German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition took a setback in Berlin elections Sunday when a junior member party of her coalition lost all its seats in the city parliament.
The Free Democratic Party (FDP) had a disastrous election dropping from 7.8 percent in the previous election to less than 2 percent. The Party, which had already lost all its seats in four other regional assemblies, needed 5 percent Sunday to keep its seat in Berlin.
After a poor showing in other state elections this year, Merkel’s own Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is the largest party in the German coalition government, did well in the Berlin elections, coming in a predicted second to the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The center-left SPD kept its 10-year lead in the German city-state, also the nation’s capital, and Berlin’s SPD Mayor Klaus Wowereit now appears well poised to win a third term.
SPD went slightly down to 28.5 percent and CDU slightly up to 23.1 percent, leaving the power balance essentially the same.
SPD will not continue its coalition with the Left Party (L), which won just over 11 percent in Sunday’s vote, raising the question of whether SPD will seek to form a coalition with the Green Party or even with CDU.
The biggest surprise in Sunday’s election was the success of the Pirate Party, which won 8.9 percent of the votes and thereby 15 seats in Berlin’s Parliament. The Pirate Party is a part of the Pirate Parties International movement, and their main issues are personal privacy, state transparency, and reform of patent and copyright laws.
Local elections in Germany have not been going well for the current coalition, and Berlin followed this trend. Apart from the ongoing crisis within the FDP, the CDU’s is not getting along too well with their other coalition partner, The Christian Social Union (CSU). Some voices within the CDU are now calling for the return of a “grand coalition” between CDU and SDP, which ruled Germany between 2005-2009.
Two weeks ago, the FDP was wiped out in local elections in the German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, where they dropped from 9.6 to 2.7 percent and thereby lost their seats in Parliament. In that election, CDU did poorly as well, dropping by 5.7 percent.
