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Letter from Berlin

Angela Merkel's Bavarian Problem

By Charles Hawley

Horst Seehofer has been governor of Bavaria for just a little over four months, but lately he has become a thorn in Chancellor Angela Merkel side. The split within Germany's conservatives has become difficult for voters to ignore.

It is a quote that Chancellor Angela Merkel might want to remember. "We have a good and strong chancellor," Horst Seehofer, head of Bavaria's Christian Social Union (CSU) and governor of Bavaria, told the tabloid Bild am Sonntag over the weekend. "The cooperation between Angela Merkel and myself is very friendly."

Such praise from a political ally is not, of course, the kind of thing that Merkel needs for her career scrapbook. But with the European parliamentary election approaching at the beginning of June and German general elections slated for September, Seehofer's sentimentality might provide some needed comic relief in the coming months.

After all, the Bavarian governor lately has made it clear where his priorities lie. Political consistency isn't one of them. Neither is loyalty to Merkel's Christian Democrats. Indeed, the only thing that seems to matter to Seehofer these days is finding positions that might attract the greatest number of voters to his cause. If that means stiff-arming his party's big sister, the CDU, then so be it.

Cold Calculation

"For me, being called a populist isn't an insult," Seehofer told SPIEGEL recently. "Rather, it is a compliment." It is also the product of cold calculation.

So far this week, the Seehofer show has been missing some of its entertainment value. After months of vocal complaints about Merkel's political course, Seehofer and his CSU colleagues have spent the last few days swearing allegiance to their chancellor and backing away from positions at odds with the Merkel line. He even decided that a reform of Germany's VAT (sales tax) -- an issue he hammered on for weeks, despite Merkel's opposition -- could wait until after this fall's general election.

Few, though, expect the calm to last. Seehofer, after all, has only been on the job for just over four months. He was installed as CSU head after his party received just 43.4 percent of the vote last September, well below the absolute majority his party had become used to in the southern German state.

But Seehofer was hardly a choice born out of conviction. The party unceremoniously dropped long-time leader Edmund Stoiber in 2007 and the pair chosen to replace him, Günther Beckstein and Erwin Huber, proved not to be up to the task. But Seehofer had long been seen as something of a loose cannon within the CSU. He was handed one of the CSU's two spots in Angela Merkel's cabinet in 2005 -- as Agriculture Minister -- but many saw the move as a way to put some distance between Seehofer and the party's Bavarian base. In Berlin, he hardly did himself any favors by siring a daughter in an extramarital affair -- not the kind of thing looked kindly upon in the conservative south.

Seehofer's challenge, then, is twofold. On the one hand, he needs to establish himself as party leader. On the other, he needs to prove the CSU can be successful under his leadership. His first opportunity comes on June 7, when Germans head to the ballot box for the European Parliament elections.

Normally, of course, the European Union vote is barely a blip on the German political radar. But support for the conservatives in Germany has been wobbly of late. Merkel's CDU is down in the polls, and the CSU has not recovered from its below average performance last fall. Compounding the problem is the fact that the EU election falls on a public holiday in Bavaria, meaning voter turnout could be low.

In 2004, the CSU managed 8 percent of the Germany-wide vote in European elections. This time around, leaping the 5 percent hurdle necessary for representation in Brussels could be a challenge. The risk of a major embarrassment is very real.

The path Seehofer has taken in confronting the danger has been to clearly delineate where the CDU stops and the CSU begins. And that has meant adopting positions that seem to directly contravene those taken by Merkel. Until this week, Seehofer wanted to slash the VAT tax on restaurant bills, a proposal opposed by the chancellor. He wants to overturn a quality-assurance plan supported by Berlin for Germany's retirement homes. He has been critical of the chancellor's comments blasting Pope Benedict XVI for his handling of the Bishop Williamson, Holocaust-denying scandal. And he has blasted a healthcare reform plan that he had supported until recently.

Many have been left scratching their heads. "Nobody in German politics changes their positions as quickly as Horst Seehofer," SPIEGEL wrote this week. But there is also a strategy. Many think that falling support for Merkel can be blamed on conservatives in Germany becoming uncomfortable with her state-heavy reaction to the financial crisis. The pope episode likely didn't help either.

'Truth Lies in the Ballot Box'

To make sure the CDU problem doesn't become a CSU one, Seehofer has also added a strong dose of Euro-populism. His CSU wants to see all major EU issues be subject to a referendum in Germany. Such a rule would likely mean the end of Turkey's hopes of accession to the EU, which both the CSU and CDU oppose. Still, the demand for more referenda puts Seehofer on a collision course with Merkel, a fact which doesn't seem to bother the CSU chief. "The truth lies in the ballot box," he is fond of saying.

The danger, of course, is that Seehofer will go too far in trying to sharpen his party's profile relative to that of the CDU. Should the two parties -- known collectively as the "Union" -- not be able to mend the fences before German general elections, voters could shy even further away from the conservative camp.

Falling Numbers

Merkel this week has been doing what she can to win back the grassroots. On Tuesday evening, she visited an annual gathering of the Federation of Expellees, a group dedicated to remembering the expulsion of Germans from a number of Eastern European countries following World War II. Merkel had angered the Federation recently by not explicitly backing the group's president, parliamentarian Erika Steinbach, in an ongoing spat with Poland.

The CSU has long provided the group with political cover -- and Seehofer even offered to award Steinbach with a Bavarian medal, in yet another effort to distance himself from the chancellor. But Merkel on Tuesday assured those gathered that Steinbach had her full support.

At the end of June, the CDU and the CSU plan to present a joint campaign platform ahead of German elections. Until then, though, Seehofer and Merkel will have to find a way to work together. Indeed, there are some who think that Seehofer himself is to blame for the fact that CDU poll numbers have been falling.

"It's no accident that poll numbers are falling given that the CDU and the CSU are bickering in public," CDU General Secretary Ronald Pofalla recently told the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel. "Our voters don't particularly like conflict within the Union."