David Cameron has three particular reasons for wanting Chancellor Angela Merkel's centre-right CDU to be re-elected
Next month's German general election will naturally have most impact in Germany itself. But the rest of Europe's politicians are watching the German campaign very closely too – and so should Europe's peoples. This is partly because a prosperous and growing Germany is a more dominant player than ever in today's EU. But it is also because the choice that Germans make on 22 September will directly affect us all, whether we are members of the eurozone or not. The list of interested parties therefore includes Britain.
David Cameron has three particular reasons for wanting Chancellor Angela Merkel's centre-right CDU to be re-elected next month. The first is that, in spite of real differences over what it means to be a centre-right party in 21st-century Europe, the CDU and the Conservatives remain sister parties. They have become distanced, notably because of Tory Euroscepticism – not shared by the CDU – and by Mr Cameron's withdrawal of the Tories from the European People's party grouping. But the Tories clearly have even less in common with the CDU's principal rivals, the Social Democratic party of Germany (SPD).
Mr Cameron's second reason is that it would be good news for incumbents like him. For a while, after the 2008 financial crisis, European voters simply took it out on incumbent governments – whatever their political stripe. Brown and Zapatero on the left, Berlusconi and Sarkozy on the right – all lost out. If Mrs Merkel manages to buck the trend, not least in the wake of her commitment to economic austerity and deficit reduction, the Tories will see light at the end of their own tunnel too.
But Mr Cameron's principal reason for wanting a CDU victory next month is that a re-elected Mrs Merkel would be pivotal to his own EU strategy if he, too, secures re-election in 2015. Last week, in an important interview, Mrs Merkel signalled that, if re-elected, she is willing to look at EU moves to "give something back" to member states. This is what Mr Cameron says he wants to do too, so that he can offer British voters a renegotiated relationship with the EU to approve in his 2017 referendum. If reports are to be believed, two areas on which the UK and Germany might agree are migrant benefits and labour market regulation.
The upshot of all this is deeply paradoxical. Tories like Mr Cameron, who want to stay in the EU after renegotiations of the sort which the German leader seems now to be sanctioning, will obviously want Mrs Merkel to be re-elected. But there are few things the Tories' out-and-out anti-Europeans should fear more than a German chancellor willing to make concessions to keep the UK in the EU. For anti-EU Tories, nothing would be worse than Mrs Merkel's re-election and the boost it might give to an eventual yes vote in a UK referendum.
