After running a daring campaign four years ago and barely avoiding defeat, Angela Merkel is playing it safe in her re-election bid by keeping her economic plans vague and relying on her steady leader image to win votes. The election program of her German conservatives, due to be approved by party members on Sunday, skirts the bold tax and labour market reform pledges Merkel championed four years ago, instead charting a course of continuity in tackling Germany's deepest post-war recession. Although the strategy could alienate the pro-business wing of her party, Merkel, 54, is betting if these traditional supporters refuse to back her in the Sept. 27 election, they will choose the Free Democrats (FDP), the party she hopes to partner with in the autumn. That could weigh on the results of her Christian Democrats (CDU), but still give her the centre-right parliamentary majority she is hoping for after four years of uneasy “grand coalition” rule with the rival Social Democrats (SPD). “The conservative election strategy is two-pronged - first sell Merkel as the safe, reliable option at a time of crisis and second, not make any mistakes,” said Klaus-Peter Schoeppner, head of polling group Emnid. “It's an unusually passive strategy which doesn't offer the people much in terms of concrete policies but that doesn't mean it won't work.” Polls released over the past week give Merkel's conservative bloc - the CDU and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) - support of 36 percent, in line with their disappointing result of 2005 and among their worst in the post-war era. But the same polls put the FDP, a party which favours free markets and a hands-off approach on social issues, on what would be a record high of 15 percent. The combination would give Merkel a thin centre-right majority in the Bundestag. Merkel had an even larger lead in 2005 but was unable to hold it. She ended up beating the SPD by just one percentage point and was forced her into an awkward right-left partnership. With this lesson in mind, preserving the advantage in the three months leading up to the election has become an obsession for Merkel's handlers, colored her domestic and foreign policies, shaped increasingly cautious public appearances and affected her treatment of the media. On the domestic front, her election programme advocates modest tweaks to the tax regime that are only subtly different from what the SPD is advocating. It promises to use any financial wiggle room over the next four years to cut taxes, but gives no timeframe nor spells out how this would be done. The promises of 2005 to loosen firing rules are gone, replaced by pledges of support for a minimum income-level for all Germans, vows to increase government subsidies for families with children, and an emphasis on the environment. “The conservatives have taken away everything from the SPD that was attractive to centrist voters - family policy, environmental policy, education - and left them with the trade unions,” said Wolfgang Nowak, director of the Alfred Herrhausen Society, a Deutsche Bank think tank. “Four years ago Merkel was all about economic reform. This time she is the reassuring crisis manager.” On foreign policy, Merkel has also played it safe, resisting requests by the United States to take on inmates from the military prison for terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay and telling President Barack Obama, even before he took office, he could forget about an increase in German troops in Afghanistan. Before her first trip to visit Obama in Washington this week, Berlin pushed for a news conference in the White House Rose Garden that would yield voter-friendly pictures of Merkel alongside the US president, who is hugely popular in Germany. Merkel's handlers largely shut out international media organizations from travelling with her to Washington, packing the plane instead with reporters from national newspapers, German regional press, local radio and television stations in an apparent attempt to win favour before the vote. “Merkel will be very careful over the coming months, using international appearances to play up her image as a leader who is above the fray,” said Peter Loesche, emeritus political scientist at Goettingen University. The European parliamentary elections in early June reinforced the message the conservatives should avoid nasty sparring with the SPD and their chancellor candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is also Merkel's foreign minister. Before that vote, the SPD unleashed a flurry of negative campaign ads portraying Merkel and her party as defenders of the greedy bankers responsible for the financial crisis. The conservatives took a non-confrontational approach and emerged a full 17 percentage points ahead of them. So as Steinmeier slowly steps up attacks on his boss in the hopes of pulling the SPD's dismal support levels up from the low 20s, Merkel is going out of her way to avoid criticising her challenger - a tactic that has been welcomed by conflict-shy German voters even as it infuriates the SPD.
