A bitter defeat for Merkel months before German election

In an extremely tight German state election that seemed to produce few clearcut winners, there was no argument over who the biggest loser was -- Chancellor Angela Merkel.   

Her Christian Democrats (CDU), led by rising star David McAllister, had convinced themselves over the past week that they were on the verge of a stunning come-from-behind victory in Lower Saxony, a major agricultural and industrial region that is Germany's closest approximation to a swing state.   

But on Sunday, they came up agonizingly short, losing power to the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens, who together garnered just one more seat in the state assembly than the center-right.   

The defeat is a bitter one for Merkel, even if she remains a strong favorite to win a third term in a federal election eight months from now.   

In one fell swoop, it gives the center-left a majority in the Bundesrat upper house of parliament, meaning the opposition can block major legislation from Merkel's government and initiate laws themselves.   

"I assume it won't be possible to push anything through the Bundesrat that the SPD doesn't want," Volker Kauder, a Merkel ally and leader of her CDU in parliament, told German public television on Monday morning.   

That will not change after the national election in September, even if Merkel's center-right coalition with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) manages to hold onto power.   

In the run-up to the federal vote, Merkel's room for maneuver will be limited and the notoriously risk-averse German leader may take a more cautious stance on a range of policy issues, including her management of the euro zone debt crisis.   

The vote is also a blow to McAllister, the 42-year-old half-Scot who had ruled Lower Saxony since 2010 and become a protege of the chancellor, declaring on the eve of the vote that he was happy to be "Merkel's Mac".   

There will be much hand-wringing in the CDU about McAllister's not-so-subtle hints to supporters in the weeks before the election that they use their votes to boost the score of the FDP.   

His message resonated with CDU voters, but perhaps stronger than he would have liked.   

The FDP, which had been expected to struggle to make the 5 percent threshold needed to enter the state assembly, ended up with a surprisingly strong score of 9.9 percent, largely thanks to CDU backers who split their two votes (in German elections voters cast ballots for both a party and a local candidate).   

Yet the FDP's strong showing appears to have come at the expense of McAllister's CDU, which scored 36 percent, down 6.5 points from their last result in Lower Saxony in 2008 and well below the 40 percent-plus that opinion polls had forecast.


REUTERS