Merkel’s Rival Strikes Early

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/world/europe/merkels-rival-peer-steinbruck-strikes-early.html

Version 0 of 1.

BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s main challenger in next year’s general election accused her on Thursday of driving a wedge between Germany and its European partners through duplicitous handling of the euro zone crisis in their first public exchange since Peer Steinbrück was nominated last month by the opposition Social Democratic Party.

In a combative address to the lower house of Parliament, Mr. Steinbrück asserted that Ms. Merkel had allowed members of her center-right coalition to publicly bully Greece and that she had failed to convince Germans about the benefits of euro membership.

The speech by Mr. Steinbrück, who was finance minister in Ms. Merkel’s government from 2005 to 2009, directly followed an address by the chancellor focused on the European Union summit meeting in Brussels on Thursday.

Analysts and many Germans viewed the exchange as a harbinger of the topics and the tone that will dominate the campaign in the months before parliamentary elections in autumn of 2013.

In her speech, Ms. Merkel defended her government’s plan for Europe with a renewed vigor, calling for solidarity with Greece and repeating her pledge to keep it in the euro zone. She also set herself on a course for confrontation with the French president, François Hollande, by calling for granting stronger central powers to the European Commission on budgetary issues.

“We are of the opinion, and I speak for the whole German government on this, that we could go a step further by giving Europe real rights of intervention in national budgets,” Ms. Merkel said.

Her current finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, this week called for granting the right to a top E.U. official to veto member states’ budgets if they violated deficit rules.

In his speech, Mr. Steinbrück asserted that Ms. Merkel’s decision to close ranks with Athens had come two years too late, and only after months of allowing a damaging discourse from within her own ranks over Greece’s future.

“It was a grave mistake that you allowed your coalition to launch a bullying campaign against Greece’s membership in the euro zone,” Mr. Steinbrück said.

He was referring to comments over the summer by several lawmakers in the chancellor’s coalition who openly discussed a Greek exit from the euro zone.

“You didn’t intervene, you didn’t speak out for Europe and you vacillated,” Mr. Steinbrück said, insisting that none of her predecessors “would have allowed a European neighbor to be abused for domestic political purposes” in such a fashion.

“Rarely has Germany been as isolated as it is today” as a result of such policies, said Mr. Steinbrück, who is viewed as a forceful and gifted speaker and earned a reputation as a man of action from his tenure in Ms. Merkel’s first cabinet.

That image appeared to resonate with Germans who followed the speeches, carried live on television and over the Internet, according to a brief survey conducted after the exchange in which 65 percent said Mr. Steinbrück appeared more combative than the chancellor.

Ms. Merkel, however, was given higher marks for her leadership qualities by 77 percent of those queried by the polling agency Forsa, compared with 53 percent for Mr. Steinbrück.