I sat and watched the public TV folks (ARD) here in Germany cover this morning the SPD coalition vote announcement. It was a fairly dramatic moment, and then they announced 66-percent 'YES'.
Here, an odd thing occurred. It's inside of the SPD headquarters....a crowd formed up....and with the announcement, you'd expect applause.
Well....there was no applause with the great news.
In the last hour or two....a Focus reporter wrote up a short piece on this. He was there and kinda noticed the same thing. He walked around and had various chats. What he says is that virtually everyone in the audience knew around 30 minutes prior about the 'yes' results. So there was no real hyped-up feeling.
A negative for the SPD? I sat and looked at a poll covered by Focus today....it is bad news for SPD enthusiasts. In national polling, they managed only 16-percent. AfD polling? 15-percent. Since September, the SPD has fallen around six points and seem to be in a marginal public view at present.
For the next four years? It's Merkel's curtain-call and I think it'll be a period of frustration and discontent. If you were looking for a Macron-like creation to occur in Germany, this would be the time to assemble the strategy and find people to form up a new party from the ground up.
2 comments:
Who will follow Merkel: Jens Spahn or Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer?
You have three CDU likely 'players' and four years to see how this plays out: Jens Spahn, AKK (Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer), and Julie Klockner. Each has a plus or minus. AKK is a mini-carbon copy of Merkel. Klockner is bright, very perceptive to the public and would likely change five or six things about migration in Germany if given the chance. Jens? Well...in a debate, with two or exceptions...he can out-argue any German alive. He doesn't think the migration program has been completely thought through, and he'd be facing a tough CDU on bringing change.
I'm still waiting to see how the SPD mounts all this change they talk about. Almost no one on their list can come to the level of the three CDU folks I mentioned. In eight years, I see this Kevin Kuehnert coming into his prime from the youth group (Jusos) of the SPD.
Then I come to this Macron affect. Disenchantment by folks in the CDU and SPD exists. It's possible that you could see a party come out of thin air and mount an effort to take votes from those two parties and the AfD disenchanted. In the end, come 2021, I don't expect the combined effort of the CDU/SPD to reach 50-percent....it'll end up as the worst total vote for them since 1949.
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