Merkel and Schulz fight over who’s better European

The German chancellor and her challenger are fighting on two fronts to claim the title of European champion.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel chats with Martin Schulz in 2013, when he was president of the European Parliament | Olivier Hoslet/EPA

BERLIN — Who can make Europe great again?

That question has become central in Germany’s general election campaign, with conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Social Democrat challenger Martin Schulz battling to be seen as the candidate best placed to strengthen the European Union.

After so many years of Euro-pessimism, the EU is suddenly seen as a vote winner, as it was in France for Emmanuel Macron last month. Both Merkel and Schulz have increased the emphasis on Europe in their campaigns for September’s parliamentary election, sensing that voters see a strong EU as the best response to uncertainty caused by U.S. President Donald Trump’s moves away from established international alliances, Russia’s increased military assertiveness in Eastern Europe and Britain’s Brexit vote.

The Social Democrats had thought European integration would be a winning issue for them, as Schulz is a former president of the European Parliament who spent more than two decades in Brussels. Moreover, he is running against a chancellor whose longtime Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has become the epitome of austerity policies that have divided the EU between its wealthier north and southern countries hit hard by the sovereign debt crisis, such as Greece.

But Merkel has proved adept at exploiting her status as the EU’s pre-eminent political leader, most recently in the beer hall speech that went around the world — in which the chancellor lamented that Europe could no longer fully rely on others and declared: “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands.”

It’s not the first time that the Social Democrats have tried to claim Macron as one of their own.

Since then, her conservative bloc has managed to increase an already substantial lead over the SPD in opinion polls. It now has the support of 39 percent of voters — 14 percentage points ahead of the SPD at 25 percent, according to a survey by public broadcaster ZDF.

But the SPD is not about to give up on the EU as an election issue.

“Europe needs to be moved into the center of the campaign,” Michael Roth, the SPD’s minister of state for Europe, said at a conference at the foreign ministry on Thursday.

“There are entirely different ideas about what a united Europe means,” Roth said. It will now be up to the SPD to explain how their vision of Europe is different from Merkel’s — and to persuade German voters that it’s also more attractive.

The battle to be the best European is being fought on two fronts:

1. Making the most of Macron

After the charismatic pro-European candidate Macron won France’s presidential election in May, the idea of the Franco-German axis as a guarantor of stability in Europe became a central theme in the German election campaign. That idea was reinforced by Trump’s appearances at NATO and G7 summits that cast doubt on Washington’s reliability as an ally.

The Social Democrats’ great fear is that Merkel, who appears regularly on the global stage alongside Macron, will be primarily associated with this Franco-German engine — even though she and Macron differ on details of how to reform Europe.

So the SPD is trying to send out the message that if German voters truly want the European Union to change, new faces in both Paris and Berlin will be necessary. And the party is not being too subtle about it either.

“Macron needs a dynamic politician with experience in European politics as his partner,” Schulz told a crowd gathered in the SPD-led foreign ministry in Berlin on Thursday.

He stressed that he knew Macron well and the two of them had discussed some of the French president’s proposals for EU reform back when Schulz was head of the European Parliament and Macron was France’s economy minister.

“And I remember very well that the chancellor … and her finance minister [Schäuble] loudly said ‘no way’ to those considerations back then,” he added.

It’s not the first time that the Social Democrats have tried to claim Macron as one of their own.

When Macron made his first visit as president to Berlin, SPD Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel went to the airport to greet him personally — before the new French leader met with Merkel. Afterward, Gabriel’s official Facebook page featured a picture of the welcome with the caption “Two old friends.”

So far, however, the SPD’s efforts seem to have had little effect. National and international media coverage portrays Macron and Merkel as a pro-European, multilateralist duo moving forward on issues such as security, migration, and eurozone reform.

“A magic dwells in each beginning,” Merkel quoted from German author Hermann Hesse at a press conference last month following her first meeting with President Macron, who’s known as a connoisseur of German literature.

A few weeks later, a video showing Macron swerving away from Donald Trump to embrace Merkel at last moth’s NATO summit in Brussels went viral in Germany.

2. Money talks

If the SPD wants to present itself as the party that’s willing to go deeper when it comes to European integration, it faces a challenge: most Germans are committed pro-Europeans but they are hesitant about paying out more money. The country is already one of the major net contributors to the EU budget.

“In Germany, there is a sort of Pavlovian conditioning to say, ‘No more money,’ when we talk about EU finances,” Schulz said on Thursday. But he quickly added that he was “not talking about [spending] more money.”

Anticipating attacks by his conservative rivals, Schulz stressed early in his campaign that as chancellor he would not necessarily change much about Germany’s insistence on debt reduction and structural reforms in crisis-ridden eurozone countries.

But such statements mean the SPD still needs to explain exactly how it would act differently from Merkel.

Schulz’s strategy so far has been to stress reforms he would like to make to the EU budget. In other words, it’s not about paying more for Europe, it’s about focusing on how the money is spent.

This, Schulz said, could involve coming up with a joint budget for the eurozone, as suggested by Macron — although the SPD leader added important caveats: “If the eurozone comes up with joint tasks in the labor market, in tax policy, in investment policy — joint tasks supported by all members of the eurozone.”

We’re up for fundamental reforms, while Merkel’s conservatives are primarily interested in preserving the status quo — that’s the message the SPD will try to send.

“To fight for a united Europe is and remains a matter close to my heart,” Schulz said on Thursday at a meeting of the SPD’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag.

This passion, he added, was not something he recently discovered in a beer tent.

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