German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday won the center-right majority that eluded her four years ago — nudging Europe’s biggest economic power to the right as it claws its way out of a deep recession.
Voters sent the nation’s main left-wing party, the Social Democrats of Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, into opposition after 11 years as part of the government. It was the party’s worst parliamentary election result since World War II.
……The conservative Merkel managed to end her four-year “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats thanks to a very strong showing by her new coalition partner, the pro-business Free Democrats. Her own Christian Democrats produced an underwhelming showing.
……Merkel has called for modest middle-income tax relief, while [Guido] Westerwelle, [the leader of the Free Democrats]— who successfully portrayed his party as a champion of the middle class and small business — has called for far deeper tax cuts, with significant reductions in both the top and bottom rates.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090927/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_elections
Gee, who knew that free market and tax relief concepts would be so appealing to Euro socialists?
What timing; just as our country is being dragged into a socialist economic abyss, Germany just woke up from its socialist coma.