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The Christian Social Union’s loss of its absolute majority on Sunday threatens to reverberate through Merkel’s fractious government, already hampered by infighting after just seven months in office. Merkel’s other coalition partner, the Social Democrats, fared even worse in the wealthy southern region, shedding half its support to place fifth. The Greens and the anti-immigration AfD party were the main beneficiaries.
“It is clear that things will not get easier for Merkel,” said Carsten Nickel, an analyst at Teneo Intelligence in London. “She will have to continue muddling through, but she is dependent on two badly beaten coalition partners.”
After a summer of high-level brinkmanship in a series of crises that risked bringing down the government, all sides cited the sniping in Berlin as a factor in the CSU’s loss. At the center of the tension has been CSU party head and federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who sought to shift the party to the right with his strident criticism of Merkel’s migration policies.
Next for Merkel
His strategy failed, with voters flocking instead to the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which swept into the state parliament for the first time, and the Green party, whose pro-migration platform propelled it into second place after the CSU.
“We clearly have to recognize that moving to the right is a mistake,” Armin Laschet, a deputy CDU chairman and state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, told ARD television. “Our real challenger now is the Greens.”
Merkel’s own fortunes were not tied to the result in Bavaria, where her party wasn’t on the ballot. But they are at stake in the next regional election on Oct. 28 in Hesse, home to Frankfurt, Germany’s financial capital. Polls suggest support for her Christian Democratic Union could drop to the lowest levels since the 1960s in the state, which the CDU has governed since 1999.
A setback risks further undermining Merkel’s authority before she seeks re-election as party leader at a CDU convention in Hamburg in December. She took a hit last month when one of her loyalists unexpectedly lost his perch as head of the CDU-CSU parliamentary caucus in a revolt by lawmakers. [...]