I wrote a story yesterday for The Local, a site I do a lot of work for, about the SPD’s desperate attempts to stay relevant as national elections approach. The main takeaway is, Angela Merkel has an extraordinary degree of popularity, in part because she’s not viewed by many Germans as an especially polarizing figure. She would be a tough candidate to run against in more prosperous times (see Schröder, Gerhard) but in a crisis, facing an uncharismatic opponent (who happens to be Foreign Minister), I think she’s unstoppable. And because Steinmeier has to play sort-of nice since he’s also Merkel’s deputy, someone else has to make the case that the CDU can’t run the country…enter Franz Müntefering, also known as the man who compared hedge funds to locusts. I get why it is the way it is, but absent anything more than attack dog tacticts, it’s not enough to save the SPD this time around…though I will put my money on Große Koalition 2.0.
