GERMANY:German chancellor Angela Merkel has described as "painful" the dramatic slump in support for her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in a weekend state election, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin.
The CDU lost 12 per cent support in Hesse, home to the financial capital Frankfurt, to finish with 36.8 per cent, just 0.1 per cent ahead of the Social Democrats (SPD). Neither party has enough support to form its coalition of choice and could be forced to form a grand coalition, thanks in part to the success of the Left Party in weekend polls.
The party has now arrived in the state parliaments of Hesse and neighbouring Lower Saxony, forcing the SPD to rediscover its traditional roots and defend its left flank.
"The SPD's return to romantic socialism held greater attractiveness than we hoped," said the Hesse region's prime minister Roland Koch yesterday. "We will have to discuss at national level what this shift to the left means."
It's an open question whether Mr Koch has a political future beyond the coalition negotiations after his disastrous election campaign against juvenile crime and "young criminal foreigners".
Rumblings could be heard within the CDU yesterday that Mr Koch will have to stand aside once coalition negotiations have been completed and the cool body language was obvious between Mr Koch and Dr Merkel at yesterday's post-election press conference.
"Of course he heads the strongest party - barely - in Hesse but morally, he finds himself in the same position as Gerhard Schröder in 2005," said Prof Wichard Woyke, political scientist at the University of Münster. "The only contribution he can make to the party now is to stand down." In Berlin, the Hesse poll has reduced even further the already low reform expectations of the CDU-SPD grand coalition ahead of a possible September 2009 poll.
Analysts predict that Mr Koch's polarising election campaign has convinced Dr Merkel of the value of her own conciliatory political style.
Despite a double poll defeat, SPD leader Kurt Beck presented his party yesterday as the long-term winner.
"The SPD is a party of the left and people want it that way," he said.
"As soon as the CDU claimed to have captured the political middle ground, it allowed itself to be driven to the extreme right by Mr Koch." The SPD already rules with the ex-communist Left Party in the Berlin state government, but Mr Beck said yesterday he is not interested in ruling with the party on a federal level "for the forseeable future".