Merkel faces protests in Germany's nationalist heartlands

LONDON - 1 September 2017: German Chancellor Angela Merkel has faced fierce protests on the campaign trail for next month’s federal elections in Germany, calling into question her strategy of actively targeting regions of the country where right-wing populists have been gathering support, The Guardian reported on Thursday.

Merkel is hoping to be re-elected for a fourth term on 24 September, and her centre-right Christian Democrats have a poll lead over Martin Schulz’s centre-left Social Democrats.

On Tuesday, she told a press conference she was targeting the heartlands of populist nationalists Alternative für Deutschland, saying she wanted to “make a stand against the yelling”.

More than one in three of Merkel’s campaign rallies are being held in the five states that used to make up the socialist German Democratic Republic, even though they are home to only about a fifth of the country’s population.

But the scale and intensity of protests at some of the widely televised events have overwhelmed organisers. In Brandenburg an der Havel, west of Berlin, Merkel’s rally on Tuesday was accompanied by a 40-minute chorus of jeers after the AfD and the far-right National Democratic Party organised a counter rally.

During her speeches, Merkel lived up to her promise of making a stand against rightwing populism, telling her audience in Brandenburg that “you don’t solve problems by yelling, but by mucking in”. On the podium in Bitterfeld, she re-stated that her party would not contemplate entering a coalition with either the AfD or the leftwing Die Linke.

Polls released this week indicate that even though the chancellor’s lead over her main competitor, Schulz, remains solidly in double digits, her options for coalition-forming are narrowing.

One survey published by the INSA polling institute on Tuesday shows only two realistic options for the next government: another “grand coalition” between Merkel’s CDU and the SPD, or a so-called “Jamaica coalition” between the CDU, the pro-business Free Democrats and the Green party. A leftwing coalition between the SPD, Die Linke and the Greens would fall short of a governing majority, according to most polls.