Weekend Economists Tickle the Ivories September 20-22, 2013

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16. Merkel Appeals for Strong Europe as Steinbrueck Attacks

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-20/merkel-evokes-postwar-peace-to-champion-eu-in-final-campaigning.html

German Chancellor Angela Merkel closed her campaign evoking the benefits of European unity as Social Democrat Peer Steinbrueck lambasted her as ineffectual and “backward-looking.”

The candidates crisscrossed the nation in the days before tomorrow’s vote, with all polls putting Merkel’s Christian Democratic bloc ahead; none showed a clear majority for her continued alliance with the Free Democrats, and some suggest the anti-euro AfD party may win seats and further complicate the post-election coalition-building.

“We want a strong Europe, a successful Europe” and “in the next four years we have to work so that this wonderful continent continues to be successful,” Merkel told her penultimate rally in Berlin today. She then wound up the campaign in her Baltic Sea constituency of Stralsund.

Merkel, who has presided over a decline in unemployment to the lowest in two decades and won overwhelming German backing for her approach to the euro-area debt crisis, is struggling to assert her favoured coalition option amid a reinvigorated challenge by Steinbrueck’s SPD, a weakened FDP partner and the wildcard of the AfD.