Germany is slated to hold its next federal election in 2017. The voting typically takes place in the month of September but can be held anytime between the end of August and late October. However, some key regional elections are only weeks away; and political parties are gearing up now.
Chancellorship at Stake
According to a DW News August 13, 2016 article, Summer over for Merkel: Putin, Erdogan, Seehofer await, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s popularity continued to slip during her recent vacation because several major crises keep lingering.
“The five-year conflict in Syria and the resulting displacement of millions of people, a civil war in Ukraine and a post-coup crackdown in Turkey – none of these has improved in her absence; as expected, they’ve gotten worse.”
The chancellor was officially back on Monday the 15th.
The head of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (aka CSU) party, Horst Seehofer, is a vocal opponent to Merkel’s asylum policy, and he is even considering running against her. Historically, the Christian Democratic Union (aka CDU) ruling party and her sister, the CSU, have supported each other.
DW News added,
“His popularity among voters is currently solid, while Merkel’s has dipped, in particular after a string of unrelated attacks in July, two of which were committed by young men who had arrived as refugees.”
In response to increasingly intense political pressure at home and abroad, in July Merkel’s party introduced “measures to restrict migration and keep tabs on refugees”.
Eastern Europe Backlash
Mass migration is not hugely popular anywhere but it’s even less so in Europe’s Eastern flank.
Some of Germany’s neighbors — Austria, Poland, and several other Eastern European nations — flatly rejected the Open Door Migration policy championed by Chancellor Merkel, the EU Commission President, and the current head of Catholic Church.
Poland Sounds Off
EU member Poland has been especially vociferous about its opposition to this and other issues. From staunchly conservative Catholic Poland’s perspective, a number of at least nominally Christian European states are essentially surrendering to an old ideological enemy.
The latest negative remarks occurred in a recent interview on Polish TV.
Two Polish terrorism experts strongly criticized both the German government and the European Union as a whole. An American politically conservative news website, Breitbart, quoted them in its post on July 30 2016, Polish Experts: ‘Europe is at The End of its Existence … ,
One of them said,
“ … Western Europe is practically dead. These people live in a void, without ideas. And then come along the young, who [only want] to make money, as once did the barbarians”.
Photo Credits: A. Merkel by GlynLowe Photoworks License: CC BY 2.0; H. Seehofer by Metropolicio.org. License: CC BY-SA 2.0
Read more in our previous ITN article, November 3, 2015-Europe.
