Left on the Rise

The shape of a new government coalition in the state of Hesse was unclear after stunning losses robbed Angela Merkel's conservatives of their clear majority and the far left saw surprise gains.

After the votes were counted, Hesse's incumbent premier, Roland Koch, had a hair-thin majority, making uncertain the sort of coalition that could form a government and what role the candidate Koch -- who had led a controversial, openly xenophobic campaign -- could have in it.

At midmorning on Monday, Jan. 28, political advisers from all parties involved had holed up for strategy meetings.

Official results from Hesse showed the conservative CDU had slumped from a majority in the state legislature to finish only nominally ahead of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), with the same number of seats. The SPD candidate in Hesse, Andrea Ypsilanti, took 36.7 percent of the vote against the CDU's 36.8.

Search for a coalition

A deputy CDU leader in another state, Premier Christian Wulff of Lower Saxony, won re-election in a separate vote Sunday, despite moderate losses. The Left, a combination of former Social Democrats and eastern ex-communists, extended its reach in western Germany to enter both state parliaments.

But gains for the Left party and SPD in Hesse mean the CDU, together with its planned coalition partner Free Democrats (FDP), no longer have a large enough majority to rule in the state parliament in Wiesbaden.

This gives a clear mandate to the SPD to enter the state government in Hesse, according to acting SPD chairwoman Andrea Nahles. Voters saw to it that Koch took "the most brutal beating possible," Nahles told RBB news radio on Monday. While the SPD failed "by a nose" to gain a clear majority, it was clear that the voters in the western state increasingly stood behind the center-left party, and it should therefore be part of the government, she said.

Ypsilanti is currently in talks with other party representatives to discuss coalition possibilities. But Nahles reiterated Ypsilanti's campaign promise that her party would not enter into a coalition with the upsurge, far-left Left party, saying "the program and the people that they represent in Hesse do not stand for stability in government."

"Traffic light" coalition possible?

Meanwhile, SPD Secretary General Hubertus Heil called for a "traffic light" coalition to rule Hesse, which would be made up of the SPD (red), Free Democrats (yellow) and Green party, under the leadership of Ypsilanti.

"There is a Koch-must-go mood [among voters] that we have to take into account when making up the government," Heil told ZDF television talk show Morgenmagazin on Monday. "We will present the premier, I am fairly sure of that," he said.

Yet a parliamentary leader of the FDP from Hesse, Jörg-Uwe Hahn, said there is no way that his party would enter into a "traffic light" coalition. The FDP had planned to be coalition partner with the right-wing CDU, and could not be used as "a training wheel for a Red-Green" coalition, he told the DPA press agency.

Hahn predicted a coalition would form between the SPD, Greens and the Left party.

Amid the speculations on a new government, political observers took the time to mull over just what went so very wrong in the campaign of incumbent Koch -- and what it could mean for the larger question of CDU domination in German politics.

Koch faulted for polarizing strategy

Chemnitz-based election researcher Eckhard Jesse said the CDU should see the campaign as a powerful lesson. With his polarizing, xenophobic rhetoric about youth-crime, Koch led the campaign as if he were an opposition candidate, not an incumbent, Jesse told the Thüringer Allgemeine newspaper.

Merkel and other CDU candidates need to draw the conclusion that "they should take the same tact as Wulff," who handily won the state election in Lower Saxony. "That means that they should run a low-key, feel-good campaign. They shouldn't polarize -- especially not the chancellor," he said.

And political scientist Theo Schiller said Koch had reaped what he sowed from his controversial style.

"If Koch hadn't focused his campaign on youth crime and young offenders, the results might have been slightly different," the professor at the University of Marburg told DPA. The results were "catastrophic" for the CDU, he said.

By focusing on youth crime, Koch aimed to harm the SPD, but instead pilloried his own party, Schiller said. "He raised the question of deficits during the years his own government had ruled," he said. And was not able to give any satisfactory answers, he added.

No stopping rise of the Left

Like a number of other German political analysts, Schiller saw the Left party's gains as a sign of things to come.

"We can expect the Left to enter other state parliaments," he told DPA. But he also said he did not see the likelihood of the Left entering into a ruling coalition in Hesse together with the SPD. That would mean Ypsilanti would have to go back on her word to too great an extent, he said.