German Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing the first big hurdle of her push to set up an unprecedented four-party government for Europe’s biggest economy.
After a month of exploratory talks marked by bickering over policy, Merkel is up against a self-imposed end-of-week deadline to unlock actual coalition negotiations. She’s gathering heads of her Christian Democratic-led bloc, the Free Democrats and the Green party on Thursday to reach a verdict on whether to pursue the project.
Discord over sharing risks in the euro area, cutting carbon emissions and channeling immigration have hamstrung Merkel, who won a fourth term in September but is stuck with a caretaker government for now. The domestic conflicts are playing out on the global stage, most recently when she flagged Green-led demands for curbing coal as a stumbling block in coalition talks.
“That’s why these are tough discussions,” Merkel told a United Nations climate conference in Bonn, Germany, on Wednesday. “We’ll have to discuss this very precisely in the days ahead.”
Hemming in the appetite for conflict on all sides is the risk of a repeat election if the talks collapse. Merkel’s bloc won in September with its lowest share of the vote since 1949, while the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party, which campaigned against Merkel and the rest of the political establishment, entered parliament with 12.
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Party leaders want to wrap up exploratory talks that may run overnight into Friday before determining whether they have enough in common to form a government that’s supposed to last for four years.
“We’ve come a long way, we’ve already discussed and agreed on many things together,” Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, one of the negotiators in Merkel’s bloc, said on ARD public television on Thursday. “I believe that all the parties in their road maps have prepared themselves for the decision to be made tonight, either way.”
This week’s goal is to list agreements and disputes in a way that allows all parties to sign off on starting formal coalition talks. The main obstacle may be a special convention by the Greens on Nov. 25 that will vote on the proposal.
Should the talks fail, Merkel’s options will narrow. The Social Democrats, with whom she governed since 2013, say they aren’t interested in another alliance with her after the party fell to its worst electoral defeat since World War II. That would leave Merkel with two scenarios that postwar Germany hasn’t yet seen: a minority government or an election repeat.
— With assistance by Rainer Buergin.
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