Germany, said Armin Laschet on Sunday evening, was in uncharted territory. An election meant to decide who will succeed Angela Merkel, its leader of the past 16 years, has left the country — and the world — without a definitive answer.
Sunday’s vote has left Laschet, candidate of Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union, vying for Germany’s top job with Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats. The SPD finished slightly ahead in an exceptionally tight race that now looks set to be followed by many weeks of arduous coalition negotiations.
“There has seldom been a situation on an election night . . . when it wasn’t clear who would be chancellor,” said Laschet. “All Europe is watching what will happen in Germany.”
The risk now is that Berlin will go into a state of semi-paralysis, just as it did during the protracted talks that followed the last Bundestag election in 2017, when it took nearly six months for Merkel to form her fourth and last government. Yet this is a time when Germany badly needs to plan its recovery from the coronavirus crisis and prepare for its presidency of the G7 in 2022.
The SPD was, in many ways, the clear election winner. It appears to have come first in the share of the popular vote and significantly improved from its electoral nadir in 2017, when it was backed by just one in five voters. For a party that for months was stuck on just 15 per cent in the polls, way behind both the Christian Democrats and the Greens, it marked a stunning recovery.
Meanwhile the CDU, in an alliance with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, looked to be heading for the worst result in its history, down about 8 percentage points on the last election.
It was a sobering result for Laschet, whose personal approval ratings had always lagged far behind those of Scholz, a popular finance minister and deputy chancellor. But he insisted he still had a mandate to form a government. “[In Germany] it was not always the parties that came in first place who provided the chancellor,” he said on TV.
Yet the inconclusive result — stemming from the country’s increasingly fragmented electoral landscape — means that neither the CDU/CSU nor the SPD will determine who is Germany’s next chancellor. That decision will fall in large part to two smaller parties, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats, which must figure out who they want to team up with.
There are two options for a coalition that could command a majority in the Bundestag — absent a repeated “grand coalition” between SPD and CDU/CSU, which neither party desires. The Greens and FDP can join the CDU/CSU in a “Jamaica” alliance — so called because their black, green and yellow party colours match those of the Jamaican flag. Alternatively, the Greens and FDP could join the “red” SPD in a “traffic-light” coalition.
It is the first time two smaller parties — which between them have a quarter of the vote, roughly the same as either the SPD or the CDU/CSU — have together been able to wield such kingmaking power.
“All eyes will now be on the Greens and the FDP — they will decide everything,” said Karl-Rudolf Korte, a political scientist at Duisburg-Essen university. “Both are now in a position to seek a majority for themselves — will it be SPD or CDU?”
Speaking in the “elephant round”, a traditional election-night Q&A session on national television, Christian Lindner, the FDP leader, was at pains to stress the party’s newfound strategic importance and gloat over the decline of the SPD and CDU/CSU, two parties that for decades dominated German politics.
“Neither of the old big-tent parties got more than 25-26 per cent,” Lindner said. “About 75 per cent of Germans did not choose the party that will supply the next chancellor.”
For that reason, he said, it would be “advisable” for the FDP and Greens — two parties united by their desire to overcome the old political status quo — to talk with each other first, before they consult with the SPD and CDU/CSU. Annalena Baerbock, the Green candidate for chancellor, was non-committal about the idea but did not rule such talks out.
It will be a difficult dance. Lindner, who opposes tax increases and any changes to Germany’s restrictions on new borrowing, has made it clear that he sees the “most policy overlap” with the CDU/CSU.
Meanwhile, the Greens and SPD, which both want to raise taxes and unleash billions of euros in new investments, have made it clear they see themselves as ideal partners.
With big differences to overcome, the coalition talks are likely to drag on for weeks. There is already speculation that Merkel will have to remain as acting chancellor into 2022 — though Scholz said it was his “ambition” to form a new government sooner “so that Ms Merkel doesn’t have to give yet another [New Year’s] address”.
“We must do everything to ensure that we’re finished by Christmas,” said Scholz. But even if Merkel does not have to wish her fellow Germans a happy new year a final time, it remains anyone’s guess who will.
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