PERHAPS it was the impeccably proletarian setting: a vast former coal mine in the industrial Ruhr. Or perhaps it was the 1,500-strong crowd chanting “Martin! Martin! Martin!” Or perhaps it was the sound system blaring the upbeat 1990 hit “I’ve got the power”. But for some reason Martin Schulz, the Social Democratic (SPD) candidate for Germany’s chancellorship, got carried away and said something rash at his early-April rally in Essen. If the SPD won the state election here in North-Rhine Westphalia on May 14th, he proclaimed, it would go on to become “the strongest force in Germany” and eject Angela Merkel at the general election in September.
The Essen rally coincided with the so-called Schulz-Effekt, the surge in support for the SPD following Mr Schulz’s coronation as party leader in January, which saw it draw almost level with Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) for the first time in five years. Its poll numbers in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s industrial heartland and most populous state, and Schleswig-Holstein, its northernmost state which votes on May 7th, had also jumped (see...Continue reading
Souce: Europe http://ift.tt/2p2Upya
EmoticonEmoticon