Germany: Chancellor-designate Angela Merkel has warned that an acrimonious blame game over the poor election result of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will weaken its position in coalition negotiations.
Dr Merkel had hoped to contain the post-election finger-pointing - and sniping at her authority - until she was installed in the chancellery next month after coalition talks.
"Naturally I don't want to put off the analysis . . . but the coalition talks have just begun and there we need cover not discussion every day," she said yesterday to a conference of the CDU youth organisation.
The strategy appeared to work: she called a snap vote to assert her parliamentary leadership two days after the election left the CDU just one percentage point ahead of the SPD. But, as talks enter week two today, the pent-up anger has finally exploded, with open criticism of Dr Merkel from party rank-and-file and, more damaging, from political rivals she has sidelined on her way to the top.
The message from the party is clear: the Merkel campaign concentrated on economic reforms seen as overly liberal without any reference to the Christian social tradition of the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU).
"We have to ask ourselves if we didn't set the wrong priorities," Edmund Stoiber, the likely future economics minister, said on Saturday. As leader of the CSU, Mr Stoiber cannot easily be silenced by Dr Merkel, and he has used that freedom since election night to openly question her authority as future chancellor.
Another critic is the CSU's Horst Seehofer, sidelined by Dr Merkel after clashing openly over health policy. Mr Seehofer will now sit at her cabinet table as agriculture minister, but has said that voters had "clearly rejected her radical political path".
Friedrich Merz, whom Dr Merkel elbowed out of the parliamentary leadership post in 2002, criticised party leaders for allowing Chancellor Schröder to keep the CDU on the defensive throughout the campaign. "You can't allow a mistake like that happen to an opposition party," he said.
CDU politicians close to Dr Merkel hit back at the critics yesterday, particularly at Mr Stoiber, who is leaving Bavaria to become economics minister in Berlin. "Stoiber has to finally realise that he's no longer King of Bavaria," said one disgruntled CDU politician. "If he doesn't learn that, he will become a serious burden on the government."