Angela Merkel took the stage at an election rally to the sound of 1980s rock anthem “Burning Heart” by Survivor.
The song was both incongruous and apt. Flaming passion is not part of the German chancellor’s political style but Sunday’s regional election in the western state of Hesse will go a long way to determining her political survival.
After her party fell short of expectations in last year’s general election and Merkel struggled to form a government, the veteran chancellor has presided over a coalition beset by infighting that has lost popularity.
Following a big drop in support for her Bavarian allies in a state election earlier this month, a poor result for her Christian Democrats (CDU) in Hesse would increase unease in the party and raise questions over whether she will seek another term as CDU leader.
The result in Hesse — home to Germany’s financial capital Frankfurt — may also raise the pressure on Merkel’s floundering junior coalition partners, the Social Democrats (SPD), to pull out of government. And it provides an opportunity for the Greens to capitalize further on their surge in support in recent months.
Rather than trying to keep her distance from the Hesse election, Merkel has thrown herself into the campaign to reelect CDU state premier Volker Bouffier. She even took the highly unusual step for a German chancellor of hitting the phones to drum up support for Bouffier, a close ally and supporter of her centrist course.
Thursday’s rally in the town of Fulda, in the north of the affluent state, was her fourth campaign appearance alongside Bouffier, who leads a coalition government of Christian Democrats and Greens.
“This is about you, above all about you,” Merkel said in a feisty speech to around 1,000 party supporters at a sports hall in Fulda. “So go out and talk to people, perhaps even let yourself be insulted a bit, and tell them nevertheless: ‘Think about it!’”
Opinion polls forecast the CDU will suffer badly on Sunday, dropping 12 percentage points on their 2013 result to an expected 26 percent share of the vote.
The polls also suggest it will be impossible for any two-party coalition to form a majority government in Hesse, with the CDU’s nearest rivals — the Social Democrats and the Greens — tied at around 21 percent.
That would leave two options: Bouffier gets the Greens back on board for another term and pulls in the liberal Free Democrats, or the ecologists, SPD and far-left Die Linke team up to take power.
Danger signs
Bouffier, who remains personally popular in Hesse after eight years in charge and two decades in local politics, is using the campaign to warn against a coalition of the left. His slogan “Hesse stays strong” puts the chips on maintaining the status quo.
Merkel said the “danger” of a Green, SPD and Die Linke government “is no longer a fairytale,” adding that “it’s a possibility we must prevent on Sunday.”
Such an outcome would be dangerous for Merkel personally. The CDU holds a party congress in December, at which Merkel is expected to run for another two-year term as party leader, taking her stewardship of the CDU to two decades.
“Bouffier is one of Merkel’s last allies,” said Alexander Kritikos, research director at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. “If they are not able to continue the coalition with the Greens, there will be a stronger discussion of when and how to replace her.”
Even beyond the skyscrapers of Frankfurt, Hesse is a prosperous state with unemployment below the national average at 4.4 percent. Forests and hills cover much of the region of just over 6 million.
Here, national scraps on migration policy are part of the political debate alongside housing shortages and booming rents — and a court ruling that mandates diesel car bans in the country’s commuting capital Frankfurt next year.
The far-right Alternative for Germany is set to complete a sweep of regional parliaments by entering Hesse’s legislature for the first time on Sunday. But the big question is who can win the support of mainstream voters fed up with the CDU and SPD.
The Social Democrats, once a dominant force in Hessian politics, are polling 9 percent down on their last result in 2013. Some in the SPD are pressing for leadership to pull out of the ruling coalition at federal level. National SPD leader Andrea Nahles is under pressure but many voters say their main complaint is that they don’t know what the party stands for.
“The Social Democrats have no concept,” said Thorsten Schwindt, a factory worker from Maintal on the Main river, in the Moseleck pub near Frankfurt’s main train station. “It’s not the people, it’s the party.”
Green dreams
Such confusion creates space for another party to fill the void on the center left and the Greens are well-placed to move in. Hesse, a hotbed for anti-establishment protest in the 1960s, is where the Greens first secured regional representation in the 1980s.
In 1985, Joschka Fischer was sworn in as environment minister in the state capital Wiesbaden wearing trainers — a scandal in local politics at the time. But the Greens became part of the mainstream and Fischer served seven years as Germany’s foreign minister.
Now, after securing second place in the Bavarian poll two weeks ago, the Greens are eager to take another step forward in Hesse.
“They are becoming the new popular party but the interesting point is that they are in the center, they gained as many votes in Bavaria from the CSU [conservative Christian Social Union] as they did from the SPD,” said Kritikos.
On the sidelines of a campaign event in the Moller Haus theater in Darmstadt on Wednesday night, Tarek Al-Wazir, Hesse’s deputy state premier and the party’s lead candidate for Sunday’s ballot, tried to manage expectations. He said the Greens’ voter base of liberals and the academically minded isn’t big enough to pull in the numbers the CDU and SPD once attracted.
But he also argued that the new political landscape means more votes are up for grabs.
“We now live in a society in which these class and religious boundaries do not play such a role,” he told POLITICO. “This means that the core base of regular voters doesn’t exist any more.”
To a friendly crowd of locals, he reeled off calls for an open society, likened the CSU’s hard-line Interior Minister Horst Seehofer to U.S. President Donald Trump and collected laughs with whimsical reflections on Ikea’s catalog.
Unlike many junior coalition partners in German politics, the Greens have maintained support and popularity after a five-year term in Hesse’s government. Al-Wazir, who holds joint German-Yemeni citizenship, could become Germany’s second Green state premier in a left-wing alliance if his party can continue its recent surge.
“It’s clear that the grand coalition [at the national level] is in crisis at the moment,” said Al-Wazir. “That’s why people are paying special attention to this election.”