Merkel Party Admits COVID Failings After Defeat in Regional Polls

Frankfurt, March 15 (AFP/APP): German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party on Monday admitted it must do better in its pandemic management after suffering heavy losses in two regional polls, six months before a general election.

The centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) scored its worst-ever results in elections in the southwestern states of Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, according to preliminary results published by the states. Armin Laschet, elected as the new head of the CDU in January, acknowledged that the government had fallen short in its handling of the outbreak as the dismal election results were blamed on growing public anger.

“The corona crisis is affecting everyone in our country, and that is why there have been debates about corona management. We must improve here,” he told reporters in Berlin, admitting the election results were “disappointing” for the CDU.

Markus Soeder, the head of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the CSU, called the results a “wake-up call” for the conservative alliance, also honing in on mistakes in the government’s virus response. The party must prove it can “govern well and reliably” in the run-up to the general election and offer a vision for the future, he said.

The CDU-CSU alliance “must give answers to these questions, and it must give them decisively,” he added.

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