Word: fdp
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Regional elections rarely excite much attention outside the immediate locality. But there are notable exceptions and the results of yesterday's regional poll in the state of Hesse, which handed a coalition of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) a sweeping victory, is being studied closely across Germany and beyond...
...Sept. 18 showed Germans are ready for different mood music. The Social Democrats lost four percentage points, torpedoing any chance of a return to power for the incumbents. And although the Greens maintained their share of the vote at 8%, it was another small party, the Free Democratic Party (fdp), that attracted new and younger voters, many under 30, to edge ahead of Fischer's party with 10%. Fischer and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder were the first German leaders born too late to feel implicated in Germany's Nazi past. One result was a bolder, more assertive German foreign...
...Greens relied on people under 30 for most of their support, today their base is aging and the bulk of their vote comes from Germans in their 40s and 50s. Jan Böttcher, a 27-year-old law student at the Free University of Berlin, voted for the fdp, with their emphasis on free-market policies. "The big difference between us and the '68 generation is that we don't feel any real revolutionary drive," says Böttcher. "We feel an affinity with the economic system more than a need to demonstrate against it." First-time voters...
...Social Democrats; last month she ticked the Christian Democrat box. "I'm a little embarrassed to tell my friends about it," she admits. "But something has to happen. Germany needs this kind of a signal for change." The biggest winner from the generational shift may be the fdp. A party that once relied on support from middle-aged voters increasingly appeals to the young. In the election, the fdp's youthful leadership stressed a simple campaign message that called for radical labor-market and tax reform. Even the Greens no longer stand in the way of market reforms...
...Such calamity might befall Italy, but Germany, the rock of stability ?ber alles? It gets worse. There is no obvious way to cobble together a majority that can govern Germany for the next four years. Theoretically, the Social Democrat-Green coalition could recruit the FDP. But the party's chairman insists that he won't get into bed with Schr?der's Social Democrats and Joschka Fischer's Greens. On the right side of the political divide, Merkel could try to pry the Greens out of Schr?der's embrace. Arithmetically, this is a fetching idea; ideologically, it is not. How would...