Led by rising star David McAllister, the Christian Democrats were almost sure they were on the verge of a stunning victory in Germany's swing state of Lower Saxony. But they were proved wrong on Sunday.
In an extremely tight German state election that seemed to produce few clearcut winners, there was no argument over who the biggest loser was — chancellor Angela Merkel, whose Christian Democrats (CDU) lost power to the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens. The SPD together garnered one more seat in the state assembly than the centre-right.
Led by rising star David McAllister, Merkel's CDU had convinced themselves over the past week that they were on the verge of a stunning come-from-behind victory in Lower Saxony, a major agricultural and industrial region that is Germany's closest approximation to a swing state. But, on Sunday, they were proved wrong.
The defeat is a bitter one for Merkel, even if she remains a strong favourite to win a third term in a federal election eight months from now. In one fell swoop, it gives the centre-left a majority in the Bundesrat upper house of parliament, meaning the opposition can block major legislation from Merkel's government and initiate laws themselves.
"I assume it won't be possible to push anything through the Bundesrat that the SPD doesn't want," Volker Kauder, a Merkel ally and leader of her CDU in parliament, told German public television on Monday morning. That will not change after the national election in September, even if Merkel's centre-right coalition with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) manages to hold onto power. In the run-up to the federal vote, Merkel's room for manoeuvre will be limited and the notoriously risk-averse German leader may take a more cautious stance on a range of policy issues, including her management of the euro zone debt crisis.
The vote is also a blow to McAllister, the 42-year-old half-Scot who had ruled Lower Saxony since 2010 and become a protege of the chancellor, declaring on the eve of the vote that he was happy to be "Merkel's Mac". There will be much hand-wringing in the CDU about McAllister's not-so-subtle hints to supporters in the weeks before the election that they use their votes to boost the score of the FDP.
"The state election in Lower Saxony should be a warning for Angela Merkel for the federal election in the autumn," conservative daily Die Welt wrote on Monday. The FDP were hailed as the big winners of Sunday's vote, but the result failed to silence internal critics who want to jettison national party leader Philipp Roesler before the federal vote.
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