WITH FRIENDS like these, who needs enemies? Another family row has broken out between Germany’s sister conservative parties—the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) and its bigger sibling, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The pair choose a joint candidate for chancellor, and in April Armin Laschet, the CDU’s leader (pictured, right), got the nod over the more popular Markus Söder, head of the CSU (on the left). The parties were supposed to unite behind Mr Laschet, but after months of barely disguised sulking, the CSU is now making it clear that they find him as impressive as a soggy Weisswurst. On September 8th, asked by a journalist if Mr Laschet was Germany’s next chancellor, Mr Söder grimaced and responded with a sarky “Klar!” (“Sure”). A day later Markus Blume, the CSU’s secretary-general, told Der Spiegel that the CDU/CSU would “of course” be doing better had they opted for his boss. (File that under “true, but unhelpful.”) Expect grimaces all round when Mr Laschet appears at the CSU’s pre-election congress in Nuremberg on September 11th.
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Meanwhile the CDU’s miseries have only deepened. Its panicked campaign to spook voters into believing that Olaf Scholz, the popular Social Democrat (SPD) chancellor-candidate, will invite the hard leftists of Die Linke into government has utterly failed to shift the polling needle. Yet it is doubling down. Even Angela Merkel, who had been doing her best to remain aloof from the campaign fray, was sucked in this week. At what was probably her last appearance before parliament she warned that a vote for Mr Scholz—who has served as her vice-chancellor since 2018—risked undermining Germany’s much-prized “moderation”. “I’m only telling the truth!” the chancellor exclaimed, as Die Linke MPs booed. (Commentators dismayed by Mrs Merkel’s rare foray into partisanship seemed surprised to learn that Germany’s monarchical chancellor remains a party politician.) There is still a fortnight to go, and the polls may be wrong. But for now, the CDU’s campaign is looking like a case study in some future political strategists’ textbook on how to lose elections.
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Not that it has been plain sailing for the SPD. In Hamburg, Mr Scholz’s home town, an SPD member of the city-state’s government earned himself lasting ignominy (and his own derisive #PimmelGate hashtag) by ordering six police to search the house of “ZooStPauli”, a hapless Twitter user who had called him a “dick”. The following day saw a raid of a rather more serious nature, when prosecutors swooped on Mr Scholz’s finance ministry, as well as the justice ministry, as part of an anti-money laundering probe. The Financial Intelligence Unit, part of the finance ministry, stands accused of failing to act on banks’ warnings about questionable transactions. Mr Scholz criticised the decision to raid his ministry, saying officials should have put questions in writing.
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Size is starting to matter in the Bundestag. Although Germany’s mixed electoral system preserves proportionality, it throws up perverse outcomes when the vote fragments. The last election produced 709 MPs, well over the legal minimum of 598, putting pressure on office space and lifting the parliament’s annual running costs to over €1bn ($1.2bn). This time, reckons the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Bundestag could swell to over 900 members. Only China’s rubber-stamp congress is bigger. Attempts to tweak Germany’s electoral law have so far foundered on this or that party’s objections. Those who want to throw the scoundrels out may be dismayed to see how many of them are coming in.
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Although the Delta variant has lifted Germany’s covid-19 incidence rate to its highest level since May, the pandemic has largely taken a back seat in the campaign. That is not to everyone’s taste. Lothar Wieler, head of the federal disease-control agency, warned this week that hospitals could become overburdened if the vaccination rate did not pick up. Almost all the new hospitalisations are among the unvaccinated, but Germany has a lot of them: only 62% of adults are double-jabbed, and the vaccination rate has tailed off at a lower level than in comparable countries (see below). France solved this problem by making life extremely difficult for the unjabbed. A country in the middle of a tricky election campaign is unlikely to follow suit.
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