sunday’s debate is the only one-on-one encounter of the campaign. There were two debates in 2002, but Merkel argued that this year’s short campaign left time for only one – a proposal that both sides approved after lengthy wrangling.
Three years ago, the looming Iraq war and Schroeder’s decisive handling of floods in eastern Germany helped him to a narrow win. But this time, Schroeder’s party has yet to find an issue that resonates with voters.
Schroeder, who called for the vote a year ahead of schedule after his party suffered a crushing state election defeat in May, has accused Merkel’s conservatives of pursuing a “cold” society in which workers’ rights would be attacked.
Merkel has centred her campaign firmly on the German economy’s stagnation and the country’s persistently high unemployment rate – currently 11.4%.
