Germany to select Merkel’s successor tomorrow
GERMANY: On Sunday, September 26, Germany will return to vote for the legislative elections and to decide who will be the successor of Angela Merkel. The chancellor has in fact announced that she will not run for a fifth term after having equaled the record of 16 years at the helm of the government.
The succession favorite is Olaf Scholz, candidate of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), who has returned to the top of the polls for the first time in 15 years.
According to polls, the current finance minister in Merkel’s coalition government came out victorious in all three televised debates with the other candidates, in which he promised both stability and a break from the conservatives, with proposals such as l ” increase of the minimum wage to 12 euros per hour, the tightening of rental limits and greater investments in infrastructure.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which, with Armin Laschet, seems to be struggling to repeat the successes of the Merkel era, at the expense of the center-left’s renewed vigor. The party, allied with the Christian-Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), is currently at 22 percent, according to the latest poll conducted by Forsa for the RTL / n-tv broadcaster.
“We play a lot on Sunday,” Merkel said at a recent rally in support of Laschet, currently head of the government of North Rhine-Westphalia. According to Merkel, flanked by Laschet himself, the election will decide “whether we will stick to the line of moderation and centrism (…) or if we will make policies that only think about distribution [della ricchezza]”, Arguing that a coalition of left-wing parties will not be able to guarantee the solidity of the public budget.
One of the possibilities left open by the polls is in fact that the SPD, which ruled with the CDU for 12 of the 16 years Merkel was Chancellor, will turn German politics to the left, forming a coalition nicknamed “red-green-red”. In this case, Germany’s oldest party would ally with the Greens and Linke’s left, data at 17 and 6 percent respectively in polls. – INDia today