STRAIGHT TALK
MARK BARNES: Wanted: virtuous, strong and united leadership
How many combinations of 33%, 20.5%, 12.6%, 9.2% and 8.9% can you come up with that get over that magic 50% required for control? Quite a few, if you do the sums. Not that many if you’re trying to get together a cohesive coalition government, maybe only one. This is the challenge facing Angela Merkel after her "win, but …" result in the German elections. She won a fourth term, but with a smaller percentage of the vote. Technically, but not practically, parties other than CDU/CSU (33% of the vote) could come together to form a majority, but they’re simply too far apart ideologically and any such result would be too fragile and fractious to govern. The extremists on either side will be excluded from Merkel’s new government, but there can be no doubt that the Bundestag is going to be a noisier place as the AfD (12.6%) and Die Linke (9.2%) have their say. We’ve already become used to such disruptive parliamentary debates here. The worst consequence of adversarial coalition government is...
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