Two German conservative leaders warned on Sunday that Chancellor Angela Merkel's grand coalition could collapse if the Social Democrats formed a controversial alliance with the Left party in the western state of Hesse.
Peter Mueller, state premier in Saarland, and Christian Wulff, state premier in Lower-Saxony, said the Christian Democrats (CDU) would have trouble staying in the federal grand coalition with the SPD if it joined up with the Left in Hesse.
Merkel's CDU and the centre-left SPD, Germany's two largest parties, have been in a loveless grand coalition since an election in 2005 when neither party won enough votes to form a two-way coalition with preferred junior partners.
"If there is a SPD-Greens-Left coalition in Hesse everything speaks in favour of ending the grand coalition," Mueller told Bild am Sonntag newspaper. The next election is due in 2009.
"I can't imagine how there could be any confidence for any further co-operation in the grand coalition," said Wulff, who is also one of Merkel's four deputy party leaders. Wulff said the election of Andrea Ypsilanti, Hesse's SPD leader, with support from the Left party would mark the start of a vicious election battle one year before the 2009 ballot.
"If she lets herself get elected state premier with help from the communists it would mark the start of the nastiest of campaigns," he said. "I'd be worried about Germany's future because I know where the journey is headed if the Left gets in." The Left party was formed last year when the ex-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) merged with leftist SPD defectors, disenchanted with the SPD's centrist course.
The Left, the strongest party in many eastern states, is in a coalition with the SPD in the city-state of Berlin. But it is ostracised in western Germany and is not part of any coalition. The SPD rules out a federal level coalition with the Left. Speculation about a SPD-Greens-Left coalition in Hesse was heighted at the weekend when Left chairman Oskar Lafontaine urged his party at a rally to support such a coalition in the prosperous western state.