By Tony Czuczka and Patrick Donahue - Mar 18, 2012 6:01 AM GMT+0700
Chancellor Angela Merkel is set to vote for a German president she rejected once already, shrugging off the setback to focus on state elections and crisis-fighting steps that are more likely to shape her chances of a third term.
The probable election today of Joachim Gauck, 72, a former pastor and East German anti-communist activist, would mean Europe’s biggest economy is headed for the first time by both a chancellor and president who grew up behind the Iron Curtain.
Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel. Photographer: Michele Tantussi/Bloomberg
German President Joachim Gauck, who had been a pro-democracy activist in East Germany. Photographer: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
The vote also enables Merkel to dodge a conflict in her coalition that failed to dent her record-high approval ratings. Three state elections and a decision due by the end of the month on whether to back an expanded financial firewall against the crisis are her immediate challenges.
“She’s like Teflon,” Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING Groep in Brussels, said in an interview. “Everything that could have been blamed on her hasn’t affected her at all.” Merkel “has shown that she can sit things out.”
A special federal assembly is due to convene in Berlin at noon today for the presidential election, the second vote for the mainly ceremonial post in less than two years. Gauck was the main opposition candidate in 2010, when he lost to Christian Wulff, Merkel’s pick. Wulff quit on Feb. 17 to face a criminal probe that may lead to corruption charges. He denies any wrongdoing.
The only other candidate this time is Beate Klarsfeld, 73. The German-born Nazi hunter living in Paris was nominated by the anti-capitalist Left party. With Merkel’s coalition and two opposition parties backing Gauck, his election is assured.
Stasi Hunter
Gauck, the son of a sailor who was sent to a Soviet Gulag for more than three years in the 1950s, grew up in the Baltic Sea port city of Rostock and became a leading figure of East Germany’s anti-communist opposition in 1989. He later gained a reputation as Germany’s leading “Stasi hunter” for his work in overseeing the opening of millions of files kept by informants of the communist-era Ministry of State Security.
“The central issue in the public life of Joachim Gauck has been that of freedom and responsibility,” Merkel said Feb. 20 when she announced his candidacy. “That’s what connects me to him personally, despite our differences.”
After expressing reservations about the opposition’s pick of Gauck, Merkel backed down last month when the Free Democrats, her junior coalition ally, supported him. By retreating and moving on, she tamped down a domestic distraction as European leaders were struggling to craft a second bailout for Greece.
Latest Poll Scores
An Emnid poll on March 11 showed national support for her bloc at 36 percent, a level last exceeded in 2008. Her FDP ally, which has seen voter support collapse amid leadership changes and a split over its stance on euro bailouts, had 3 percent backing after almost 15 percent in 2009. The main opposition Social Democrats had 28 percent and the Greens 14 percent.
“She checked it off the list in a hurry,” Manfred Guellner, head of the Berlin-based Forsa polling firm, said of the Gauck spat. “It didn’t harm the high approval she enjoys. When Merkel is alone on the stage saving the euro, that’s when she scores points.”
Next stop for Merkel is Saarland, where voters cast ballots on March 25 in the first of three German state elections this year. It’s followed by votes in the northern state of Schleswig- Holstein on May 6 and North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous region, which with almost a quarter of the country’s 82 million people is a bellwether for the respective parties’ national fortunes before the federal election in 2013. While not yet scheduled, that vote will probably also take place in May.
Grand Coalition Redux
Merkel’s position is a turnaround from last year, when her national coalition was defeated or lost votes in all seven state elections as Germany’s involvement in the crisis stemming from Greece made it the biggest contributor to euro-region bailouts.
Polls now show the CDU and Social Democrats in a dead heat in Saarland, suggesting the CDU and SPD will ally to govern the region bordering France and Luxembourg in a “grand coalition,” mirroring Merkel’s first-term government.
That’s a constellation Germans like because they favor cooperation among the two biggest parties rather than conflict, making another grand coalition a possible outcome of the next national election in 18 months, Forsa’s Guellner said.
With the Free Democrats decimated, Merkel reached out to the opposition to agree on the presidential candidate, who is elected by a 1,240-member assembly of national lawmakers and state delegates that meets at the Reichstag building in Berlin.
The chancellor’s majority in the assembly has narrowed to as little as two seats from 21 seats in 2010, when Wulff defeated Gauck, according to election website wahlrecht.de.
To contact the reporters on this story: Tony Czuczka in Berlin at aczuczka@bloomberg.net; Patrick Donahue in Berlin at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net
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