Tokyo, March 29: German Chancellor Angela Merkel Monday lamented her party’s “painful defeat” in a crucial state poll and blamed the debacle on fears sparked by the Japan nuclear crisis.
She said after a meeting of her Christian Democrats that their loss of power Sunday in their conservative heartland Baden-Wuerttemberg after 58 years at the helm meant that the party could not return to “business as usual.”
“That is a watershed moment for the state and also in the history of the Christian Democratic Union. We will have to work through this painful defeat with our friends in Baden-Wuerttemberg for a while to come,” she said.
Merkel, 56, said she was a supporter of nuclear power but that the post-tsunami crisis at the Fukushima plant had led her to rethink her position.
Nuclear power is unpopular in Germany, but polls indicated voters saw Merkel’s zigzagging as an electoral ploy; it cost her support while boosting the Greens, who doubled their score in Baden-Wuerttemberg and tripled it in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate, where they are expected to form a coalition with the Social Democrats.
Merkel ruled out Monday a Cabinet reshuffle or an end to her coalition with the embattled pro-business Free Democrats, who failed to win seats in Rhineland-Palatinate and barely scraped in in Baden-Wuerttemberg.
“We had trouble at the beginning, that’s perfectly clear, but we have accomplished a lot together and we will continue to do so in the remaining years of this term,” she said of her almost 18-month-old center-right alliance.
She congratulated the Greens on their success but said they had to turn what could be seen as an anti-nuclear protest vote into a viable program.
“The Greens had a very good outcome yesterday. But there’s a difference between being in the opposition and bearing responsibilities in the government,” she added.
——–Agencies