CHANCELLOR ANGELA Merkel was facing growing pressure to call a confidence motion yesterday after government rebels turned Wednesday’s presidential election into a marathon no-confidence motion in her leadership.
In two secret ballot rounds, frustrated coalition MPs withheld their support for Dr Merkel’s presidential nominee, Lower Saxony governor Christian Wulff, backing him only in a third round of voting.
Mr Wulff (51), who will be sworn in as president this morning, glossed over the nine-hour cliffhanger yesterday.
“It was a democratic, fair, secret free vote and a big gain for our country,” he said. “Having the absolute majority in the end was sufficient backing.”
Mr Wulff’s Christian Democrat (CDU) colleagues sent out mixed signals yesterday: promising a post mortem to learn from the Wulff debacle while urging party members to move on.
“What we don’t need now is a hunt for dissenters or a blame game,” said CDU general secretary Hermann Gröhe in a letter to party rank and file. “Government is a team sport and we know we have to improve.”
Foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, leader of the junior coalition partner, the Free Democrats (FDP), was of a similar view.
“I think we have a good president and what people want from us now is to be less engaged with ourselves and more with the problems that need solving,” he said.
Their pleas to unite and move on were undermined by senior regional figures who saw the Wulff vote as a serious protest vote against Dr Merkel’s squabbling coalition.
“It was like an exclamation mark and a demand: deal with your interior problems for once and for all,” said Wolfgang Böhmer, CDU premier in Saxony-Anhalt.
In neighbouring Saxony, governor Stanislaw Tillich admitted that the CDU-FDP government in Berlin had “squandered a chance for a fresh start”.
Meanwhile former FDP leader Wolfgang Gerhardt attacked the government for being “incapable of organising issues and communicating them to voters”.
Government insiders said yesterday that, after two failed rounds of voting, the decisive moment on Wednesday evening came when Chancellor Merkel resorted to soccer analogies.
“We’ve had the Serbia match,” she told delegates, referring to the German national side’s surprise World Cup defeat, “now it’s time for the English match.”
Picking up and developing the sporting imagery, political scientist Prof Jürgen Falter compared Dr Merkel’s government yesterday to the French World Cup side, “except that no one here is being sent home”. “It’s clear there is a loss of authority,” he said. “It existed beforehand and has now grown to a dangerous level.”
After the disarray of Wednesday’s vote, political analyst Franz Walter suggested Chancellor Merkel had no choice but for a confidence vote in her leadership.
“It would be an important method of discipline to force reason on the deputies who are running wild,” he said. “The only problem is around what question or goal could she base the confidence vote.”
As the government licked its wounds in Berlin yesterday, history was made in Hanover as Lower Saxony swore in its first leader with dual citizenship.
David McAllister, a 39-year-old with a German mother and Scottish father, has succeeded Christian Wulff as state premier in the central German state.
It’s an position of considerable influence, which was used by the former SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder as his regional springboard to power.
After joining the CDU aged 17, Mr McAllister has had a rapid rise through the ranks in the last decade.
Yesterday’s promotion makes him the first of a new generation of CDU politicians likely to eventually challenge Angela Merkel for the party leadership.