Despite German Chancellor’s resounding victory in Germany’s parliamentary elections in September, with 41.5% of the vote, Forbes’ most powerful leader in the European Union is having trouble putting together a coalition. Despite her strong electoral showing, the Chancellor fell just short of the absolute majority needed to form a single party government and her limited choice of coalition partners has left the center-left SPD party in a strong position to extract painful concessions.
SPD uneasiness about a coalition with Merkel has less to do with political disagreement than long-term strategy. The SPD, which cooperated in a government with Merkel’s center-right CDU/CSU between 2005 and 2009, feels as if it has more to lose than to gain from teaming back up with Merkel. Despite the popularity of the last coalition government, the SPD gained little politically from participating in the CDU/CSU-led government and had a disastrous showing in September elections.
Some SPD leaders think they have more to gain from spending the next couple years in the opposition, or even forming an all-left government. In a concession to his blue collar base, SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel pledged to open future talks with Die Linke, which descends from the former East German Communist Party. The two parties used to despise each other, Die Linke seeing the SPD as capitalist “sell-outs,” but some think sufficient water has passed under the bridge.
SPD leaders are thus driving a hard bargain, demanding concessions in exchange for a “grand coalition. Their most symbolic demand is for a national minimum wage of around €8.50 ($11.50). Other demands include a partial backtracking of labor-market reforms begun a decade ago, reducing the pension age for certain categories of workers and a relaxation of the country’s naturalization laws, which are among the strictest in Europe.
Mr. Gabriel knows that the party’s base is not likely to be happy with a coalition government between the country’s two biggest parties, so he has taken the unprecedented step of letting the SPD’s almost half million members vote on the final contract next month. “The membership vote is an extraordinarily big opportunity to get additional legitimacy for a difficult coalition after a difficult election result,” says SPD deputy Hans-Peter Bartels. “But it is also an extraordinarily large risk,” he adds.
Botched coalition talks with the CDU/CSU could leave the SPD looking irresponsible in German voters eyes. If talks failed, Merkel would most likely not have any choice but to turn back to the Greens, with whom coalition talks failed last month after two fruitless rounds of negotiations. The two parties failed to reach agreement across a wide set of policy areas, including tax rises, the introduction of a minimum wage, Europe and, crucially, the country’s renewable energy policy.
“The door isn’t nailed shut with the kind of long nails that you can’t pull out again,” said Green co-chairman Cem Özdemir, hinting that the party did not want to rule themselves out just yet. The Greens know that if talks fail with the SPD, Merkel will have little choice but to turn back to them. Her former coalition partners, the liberal FDP party, failed to reach the 5% of votes necessary to secure representation in the Bundestag. The only other option would be an extremely unlikely coalition with Die Linke or even new elections.
In any case, German voters will become increasingly restless if no solution is found by the end of the year. Ever conscious of the bloody 20th century history of the country, Germans are highly averse to political instability. Bild, the country’s best-selling tabloid newspaper, captured this impatience last week with a simple headline that read: “When are you going to finally govern?”