Angela Merkel Speech

Wednesday night, German Chancellor candidate Angela Merkel came to Freiburg. I had to see this.

A quick overview — current Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder called an early election, which is being held September 18th (this coming Sunday). In the polls, Schroeder (with the Social Democrats) is currently behind Merkel (who is fronting the CDU, or Christian Democratics). However, the CDU’s lead has fallen to single digits after Schroeder did particularly well in the two televised debates. At the moment, neither party has a majority, even factoring in likely alliances. This raises the interesting question of a CDU-SPD alliance, a la Israel at the moment.

Angela Merkel is, in the spectrum of German politics, pretty right-wing (for comparison, the SPD is left-center). Freiburg is your typical liberal college town, with sections of the town voting majority Green. So it might come as no surprise to anyone that most of the crowd was against the CDU.

And when you don’t like a person’s speech in Germany, you don’t just frown and remain silent. You boo and whistle (those with whistles have an advantage. I wonder why no one had an airhorn). The atmosphere was less political speech, more political demonstration. It was all in German, of course. But even if I was fluent, I couldn’t of understood most of what she said, because the crowd was loud.

The speech was held in the Munster plaza, and it was absolutely jam-packed where I was standing. It was a tighter crowd than most concerts I’ve been to. Ultimately? It restored my faith in society. Or at least a certain sect of it. Spiritually refreshing, if you will. From what I’ve seen of the CDU’s platform, it could be a scary turn for Germany. Sort of like America, circa 2000.