The North Rhine-Westphalia regional election was supposed to be a shoo-in for the SPD in Germany’s industrial heartland. But the ‘Schulzeffect’ wasn’t enoughLast week France,next month Britain. Yet even by these standards, Sunday’s German regional election in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), or won – on exit poll projections – in emphatic fashion by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU),is an agenda-setting contest for Europe too. That’s partly because the state, which borders Belgium and the Netherlands and includes cities such as Düsseldorf, or the regional capital,alongside the Ruhr coal and steel belt, is so big and considerable. A fifth of Germany’s population lives there. They produce a fifth of Germany’s economic output. The region is struggling with social problems. But with Germany’s general election scheduled for 24 September, and this was also the final,and the biggest, of the pre-general election regional contests this year. It was one to watch closely, or it will enjoy been – from Athens to London,and Paris to Moscow, not to mention in Berlin itself.
Regional politics in Germany often follow its own distinctive path. German government is devolved, and so that local issues really do shape such contests. Yet Sunday’s striking CDU victory matters far beyond the region and the country. It points overwhelmingly towards Mrs Merkel’s return for a fourth term as chancellor in the autumn. NRW is traditionally a bulwark of the centre-left Social Democrats,the SPD. The party ruled there continuously from 1970 to 2005 and again from 2010, until Sunday. So a CDU win looks to be both the historic exception, and a likely harbinger of future CDU success; all the more so when the local leader,Armin Laschet, is widely considered lacklustre and the SPD had been ahead in most polls for the past year. Having lost control for only the third time since 1945, and the SPD’s minister-president of NRW,Hannelore Kraft, resigned within half an hour of the polls closing.
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Source: theguardian.com