• English Site
• > Germany

Bitter Dispute

Schleswig-Holstein Faces Early Election After Government Collapses

The government of the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein has collapsed in acrimony. Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives, well ahead in opinion polls, face accusations of having engineered the crisis to profit from an early election.

Germany's unhappy coalition government between conservative Christian Democrats and center-left Social Democrats (SPD) is set to struggle on until the Sept. 27 general election but a similar right-left alliance has collapsed in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, where pent-up animosity between the two parties has erupted into an acrimonious public dispute.

The state famous for its windswept sandy beaches is now expected to call an early election that opinion polls indicate will produce a tie-up between the conservatives and their preferred partner, the pro-business Free Democrats -- a coalition that Chancellor Angela Merkel hopes to be able to form at the national level after four years in a loveless marriage between Germany's two main parties.

The SPD has accused Peter Harry Carstensen, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU)governor of Schleswig-Holstein, of blatant opportunism for orchestrating the collapse of the government at a time when opinion polls are favorable to him, and deeply unfavorable to them.

Opinion polls in the state put the CDU at 36 percent and the FDP at 15 percent, which would be enough for them to form a government, while the SPD is languishing at 24 percent. The election was originally scheduled to take place on May 9, 2010, but is now set to coincide with the general election in September.

It's a shrewd tactic by Carstensen because by next May, the CDU may well be less popular than it is now given that unemployment is expected to keep on rising in the worst recession since World War II.

Row Over Big Payment to Bank CEO

Carstensen declared last week that the coalition was finished because the regional head of the SPD, Ralf Stegner, was failing to stand by agreed policies. The decision followed a row over a bonus of €2.9 million ($4.12 million) to the CEO of publicly owned regional bank HSH Nordbank, Dirk Jens Nonnenmacher.

Carstensen and Stegner have had a rocky relationship ever since they formed a coalition in 2005.

The governor tried to dissolve the regional parliament in the northern port of Kiel on Monday but failed because SPD MPs refused to back his motion and deprived him of the necessary two-thirds majority.

He plans to introduce a motion of no confidence on Thursday in a move that will most probably allow him to go ahead and dissolve parliament in preparation for an early election.

Carstensen said on Monday that Schleswig-Holstein "needs an effective government that can be trusted and which is based on mutual trust."

But his own credibility has taken a knock after he was forced to confirm a SPIEGEL article on Sunday that he had given false information to parliament this month -- he had written a letter to the president of the assembly telling him that the €2.9 million payment to Nonnenmacher had the approval of the SPD leadership, which wasn't the case. The special payment to Nonnenmacher had been approved in November 2008.

After learning about it, members of parliament were deeply angered. After all, the state in February ruled to adopt strict rules from the German government's bank bailout authority, Soffin, that caps salaries and bonuses for leading executives at €500,000 annually. The bank had gotten caught up in the financial crisis and was saved -- at least initially -- by a €13 billion government aid package earlier this year.

The collapse of the Schleswig-Holstein government has angered the SPD's national leadership. Hubertus Heil, the SPD general secretary, accused Carstensen of letting the coalition collapse in order to conceal the controversy surrounding Nonnenmacher's payment.

"I call his behavior indecent," Heil said on Monday. The way in which Carstensen engineered an early election was "not clever, but deceitful," he added.

Meanwhile, Merkel, who was forced into a grand coalition with the rival SPD in 2005 after failing to win a sufficiently clear majority in the last election, reiterated on Sunday that she wants to govern with the FDP after the next election.

She told ARD television that it would be easier to tackle the economic crisis together with the FDP than with the SPD.

The CDU and SPD have had to shelve their disagreements on a wide range of issues from nuclear energy to social policy over the last four years -- but even though they dislike working together, there's a chance they may have to form another grand coalition after the September election. Pollsters say there's still a chance that conservatives and the FDP will fail to win enough seats to govern together.

cro -- with wire reports