Merkel’s rivals roll out big guns to narrow gap

Bloomberg

Angela Merkel’s main rivals for the Chancellery stepped up their criticism of her handling of Germany’s domestic and international agenda, slamming her for failing to address the diesel scandal rocking the auto industry and accusing her of kowtowing to President Donald Trump.
Six weeks before federal elections that will determine whether Merkel wins a fourth term, Social Democratic Party grandees went on the attack in a bid to help her SPD challenger, Martin Schulz, reel in a poll lead for Merkel’s bloc of as much as 17 percentage points.
Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, a former Social Democratic Party leader, said that Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union-led bloc is intent on channeling funds into defense spending at the expense of social programs. That’s a “signal to Trump that they will yield to his pressure,” Gabriel said in a interview with newspapers of RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland published Monday.
Former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who clawed back a lead of more than 20 points at a similar stage of the 2005 campaign only to lose to Merkel by a single percentage point, took aim at her crisis management of the diesel scandal in a weekend interview with the Swiss newspaper Blick.
“I don’t want to spoil anyone’s vacation,” Schroeder was cited as saying in Blick’s Sunday edition, a reference to Merkel’s near-three-week absence when the scandal erupted. “But I would have personally taken charge. It’s just too important.”

CAMPAIGN SHIFT
The rolling out of the SPD’s big guns to pound Merkel suggests a new tack to gain purchase going into the September 24 election. Schulz, a former president of the European Parliament who only took over the SPD leadership in January, has addressed similar themes while noticeably declining to attack the chancellor. That gentlemanly approach may now be changing as the campaign heats up after the summer break. “The closed season for Mrs Merkel is over,” Thomas Oppermann, the SPD’s caucus leader in the Bundestag, told Tagesspiegel newspaper’s Sunday edition. In the run-up to the election, he said, his party will “confront Merkel each day with the challenges and problems our country faces, as well as with the opportunities that she’s
let pass by.”
Merkel’s bloc maintained its lead with 38 percent support in a weekly Emnid survey published by Bild am Sonntag newspaper, while the SPD — her coalition partner of the past four years — climbed one point to 24 percent.