What Merkel’s Campaign Stops Say About Her Plan to Beat Schulz
What Merkel’s Campaign Stops Say About Her Plan to Beat Schulz
(Bloomberg) -- As Chancellor Angela Merkel crisscrosses Germany during the final weeks of election campaigning, she’s scarcely setting a foot outside areas where her Christian Democratic-led bloc topped the poll four years ago.
Of her 50 scheduled campaign stops, 47 are in districts where the Christian Democratic Union or its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union, led on the decisive proportional vote last time, according to a Bloomberg analysis of the results. Germans have two votes in Bundestag elections: the first for a directly elected local candidate and the second that determines the overall national seat shareout.
Graphic: How Germany Forms a Government
Merkel made visits this month to Dortmund and Bremen, where the Social Democrats were ahead in 2013. But between now and election day on Sept. 24, she’s venturing only once into largely opposition territory for a rally, in Germany’s second city, Hamburg, where the Social Democrats came in first in four of the six seats.
Unlike in Britain, where Prime Minister Theresa May spent this year’s election campaign making regular forays into opposition-held swing seats in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to boost her majority, the key to the German election is vote share. And so the Merkel strategy appears to be all about replicating the experience of 2013, when her bloc took 41.5 percent of the vote, its best result since 1990, and came very close to being able to govern without a coalition.
Recent polls show the CDU and CSU on or just below the 40 percent mark, though with two more parties looking set to take seats in the Bundestag this year, Merkel will be further away from a majority.
The chancellor’s bloc topped the poll in 260 of the 299 voting districts last time round, including a clean sweep in nine of the country’s 16 states.
Among the districts Merkel’s helicopter touched down in this campaign was Cloppenburg in northwest Germany, where in 2013 the CDU took 63.2 percent of the vote—the highest share for any party, anywhere. In September, the chancellor’s in Lingen in the Mittelems district, another CDU hotspot in the same region.
She’s not holding any rallies, though, in Berlin; the CDU’s six worst performances last time were in six of the capital’s 12 constituencies (though it did much better in the western half of the city). And apart from Dortmund, cities in western Germany’s Social Democrat-leaning former industrial heartland won’t see the chancellor live.
While many of Merkel’s rallies are in medium-sized towns, her main opponent, Social Democrat leader Martin Schulz, is pursuing a different strategy. He’s concentrating his appearances in Germany’s main population centers, visiting 19 of the 30 largest, compared with just eight for the chancellor. The idea appears clear—to galvanize an apparently dormant urban SPD vote.
While the Social Democrats trailed the CDU or CSU on second votes in places like Frankfurt, Munich and Nuremberg in 2013, they have a strong local base in these and smaller cities. The mayors of all three come from the SPD. Social Democrat mayors also run eastern cities like Leipzig, Magdeburg and Erfurt where the party trailed in third place behind the CDU and the Left in 2013. Schulz is speaking in all these places and more, often on the main square.
Whatever the Schulz or Merkel strategy, there’s another notable difference from Theresa May’s campaign. The British premier would generally show up somewhere like Leeds in northern England for a carefully choreographed meeting with local Conservative activists that was kept under wraps until it was actually happening; she rarely met real voters.
By contrast, the German contenders’ calendars are fully public, with precise locations and timings. And that can backfire; at a couple of her earliest rallies in this cycle, the chancellor found herself jeered by dozens of supporters of the populist Alternative for Germany party protesting her open-doors policy toward refugees.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Alan Crawford at acrawford6@bloomberg.net, Tony Czuczka