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BERLIN — Leaders of the three parties set to form Germany’s new government have sealed a coalition deal to make Social Democrat Olaf Scholz the country’s next chancellor.
Providing the pact is approved by the parties, the coalition of Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and liberal Free Democrats (FDP) will take office early next month, bringing the curtain down on 16 years of conservative-led government under Angela Merkel.
With Merkel not running for another term, the center-left Social Democrats finished first in September’s general election, ahead of the outgoing chancellor’s Christian Democrats. That put Scholz, the finance minister in Merkel’s last Cabinet, in pole position to lead the next government.
Scholz will assume the chancellery amid a staggering rise in coronavirus cases across Germany, a development that has politicians tussling over potential new restrictions and ways to boost the country’s lagging vaccine rate.
Scholz will present the coalition agreement Wednesday afternoon alongside SPD officials and leaders from the Greens and FDP.
The pact brings to an end nearly five weeks of formal negotiations, involving roughly 300 negotiators hammering out policy positions across 22 working groups. The teams worked behind closed doors, with party leaders repeatedly refusing to publicly reveal much about the talks.
From the beginning, the SPD, Greens and FDP — known as the traffic-light coalition, due to their respective colors of red, green and yellow — strove to appear civilized and optimistic at all times, attempting to contrast their talks with the messy and ill-fated 2017 coalition talks between Merkel’s conservatives, the Greens and the FDP.
Their efforts to put on a united front even led to some mockery in the German media, especially after leaders of the Greens and the FDP took a selfie to demonstrate their team spirit.
But the peace generally held, even though the FDP and Greens have never been considered natural allies, given the FPD’s free-market, low-tax ideology and the Greens’ focus on the environment and social equality.
Not always smooth sailing
Even hours before the coalition agreement was revealed, negotiators were still sticking to their silence. On Wednesday morning, Konstantin von Notz, one of the Greens’ senior negotiators, tweeted an enigmatic picture of the Berlin sky, where some blue could be seen shining through thick gray clouds.
When details have slipped through the cracks in recent weeks, disagreements did emerge.
Earlier this month, the Greens complained of a lack of ambition in the coalition’s climate policies, prompting them to put pressure on SPD and FDP. That logjam broke on Tuesday when the three parties agreed to phase out coal in Germany by 2030, eight years earlier than initially intended — a victory for the Greens.
Meanwhile, it has long been speculated that FDP leader Christian Lindner would become the new finance minister, a key requirement for selling any deal to the FDP base. Giving Lindner that post amounts to a significant compromise by the Greens, given their advocacy for looser fiscal rules in Europe — a concept anathema to Lindner.
In return, the Greens are expected to be rewarded with two major ministries for their own leaders, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock: A new economy and climate ministry for the former, and the prestigious foreign ministry for the latter.
In any event, before oaths of office can be taken, the deal will first be put to the wider parties for consideration. The Greens plan to consult their members about the pact, while the SPD will vote on it at an extraordinary party conference scheduled for December 4. The FDP plans to do the same at a party conference on December 5.
If all parties approve, they will be done in time to have Scholz elected as chancellor in the week starting December 6, sticking to the parties’ intended timeline — and just days before Merkel would overtake Helmut Kohl to become the country’s longest-serving post-war chancellor on December 17.
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