Social Democrat Dagmar Metzger from Darmstadt, member of the Hessian State Parliament, is opposed to a red-red-green coalition and said yesterday she is not going to vote for Andrea Ypsilanti to become State Governor. That means the red-red-green dreams are over. And I am proud to say the resistance came from Darmstadt, my birth town!
A dramatic week in the western German state of Hesse has concluded with the Social Democrats (SPD) spectacularly failing to broker a minority government with the Green Party. SPD leader Andrea Ypsilanti was forced to abandon plans to stand as state governor after a rebel SPD politician said she couldn’t vote for a coalition that was supported by the Left Party.
“I will not stand for election on April 5,” she told a televised news conference on Friday after she had failed to persuade SPD representative Dagmar Metzger to back her in the forthcoming vote. (…)
Ypsilanti had met with Metzger on Friday morning to try to persuade her to change her mind, but the 49-year-old lawyer was sticking to her guns. She told reporters after the meeting that one of her reasons for refusing to back her leader was the fact that the Left Party was a direct successor party to the SED, the former East German Communist Party.
“I am from West Berlin and grew up in the time of the Berlin Wall, and I experienced how this wall divided a family” she said. “The Left Party is for me far too unpredictable at the moment.” (…)
UPDATE March 8, 2008: Dagmar Metzger is considering to give back her mandate.
UPDATE March 9, 2008: Darmstadt Resistance continued - In case Dagmar Metzger should give back her mandate, her successor already stated he was also sceptical of a minority government tolerated by the Left.