No Clear Winner In German Elections, Both Sides Claim Mandate

by Ramesh Jaura

(IPS) BERLIN -- German voters on Sunday declined to give the parties of either Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder or challenger Angela Merkel a clear majority in parliament, leaving political leadership of the country in limbo.

Members of parliament select the chancellor.

Schroeder's "red-green" coalition government, which first came into power in 1998, comprises the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Green Party.

Merkel -- who was born and brought up in a Protestant family in communist East Germany and made her way to the top of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) after unification of two Germanys 15 years ago -- was expected by pollsters to win a distinct majority vote for the conservatives and their potential coalition partner, the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).

The CDU and its Bavarian sister Christian Social Union (CSU) together form a parliamentary party in the German parliament, Bundestag. The Free Democratic Party constituted a coalition government with the CDU-CSU until seven years ago.

According to provisional poll results the CDU-CSU bagged 35.3 percent of the vote, SPD 34.2, FDP 9.9, the Left Party 8.6 and the Greens 8.1 percent.

Schroeder called for an early election in the hope of winning a stable majority for the red-green coalition government that would pave the way for pushing through economic reforms. Just one week earlier Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had spectacularly won a similar gamble in forwarding that country's general election.

Merkel said that despite her failure to secure a ruling majority, the slim victory entitled her to negotiate with all the major parties on forming a new coalition government.

"We have a very clear mandate and I assume this mandate with all my power," Merkel said in a TV appearance Sunday. "We now need to form a stable government," she told her supporters at party headquarters earlier.

But Schroeder insisted he had been confirmed in power. "I feel I have won approval to provide a stable government for the next four years under my leadership," he told party supporters.

SPD leadership was hoping that in view of Merkel's failure to garner more than the expected 40 percent of the vote, support for her within the CDU-CSU parliamentary party would start eroding.

Whether Sunday's vote was a "gender election" will be known only after final results come in and are analyzed. But in TV debates in the run-up to the election and in the party leaders' TV round Sunday, the social democrats and the Greens have been far from gentle in discussions with Merkel.

In fact, both Schroeder and the Green Party's Joschka Fischer, the country's foreign minister, have often left the impression that they doubted Merkel's political abilities: this despite the fact that Merkel, a physicist, has proved her political acumen in making her way to the leadership of the CDU, surmounting umpteen obstacles.

In view of what Fischer has described as a "terribly complex" situation arising out of the polls, the issues involved have been eclipsed. Foremost among these was the impact of economic policies that the major contenders -- CDU-CSU and SPD -- announced ahead of the election.

Merkel proposed creating jobs and driving economic growth with a program of income tax cuts and labor market liberalization that would go beyond Schroeder's controversial economic reform package known as Agenda 2010.

Much to the chagrin of Fischer, the Greens have been relegated from the position of the third largest party in the German Parliament to the fifth, with the FDP becoming the third largest and the new Left Party the fourth largest.

The Left Party is a breakaway faction of the SPD and a political grouping that was constituted as a successor to the communist SED.

Formally known as the Socialist Unity Party, SED ruled the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for more than four decades in the aftermath of World War II that resulted in the division of Germany, a price paid for genocide committed by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.

Until the unification of two Germanys on Oct. 3, 1990, the GDR remained under the Soviet sphere of influence. West Germany, liberated by the Western allies, went the way of the free market.

The new Left Party has been formed at a critical juncture in post-war German history: The country's affluent and technologically powerful economy, the fifth largest in the world, has become one of the slowest growing in the euro currency zone.

The euro zone consists of Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain.

Neither the SPD nor the CDU-CSU and FDP has hidden its anxiety about the rise of the new Left Party, an alliance of the former communist SED's successor PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) and the breakaway social democrats' leftist grouping, the Alternative Vote for Labor and Social Justice (WASG).

The left-wing alliance is being led by two flamboyant and highly controversial leaders, Oskar Lafontaine and Gregor Gysi.

Lafontaine left the SPD last June after heading it from 1995 to 1999. Gysi quit before completing one full year in office as senator for economy and labor with the city government of Berlin.

Lafontaine argues that the Left Party is the only real opposition to the neo-liberal mainstream. He has called for higher wages and a government spending program to push the economy.

Whatever the shape of the coalition government that might emerge in the next weeks, the CDU-CSU and SPD have left no doubt they are unwilling to ally with the Left Party.