New Bavarian putsch

The squabble has weakened Germany's ruling coalition

Yesterday it turned out that in Sunday's elections to the state parliament - Landtag - of Bavaria, the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) party received a respectable, by the standards of European democracies, 43.4% of the vote. Any other major party can only dream of such a result. Nevertheless, this is a disaster for a party operating in a “free state” (as the federal state of Bavaria is called in the German constitution).

The fact is that for the last 46 years, the CSU had the majority of parliamentary seats in the land parliament, and, accordingly, it had the last word in the formation of the land government and its policies. The CSU was so firmly established at the top of the Bavarian political pyramid that it was called the “state party” of the state.

There were two of these in modern Germany. The Social Democrats of the largest federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia were still considered “unsinkable,” but the 39-year era of their rule ended in May 2005 with a crushing defeat. Now the “rainy day” has come for the CSU. However, the landslide result was predictable. After the resignation of party leader and head of Bavarian government Edmund Stoiber in 2007, his successors failed to win the sympathy of the masses.

Spiteful critics say Eddie was ousted after a scandal caused by his secret tracking of his fellow soldiers. Defeated and offended, he, according to sources in the CSU, has been diligently “filing” the legs under the chairs of his successors - the new party boss Erwin Huber and local Prime Minister Günther Beckstein. Now the results of the Bavarian “putsch” (this is also the current political vocabulary of the “free state”) are obvious, and Herr Stoiber invites his party members to “feel the difference.” After all, as recently as 2003, almost 61% of voters supported him - this was the best result of the CSU in the entire history of this party, created in the first post-war years. Now Huber, apparently, will also have to resign as head of the party.

The failure of the Bavarian conservatives will inevitably affect German politics and at the federal level, since they, together with the Christian Democrats, are part of the CDU/CSU bloc led by Chancellor Angela Merkel. On the eve of the September 28 elections, she openly spoke out in support of, as they say here, the “sister parties” - after all, elections to the Bundestag will be held in the fall of 2009.

Now the CDU's election strategy will be built taking into account the outcome of the elections in Bavaria. But it is already clear that the positions of the ruling coalition of the CDU/CSU and the SPD in the upper house of parliament - the Bundesrat (Federation Council) - have been shaken. Now it has only a minimal majority there, with which it is difficult to make decisions in its own interests.

Yuri Shpakov, Berlin