Presidency row shakes Merkel’s coalition
Conservative leaders warned the FDP on Sunday there would be “serious consequences” — language party officials understood to mean the end of the coalition — if they refused to drop support for former East German rights activist Joachim Gauck, the sources said.
But the FDP did not blink, and it was Merkel who ended up backing down and agreeing to support Gauck, whose candidacy she had publicly opposed in 2010.
“It was indeed quite serious,” said one senior conservative source close to the chancellor.
Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, and other conservatives have tried to play down the suggestion the coalition was on the verge of breaking apart.
Merkel’s retreat kept the coalition together but the episode appears to have seriously poisoned relations and may herald more tensions in the run-up to next year’s general election, possibly over eurozone rescue efforts.
Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party have run roughshod over the FDP since the coalition was formed in 2009, confident the liberal party, whose support has plunged to 2% in opinion polls, would swallow anything to avoid elections.
When the FDP surprisingly drew a line in the sand over the coalition’s candidate to replace Christian Wulff, a hand-picked Merkel choice for president who resigned on Friday over a financial favours scandal, the conservatives switched to hardball tactics, according to sources.
“They were caught off guard when we came out for Gauck,” said one senior FDP source.
“Merkel and others warned about ‘consequences’, which we all understood to mean a threat to end the coalition [and call new elections].”
One source said Bavarian premier Horst Seehofer of the CSU had even threatened the FDP’s leader in the state, justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, with an end to their ruling partnership if the party refused to reverse.
Merkel spokesman Seibert played down the row at a news conference yesterday when asked if the government had come close to breaking point.
Gauck will now likely be elected at a special session of the Federal Assembly set for Mar 18.
“You don’t need to worry about the coalition, its composition or about the government in general,” he said, not answering the question directly while describing the decision to back Gauck as a “good result” for the government and the country.
But opposition parties seized on the episode as another example of mistrust within the coalition.
“The trust between the Soviet Union and US during the darkest days of the Cold War was greater than the trust between the CDU/CSU and the FDP right now,” said Greens leader Cem Oezdemir.
Gauck, 72, was nominated by the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens in 2010 and supported by a majority of Germans for the presidency.
But Merkel defied public opinion and pushed Wulff into the post.
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