Why the elections in Berlin are important for Germany
Berlin returns to the vote on February 12 to repeat the 2021 vote, canceled due to irregularities due to organizational malfunctions. The article by Pierluigi Mennitti
The repetition of the vote for the government of the city of Berlin risks taking on national implications, should the polls confirm last week's polls. For the first time in more than twenty years, the CDU could find itself the first party and, despite the difficulty of forging alliances for the government, it could put the outgoing majority of the left, made up of social democrats, greens and the radical left, in a serious crisis.
THE ELECTIONS IN BERLIN
Voting will return to the capital on Sunday 12 February, to remedy the serious organizational errors that invalidated the September 2021 elections and for which the supervisory authorities have imposed a repetition. The current government and the mayor in office ( Franziska Giffey , SPD) must therefore be reconfirmed by the polls if they want to continue the work begun just over a year ago.
Berlin, in addition to being the capital of Germany, together with two other cities (Hamburg and Bremen) enjoys the status of city state and therefore has the rank of Land. Technically, therefore, it is a regional election and this in itself increases its political value. It is the first vote of a rather demanding year, which will see ballots open in Bremen in May and in October in two fundamental Lands such as Hesse and Bavaria. It comes in the midst of the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, and while in a city as large as Berlin local issues matter a certain amount, the vote is also seen as a partial indicator of the health of the federal government.
WHAT THE SURVEYS SAY
And the polls produced by opinion poll institutes leave room for a surprise. For the first time in more than twenty years, a candidate of the CDU could have his nose in front and perhaps mess up the cards on the table of the outgoing coalition, which was already working on the continuation of the alliance with the only doubt (not of little importance anyway) of the exponent who would lead it, Social Democrat or Green.
The problem is that the gap between the Christian Democrats and the other political forces appears to be substantial and has been increasing in recent days. The forecast provided by the Infratest/dimap institute for the regional public television channel RBB, indicates the CDU at 25%, followed by the SPD which would thus have surpassed the Greens who had instead been in the lead for a large part of the electoral campaign : 19% to the SPD of outgoing mayor Giffey, 18% to the Grünen, led by Bettina Jarasch, current minister (in Berlin they are called senators, the government is defined as the Senate) for the Environment, Mobility and Climate and Consumer Protection. The other parties are even further behind: 12% the radical left of the Linke, 10% the nationalist right of Alternative für Deutschland, 6% the liberals of the FDP. However, all these parties will enter the Berlin parliament, with still some slight suspense for the liberals, one point above the 5% threshold.
A second survey carried out by the ZDF shows the same trend, but with more contained gaps: Cdu at 24%, Spd at 21, Verdi at 18.
THE CONSEQUENCES
For Franziska Giffey, who has been at the helm of the capital since December 2021, such a result would be a joke. The incumbent mayor especially suffers from the bad performance of his party, because if the mayor were to vote directly, Berliners would still prefer her. But as always, in Germany we vote for the party and the candidates have a driving or braking effect, but they are almost never decisive.
The SPD has been in government of the city for almost 35 years, 25 of which the mayor was the first party to vote. “Berlin bleibt Rot”, Berlin remains red, the old motto of the last years of the Weimar Republic, seemed to have crystallized in city life at the turn of the new century. When the Genosse returned to the Senate after seven years of absence, it was March 1989 and the headquarters of the Rathaus was still in the old Schöneberg building, in West Berlin, the one from where John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave his famous speech in 1963 "Ich bin ein Berliner". In short, a certain attrition of power in the Berlin SPD is evident and at the moment there is no favorable wind coming from the national government.
On the contrary, the CDU seems to have been reborn, even if its candidate Kai Wegner is little known (a third of voters say they don't know who he is). However, the party has built up the recovery by focusing on local issues, exploiting the discomfort caused by the experiments on city mobility judged too ideological, pressing the administration on the daily problems in the neighborhoods and, above all, raising the issue of security and public order after the attacks on New Year's Eve against the police and firefighters, which took place in some areas with a high density of immigrants. This issue in particular leapt to the center of the debate: the Berlin integration model has come under accusation and the Cdu now pushes the horizon of criticism further, questioning the entire development project of the left-wing junta for the capital, according to him modest compared to the ambitions of a global city. The time of poor but beautiful Berlin is over, the city should come of age, but this coalition doesn't know what dress to wear: this is Wegner's message in summary.
Giffey is all played out in the last week. It's not an impossible mission: the Social Democrat exponent, who worked her way up in politics in the problematic neighborhood of Neukölln and who gained ministerial experience at the federal level, is a combative and tenacious woman, who in this first year of trade union has launched projects and moved interests. After overtaking the green competitor in the preferences, he will attempt a backlash to catch the Christian-Democratic candidate as well. Or at least to get as close as possible to his ribs. Always assuming that the polls have seen us right, the match for the new majority will also depend on the distance between the CDU and the other parties.
If they are the 6 points predicted today, it will not be so easy for the parties of the current coalition to turn a blind eye. But forming a new government could get tricky. The Berlin Greens have a very leftist tradition, a far cry from the pragmatic stance that the party has inaugurated nationwide and the CDU candidate has ruled out future alliances. Of course, not even Linke envisages government relations with the Christian Democrats, but itself risks remaining out of the picture. The SPD remains more cautious, Giffey herself plays the card of involving the liberals on the model of the national coalition. However, we are at the propaganda skirmishes of the last days of the electoral campaign. Everything hangs in the balance waiting to read the real numbers and make the first moves from there.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/berlino-elezioni-12-febbraio/ on Mon, 06 Feb 2023 06:47:46 +0000.