'Germany is not a nation of surveillance. Germany is a nation of freedom,' Merkel says. NSA looms in German election

BERLIN — It’s election season in Germany and there’s one campaign issue that won’t go away: the NSA surveillance scandal.

A month before the Sept. 22 federal elections here, which determine whether Chancellor Angela Merkel and her party will be reelected for a third term, the NSA scandal appears in headline after headline in German newspapers.


And in what’s otherwise considered to be a fairly quiet campaign season, the new information about U.S. surveillance has given parties across the political spectrum ammunition to use against Merkel — and caused her party, the center-right Christian Democratic Union, to hit back.

The issue is unlikely to cost the very popular, two-term chancellor another four years in office: Most observers expect her to win next month. But Germany, whose citizens are suspicious of any hint of government spying, has witnessed perhaps the strongest backlash of any country against news of the NSA surveillance program since details were leaked in June.

( PHOTOS: Pols, pundits weigh in on NSA report)

Since then, Merkel has expressed anger over the NSA’s actions and discussed the issue with President Barack Obama when he visited Berlin. At the same time, she has urged the German people to learn the full scope of the program. Her government has also set up negotiations with the U.S. to create a “ no-spy pact” between the two countries.

“With every day it becomes clear to the United States that this is important for us,” she said at a July press conference in Berlin. “Germany is not a nation of surveillance. Germany is a nation of freedom.”

( Also on POLITICO: Obama can't get ahead of NSA story)

But Merkel’s main opposition, the center-left Social Democratic Party, as well as the Greens and the Left Party, say she isn’t pushing back hard enough against the U.S. They’ve unleashed a barrage of criticism, hoping to use the issue to hurt Merkel’s chances in the election: Her party still leads its closest challenger by more than 15 percentage points in most public polling here.

SPD officials, including chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück, have sought to use the issue against Merkel since the program’s details first came to light earlier this summer, saying the two-term chancellor isn’t doing enough to protect German citizens’ privacy. The SPD, along with the Left Party and the Greens, is asking just how much Merkel and her government knew about the NSA program before details were leaked to the public.

“As chancellor, Ms. Merkel swore to prevent harm to the German people,” Steinbrück told the tabloid Bild am Sonntag last month, arguing that the programs clearly violated German laws.

( Also on POLITICO: Dismay at latest NSA reveal)

He also implied that Merkel and her office knew about the extent of the spying before the information was leaked.

“Secret services are coordinated by the Chancellery,” Steinbrück said. “If you are sitting at the wheel, you carry the responsibility — whether you have fallen asleep or not.”

But Merkel’s CDU has struck back against the SPD, saying they were part of the government during the years when many of these policies were put in place.

(Also on POLITICO: NSA questions hitting lawmakers on the home front)

Government spokesman Georg Streiter noted earlier this month that German intelligence forces first began sharing data with the U.S. under Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the chief of staff to former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, in 2002. In other words, Streiter was saying, the SPD isn’t blameless when it comes to authorizing surveillance and data-sharing.

The opposition’s criticism seems to have had little effect on Merkel or her chances of being reelected, observers say.

“The opposition parties tried to make it count, but the electorate is not really buying it,” said Jakob Augstein, editor of the left-leaning weekly paper Der Freitag, who has written extensively on the issue.

But the problem for Merkel is that news about the scope of the NSA’s activities just keeps coming. With every new story or report — including the most recent news, a Wall Street Journal story late Tuesday saying that the NSA’s network has the capacity to reach 75 percent of U.S. Internet traffic — the issue gets new political oxygen.

Merkel has steered clear of the topic at her campaign rallies across the country. But at her first rally, in the west German city of Seligenstadt, her speech was interrupted by SPD protesters holding NSA-related signs and calling for Merkel to go.

Despite the level of attention paid to the NSA issue here in Germany and the extent to which it’s discussed, Merkel and her party don’t seem to have suffered in the polls.

An ARD/Infratest dimap poll from July found that 78 percent of German voters think Merkel needs to “demand an appropriate response” from the U.S. and the United Kingdom, and 61 percent said they were surprised at the extent to which Germany is monitored.

Still, that same poll found that voters preferred Merkel to Steinbrück by more than 30 points, 58 percent to 27 percent. Asked who they thought would be chancellor after the election, the margin was even wider: 81 percent think Merkel would be reelected, compared with just 13 percent who said Steinbrück would win.

The CDU has consistently polled at about 15 points ahead of the SDP, a margin that’s been unchanged since the NSA scandal first broke. An August ARD/Infratest dimap poll found the CDU-CSU leading with 42 percent, compared with 25 percent for the SPD, 12 percent for the Greens, 8 percent for the Left, 5 percent for the Free Democratic Party and 3 percent for the Pirate Party.

Overall, most German political observers expect Merkel to win a third term, though it’s still unclear with which party her CDU-CSU will form their coalition government.

“The NSA issue is pretty widely discussed over here but has no impact on the campaign,” said Kerstin Plehwe, president and CEO of Initiative Prodialog, a nonpartisan think tank in Berlin. “My guess is that Merkel will remain in power either with the Liberals [the FDP] or in a Great Coalition [with the SDP].”