Erstellt am: 5. 9. 2011 - 15:00 Uhr

No Love from Home

Reality Check: Is Angela Merkel’s coalition running out of steam?

There comes a point in a any leading politician’s life where it’s time to change gear and do something radical to remind voters why they gave you their trust and put you in that top job. It’s something that’s pre-occupying Barack Obama’s mind as he prepares to hit the 2012 election trail. Meanwhile over in Berlin Angela Merkel is probably looking for some kind of divine help too.

APA

It’s all very well that she topped Forbes magazine's list of "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women" in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. But like a Nobel Prize for Obama, international titles and honours are meaningless if you are facing widespread disillusionment at the ballot box. Merkel’s party’s poor showing in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern elections appear to be symbolic of an electorate wishing to send a strong message to her governing coalition.

According to our correspondent in Berlin, Kerstin Fischer, Merkel has failed to articulate her plans well enough to ordinary Germans. All they hear is that millions of euros from Germany will be used to keep on funding fiscally incompetent neighbours within the eurozone. And there are few answers about when the bailouts will stop or what they will actually mean for the German economy over the long term. And in a state like Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, it’s unclear how continued support for Greece or Portugal brings badly needed jobs to the region.

There will be state elections in Berlin on September 18th and I guess it will be no surprise that Klaus Wowereit and the SPD will do well again here. Once the dust has settled on one more uncomfortable election evening, political analysts feel she should put forward a bold programme for the months ahead. The problem is she doesn’t convey a clear enough picture about how she sees the future of Germany under this coalition. Are her next 2 years going to be dominated by bailouts and support for eurozone partners and if that is the case what does this mean for someone who has been struggling to find a job in the north-eastern corner of Germany. Germans are missing the strong leader they (and the rest of the world) felt they had elected, maybe now is the time for her to pull out the stops and emerge from the shadows before local election rot hits the national psyche. Hear Kerstin Fischer’s report...

Also on Reality Check today, we spoke about Wolfgang Schüssel and his announcement that he's resigning his parliamentary seat in the wake of the controversy surrounding Telekom Austria. Reality Check's Joanna Bostock rushed from the midday press conference where the announcement was made and gave us her impressions...

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