Germans cast their vote in general election too close to call

BERLIN • Germans went to the polls yesterday in a national election too close to call, with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) mounting a strong challenge to retiring Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives.

Dr Merkel has been in power since 2005 but plans to step down after the election, making the vote an era-changing event to set the future course of Europe's largest economy.

A fractured electorate means that after the election, leading parties will sound one another out before embarking on more formal coalition negotiations that could take months, leaving Dr Merkel, 67, in charge in a caretaker role.

"We all sense that this is a very important federal election," conservative candidate Armin Laschet from the Christian Democrats (CDU) told journalists after voting in his home constituency of Aachen. "It is a federal election that will decide the direction of Germany in coming years and therefore every vote counts."

He was ridiculed on social media for a misstep yesterday, capping a campaign marred by embarrassing gaffes that hurt his popularity.

Under German voting rules, voters must keep their choice confidential until they have left the polling station. But when casting his vote in Aachen, Mr Laschet folded his ballot the wrong way, revealing which party he had voted for before dropping it in the box.

It was no surprise that Mr Laschet had cast both votes for his CDU under an election system that allows voters to cast one vote for a representative in the country's 299 districts and one for the party they want in Parliament.

The blunder prompted calls for his vote to be disqualified as well as ridicule in national newspapers and on social media. The election commissioner said that Mr Laschet's vote would not be disqualified because he had voted for his own party, as expected. "This does not constitute influencing of the vote," the commissioner said on Twitter.

Running against Mr Laschet is Mr Olaf Scholz of the SPD, the Finance Minister in Dr Merkel's right-left coalition who won all three televised debates between the leading candidates. Mr Scholz, 63, has seen his party's lead over the conservatives squeezed to one to three points in final opinion polls, leaving Mr Laschet with a chance of clinching a narrow victory.

"I hope that as many citizens as possible will go and vote and make a very strong result for the SPD possible and give me the mandate to become the next chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany," Mr Scholz said after casting a ballot in his own constituency of Potsdam near Berlin.

The election commissioner said turnout stood at 36.5 per cent at 2pm local time (8pm Singapore time), down from 41.1 per cent four years ago. The figure does not include postal votes, which are expected to exceed those cast in the 2017 election because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The election is expected to yield a splintered Parliament, which will force the winner to form a three-way coalition to secure a majority. The most likely coalition scenarios see either the SPD or the conservative CDU-CSU bloc - whichever comes first - forming an alliance with the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP).

Mr Scholz told supporters in Potsdam last Saturday that his preferred outcome was for the SPD and Greens to secure a majority to rule alone without a third partner.

Both the conservatives and the FDP reject a European "debt union" and want to ensure that joint European Union borrowing to finance the bloc's Covid-19 recovery package remains a one-off.

The SPD has talked about taking steps towards a fiscal union. The Greens favour a common European fiscal policy to support investment in the environment, research, infrastructure and education.

Mr Scholz has not ruled out a leftist coalition with the Greens and the Left party, which wants to pull Germany out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, a red line for the SPD.

REUTERS