One more time German Chancellor Angela Merkel has won re-election in the German national elections today. She claimed victory with 34% of the vote for her Christian Democratic Union (DCU) party and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) party. Both are conservative parties. The classically liberal Free Democrats (FDP) won 15 percent of the votes. The three top, more conservative, parties won a solid 49% of the vote.
This result gives Merkel the votes she needs to form her government with the more center-right political parties as opposed to having to attempt to govern with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) as she has had to do during her first term as Chancellor. That ‘grand coalition’ can be replaced with the center-right coalition of the DCU/CSU and FDP parties.
This is the first time since World War II that the leftist SPD party has done so poorly in an election, winning just 23.5 percent of the vote.
Less than an hour after the polls closed, Franks Steinmeier, the Social Democrat candidate for the chancellorship, conceded defeat in a tough speech that promised a strong opposition to Merkel’s new government. Merkel welcomed the result soon afterwards. And though the popular-vote totals may shift slightly as the full results come in, no one thinks that the Right’s victory will be seriously undercut.
The headline result is therefore: Center-Right Coalition Replaces Right-Left “Grand Coalition.” Merkel will finally have the reforming conservative coalition she has always said she wanted. Her socially conservative Christian Democrats will have the economically conservative Free Democrats as their junior partner.
Together with the fact that Merkel’s own spokesman on economics is a risk-taking believer in market reforms, this probably means that Germany’s so-called “social market” economy will shift slightly rightwards with long-term structural reductions in tax and economic regulation.
Merkel has been popular because of her stable, calm governance of the economic situation. During the election, she appealed to the German people to not take a chance by changing horses in mid-stream (so to speak). She also appealed to them to allow her to govern with the center-right, business friendly FDP, who have been out of power since 1998. Her argument being that the country needs to cut taxes in order to revitalize Germany’s economy.
From the election results, it appears the Germans gave her a resounding vote of confidence.
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