THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: BERLIN -- When German voters go to the polls on Sunday, Angela Merkel is almost assured re-election -- not for keeping the campaign promises she made four years ago, but for breaking most of them.
Ms. Merkel came to power in 2005 on a platform of modernizing Europe's biggest economy by deregulating the labor market, simplifying taxes and granting more freedom to entrepreneurs.
However, her conservative Christian Democratic Union was forced into a "grand coalition" with the left-leaning Social Democrats, and she quickly dropped those plans in favor of higher social spending and rising state intervention.
Ms. Merkel's leftward shift has been welcomed by most Germans at a time of great economic uncertainty. But skeptics in her own party and in the business community warn that Germany can't put off painful decisions about its overburdened welfare state, heavy taxes and strict labor rules indefinitely.
"It's not good that the governing parties have distanced themselves from market-oriented reforms," says Jürgen Grossmann, chief executive of energy company RWE AG. "It's a very short-term populism. There's very little courage to do the unpopular." >>> Marcus Walker | Friday, September 35, 2009
