Chancellor Angela Merkel faces the biggest test of her second term today in a secret ballot to elect Germany’s largely ceremonial president, a vote that threatens to rattle her coalition.

Merkel commands a 21-seat majority in the 1,244-member assembly of federal lawmakers and state delegates who will elect the president. While that should ensure victory for her candidate, state premier Christian Wulff, some delegates have signaled they may spurn him for the opposition’s pick, Joachim Gauck, a pro-democracy activist and pastor from former communist East Germany who leads Wulff in opinion polls.

The survival of Merkel’s eight-month-old government at the helm of Europe’s biggest economy could be at stake if Wulff, 51, prime minister of Lower Saxony and a deputy leader of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party, fails to win, said Ulrich Deupmann, director of Ideas.ag, a Berlin-based political consulting company.

“Those who vote for Gauck know that they’re putting the government at risk of collapse,” Deupmann said in an interview. If neither Gauck, 70, nor Wulff win an absolute majority in the first or second round, the candidate getting the most votes in the third round is the winner. “With every round the election goes, Merkel loses authority.”

The election, called after the surprise resignation last month of the incumbent, Horst Koehler, piles pressure on Merkel as coalition bickering over policies from health care to tax cuts saps public backing for the government as it grapples with Europe’s debt crisis.

Cast in Private

“We really don’t think this is about the survival of the coalition or the government,” Volker Kauder, Christian Democratic parliamentary leader, said June 28 on N24 television. “Everyone casts his or her vote in private, but everyone in our coalition knows that Christian Wulff is our candidate, that we consider him to be an excellent choice and want him to be elected.”

Germany’s president represents the country as head of state in international relations, can dissolve parliament on recommendation of the chancellor and signs bills into law. The president can also pardon convicted criminals.

The May 31 resignation of Koehler, a Christian Democrat and former head of the International Monetary Fund, deepened the domestic upheaval for Merkel at a time when her flip-flop on extending aid to Greece was blamed by CDU members for a regional election loss that cost her control of the upper house of parliament.

One week later, criticism of a program of budget cuts and revenue-raising measures worth 81.6 billion euros ($100 billion) led newspapers to speculate the coalition was close to breakup.

“Germans have too many reasons for mistrust right now,” Gauck told reporters in Berlin on June 16. “They have a yearning for credibility and they want to have credible people in top positions in politics.”

Stasi Archives

Gauck, who oversaw the opening up of East Germany’s Stasi secret-police files after German reunification on Oct. 3, 1990, won praise from newspapers including Die Welt and news magazine Der Spiegel. Merkel said Gauck, nominated by the opposition Social Democrats and the Green Party, is an “outstanding personality,” Bild newspaper cited her as saying in an interview on June 12.

Support for Merkel’s coalition is hovering at historic lows. Combined backing for Merkel’s bloc and her Free Democratic Party coalition partner was 36 percent in a Forsa poll yesterday, more than 12 points below its tally at the September election. The FDP, which entered government with 14.6 percent support, now has just 4 percent backing, below the 5 percent threshold needed to win seats in parliament.

‘Dynamic’ Growth

For all that, the chancellor may have the worst behind her. Unemployment has fallen for the past 11 months and the euro’s near 14 percent decline against the dollar this year has been a boon to German exporters, helping the economic recovery pick up “at a more dynamic pace,” the Essen-based RWI institute said June 23. The weaker currency will help cancel out the effect of government savings programs, Michael Heise, chief economist at Allianz SE, said in a June 28 note, lending support to Merkel’s argument that reducing debt won’t hurt growth.

While the FDP tumbles, Merkel’s CDU/CSU bloc gained two points to 32 percent in yesterday’s Forsa poll, less than two points below its September score. Forsa surveyed 2,500 voters on June 21-25 with a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.

Victory for Merkel’s candidate in the first round “would of course be nice; the second would also be good,” said Kauder. Either way, “we’re confident Christian Wulff will be elected.”

(Source: Bloomberg)