Germany's Messy Election
By Kirsten Thomas, 09.22.05

Following the national elections on Sept. 18 Germany is in a predicament. The elections did not produce a clear winner. The world’s third largest economy is without a leader.

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder called for an early election this past May, 2005.
“He had hoped to get a mandate for his unpopular economic reforms,” wrote Marc Young on DW-WORLD.DE. “The logic was that either he would be vindicated by the voters or the conservative opposition would take over the job of overhauling the world's third largest economy.”

The parliament vote resulted in 222 parliament seats received by Schröder of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) a center-left group. His opponent Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) a center-right group received 225 parliament seats.

This gives the CDU a slight advantage in Germany’s parliament. Preliminary voting results reveal Schröder of SPD with 34.3 percent of the vote and his opponent Merkel of CDU with 35.2 percent of the vote.

Both political parties are claiming the chancellery. Merkel said that CDU’s three seat win over SPD in parliament and the 0.9 percent lead at the voting box make her the next chancellor.

“What is important now is to form a stable government for the people in Germany, and we … quite clearly have the mandate to do that,” Merkel said.

Schröder has held office for seven years and has stated he will not step down.

“I do not understand how the [Christian Democratic] Union, which started off so confidently and arrogantly, takes claim to political leadership from a disastrous election result,” Schröder said. He is insisting the SPD has maintained enough support to establish a coalition government.

This is an option that both candidates are courting. Coalitions are formed when “two or more political parties unite to form a majority bloc in Parliament. This usually happens when no single party is able to win the majority (more than half) of the seats in Parliament to form a Government,” according to the Parliament of Singapore’s website.

However, there has been a significant voting delay. The sudden death of candidate Kerstin Lorenz due to a stroke during campaigning has caused a deferment to Oct. 2. This type of deferment is procedural and allows the replacement candidate for that party time to campaign.

At this point it is still unclear who will be chancellor or what party will run Germany’s next government.

Election Result Facts found on www.DW-WORLD.de

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