German Chancellor Angela Merkel attends a press conference following video discussions with heads of federal governments on vaccination strategy at the Federal Chancellery on March 23, 2021 in Berlin, Germany.
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LONDON – A third wave of the coronavirus pandemic has left Chancellor Angela Merkel and her ruling CDU party more political as the country moves closer to federal elections later this year.
Germany was initially widely praised for its approach to the coronavirus pandemic, deftly handling the country’s first outbreak by isolating cases and tracing contacts, while its modern and well-equipped hospitals helped keep the number of fatalities down.
A year later, and the situation is very different, Europe’s largest economy is facing a third wave of infections, a rising death toll and allegations of mismanagement of health crises against the government.
On Wednesday, Merkel caused a furore by undoing a plan to lock the country over the Easter holidays by saying she had made a “mistake”. This came after criticism from health experts and business leaders who said the proposal could do more harm than good.
The concession comes as experts rethink Germany’s handling of the pandemic, looking at how the ruling Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union parties could be affected when Germans vote in a federal election in September.
Merkel’s CDU party has already fared poorly in the recent state elections, indicating that it could be punished again later in the year by voters mistaken towards the center-left Social Democrats and in particular the environmentalists of the Greens, whose support has increased significantly.
“Mismanagement hurts,” Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank, said in a note Thursday.
Last March, a nimble response to the pandemic sent support for Chancellor Angela Merkel and her CDU / CSU almost into the stratosphere. But he added that while Germany handled the first wave of the pandemic better than most other developed countries, “this is no longer the case.”
“Confusing policy shifts and slow vaccination progress now have public confidence in the ability of the CDU / CSU, which has guided the government throughout most of post-war history, including the past 15 years, to push Germany through the crisis. pilots, ”he noted. .
Schmieding noted that a bribe scandal involving CDU-CSU MPs has resonated with the public, with polls showing a drop in support for the CDU-CSU to pre-pandemic levels. Merkel’s turn away from an ‘Easter break’ could add to the misery he added.
What’s going wrong?
A decline in popularity for the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, comes as questions remain as to who will be at the helm of the German government in September, when Merkel’s final term in office expires. The CDU-CSU has not yet said which candidate it will nominate for election.
Merkel’s turnaround on Wednesday was unusual, as she has long been considered a steady hand in times of crisis. The move showed that the German government also feels the pressure to make tough decisions in a rapidly changing pandemic situation.
Following Wednesday’s turnaround, Merkel rejected opposition demands to ask Parliament for a vote of confidence in her government.
Germany has now registered more than 2.7 million cases and 75,498 deaths, to date, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, much lower than in the UK. This compares to the UK’s 4.3 million cases and more than 126,621 deaths.
The country had recently started relaxing lockdown measures, which allowed schools to reopen in February and allow some non-essential stores to allow customers back in earlier this month. Like other European countries, it counted on the rollout of coronavirus vaccines to enable it to slowly reopen its economy, the largest in Europe.
Germany is not alone in having to change its plans; Italy will reintroduce a national lockdown over the Easter period for the second year in a row, while Paris and other parts of France will again be partially closed.
Public tolerance for renewed lockdowns could be higher if vaccine roll-out in the EU were planned. But as a whole, immunization programs across the block reveal an inhibited rate of vaccinations.
EU leaders virtually gathered on Thursday to discuss whether to block the export of vaccines from the EU as other countries, such as the UK, are racing ahead with their programs. Earlier on Thursday, Merkel defended the EU’s strategy of purchasing vaccines as a bloc rather than individually.
“Now that we see that even small differences in vaccine distribution are causing big discussions, I wouldn’t imagine some Member States having vaccines and others not. That would shake the internal market to the bone,” she told me ahead. the German legislators. of the EU summit, Reuters reported.
She also suggested that the region’s vaccination issues had more to do with lower production capacity than under-ordered injections.
“UK manufacturing sites produce for Britain and the United States don’t export, so we depend on what we can make in Europe,” she said. “We have to assume that the virus, with its mutations, will keep us busy for a long time, so the demand is well beyond this year,” she added.