Stealth politics

2 January 2013 By Olaf Storbeck

The chancellor is the nation’s most popular politician, although voters don’t like her policies. How does she manage? She benefits from an opaque communications strategy, and the lack of a coherent alternative. Pro-EU leaders should pray that this Merkel bubble doesn’t burst.

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The next German national parliamentary election will take place in September or October 2013. The CDU has constantly led in opinion polls. The latest survey by Forsa institute, conducted in late December, shows 41 percent of voters support conservative party, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel. In the 2009 election, her party and its Bavarian sister party CSU received 33.8 percent of the vote. If the CDU performs as well as current polls suggest, it would be the party’s best result since 1994.
Polls show that Merkel is the most popular politician in Germany, followed by finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. In December, 81 percent of Germans thought that Merkel was doing a decent job.
At the turn of the year, Merkel’s social democratic challenger Peer Steinbrueck caused a stir in his own party and the wider public by claiming that the German chancellor wasn’t earning enough in comparison to business leaders.

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