TEHRAN, February 22 (MNA) – An economic slump, an immigration crisis, and the lifting of a security blanket provided for decades by its most powerful ally are on the minds of German voters as they head to the polls for national parliamentary election.The general election of the Bundestag, Germany's lower house of parliament, was not supposed to come until September of this year.
But on November 6, just a day after American voters elected Donald Trump to a second term in office, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired his finance minister after months of squabbling over how to revive Germany's struggling economy, leading to the collapse of Scholz's three-party coalition government and the call for a snap election.
The latest polling data shows Scholz's Social Democrats in third place among voters (16%), behind the far-right Alternative for Germany or AfD Party (20%) and the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) alongside its Bavarian sister CSU party (29%).
The CDU will likely emerge as the largest vote-getter and thus be positioned to form a coalition government with one or two other parties.
Since all of Germany's mainstream parties have vowed not to govern with the AfD, which is under domestic surveillance for the threat it poses to Germany's democracy, the CDU's candidate for chancellor, Friedrich Merz, may have difficulty forming a coalition government.
"I'm just worried that after the election it will take maybe two months for a coalition government to form," says Jana Puglierin, director of the Berlin office at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
"Once the coalition is in place, they need to draft a budget.
And if we are very lucky, all of this will be done before the parliamentary summer break." The expected drawn-out German political timetable worries observers because of the next government's urgency to deal with multiple crises that face Europe's largest economy.
These include an economic recession, a national debate over migration, and, perhaps most importantly, how to navigate a new global security order now that the Trump administration appears to be working with Russia to bring an end to the Moscow and Ukraine conflict without inviting Europe or Ukraine to the negotiating table.
SD/NPR