BERLIN: The Social Democrats (SPD) bemoaned a lack of concessions from Angela Merkel, while her conservative allies accused the SPD of trying to dictate policy despite losing last month’s election.
Still, after eight long hours of talks on Monday between the chancellor and her centre-left rivals, it was not the partisan posturing that was most telling, but the readiness of both sides to talk again.
Despite lingering differences over tax hikes and a minimum wage, as well as opposition among grassroots SPD members to partnering with Merkel for the second time in a decade, the odds that Germany will end up with a ‘grand coalition’ before Christmas remain high.
Yesterday, hours after SPD leaders like Andrea Nahles went out of their way to make clear they could still say no to Merkel, other senior party members were striking a more conciliatory tone in private.
“I still believe we’ll have a grand coalition,” one member of the SPD’s 35-strong executive board told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Another SPD board member said that as long as exploratory talks with Merkel did not collapse in acrimony, the party had little choice but to enter full-blown coalition negotiations with the chancellor in the weeks ahead.
If the party balked at that, the official said, Merkel would be forced into a deal with the environmentalist Greens, a move that could end up relegating the SPD to the opposition benches for many years.
“Even if some people expected more from the talks on Monday, the bottom line remains the same — it would be a huge surprise if we don’t get a grand coalition in the end,” said Frank Decker, a political scientist at Bonn University.
Later yesterday, Merkel’s conservatives — her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) — will follow up the SPD meeting with a second round of preliminary talks with the Greens. Ahead of that session, some Greens leaders were sounding more open to the idea of a coalition with Merkel.
“I’m curious to see how the second round of talks go, and of course I’m open to possible surprises,” said Katrin Goering-Eckardt, the party’s parliamentary leader.
But there are numerous reasons why the pragmatic Merkel would prefer to work with the SPD. For one, that combination was tried before in her first term and was broadly successful.
Together with the SPD, Merkel extended the retirement age and shielded Germany from the worst of the global financial crisis by introducing incentives for companies to avert layoffs. REUTERS
