I have previously blogged on CentreRight about key elections last year in the German bellweather state of Hessen, which saw the two main German parties level pegging after a remarkable campaign when the CDU declined by 12 points, widely attributed to clumsy anti-immigrant rhetoric.
This Sunday sees a re-run. Hessen is a key swing state in Germany, and this time the CDU is set to win comfortably, mainly due to an incompetent dalliance of the local SPD with the far-Left Linke Partei. For more, see this article in Der Spiegel.
The main German federal elections occur this September. Der Spiegel draws a similar conclusion to the one I drew last March, that Germany is struggling with the mathematics of a five party system. The current "grand Coalition", where more than 80% of voters end up having voted for the government, is unwieldy and sometimes unable to make tough decisions, and probably not healthy for democracy, not least as the "opposition" tends to be formed by small, disparate parties which have no chance themselves to put forward any realistic alternative programme for government.
The world's third largest economy needs a more decisive direction after the September elections. It seems to me that Merkel's CDU will win the day, given the SPD's chaotic indecision faced with Die Linke, and given current opinion polls, but who knows? The CDU lost millions of votes in both 2002 and 2005 during the last Federal election campaigns, the first due to Gerhard Schröder's perceived good handling of the flooding crisis and his anti-American posturing over the coming Iraq crisis, the second due to the CDU not convincingly arguing for its agreed flat tax policy.
For us in the UK, the main interest will be in seeing how governing parties perform at what might be the absolute depth of the current recession. Brown might take comfort from a strong showing for the main governing party (the CDU), but as I have also laid out, the CDU's economic solutions are far more like those advocated by David Cameron and George Osborne.
We should know the Hessen results late on Sunday night. At the moment, it is looking like it will be a good year for the centre right in Germany - but also the far left.
