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Angela Merkel’s party braces for drubbing in German state polls

March 14 2021, 9:30 pm

German Chancellor Angela Merkel waves as she can be seen on a screen inside the Chancellery during a video conference of the digital dialog series 'The Federal Chancellor in Conversationí, on March 10, 2021 at the Chancellery in Berlin. - During the dialog series íThe Federal Chancellor in Conversationí Chancellor Angela Merkel talks to citizens on a regular basis, on March 10, 2021 she had a virtual encounter with workers manning counselling helplines during the pandemic. (Photo by CLEMENS BILAN / POOL / AFP)

Stuttgart, Germany, March 14 (AFP/APP): Germans headed to the polls in two key regional elections on Sunday, with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives bracing for a drubbing on anger over a corruption scandal and a series of pandemic setbacks.

The votes for new regional parliaments in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Wuerttemberg are seen as a bellwether ahead of September 26‘s general election — which will be the first in more than 15 years not to feature Merkel.

Recent surveys have shown that support for Merkel’s CDU/CSU alliance has fallen to a one-year low at around 30 percent as Germans sour on its coronavirus crisis management. “Merkel’s CDU is facing a disaster,” the top-selling Bild tabloid said, calling the polls a “corona election”.

Merkel’s centre-right CDU and its Bavarian CSU sister party have been roiled by damaging claims about MPs apparently profiting from face mask deals early on in the pandemic, forcing three lawmakers to step down in recent days.

Deepening the conservatives’ woes is growing public anger about a sluggish vaccination campaign, a delayed start to free rapid testing and stubbornly high infection rates despite months of shutdowns.

Germans could perhaps look past the “mask affair”, Der Spiegel weekly wrote, “if citizens felt that the government was doing its job, protecting it from the virus and guiding it through the crisis. But it’s not”.