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Germany faces a difficult period of negotiations to form a coalition government after Sunday’s federal elections, as none of the participating parties are likely to win more than 50 percent of the vote. Who are the main candidates and what are the most likely coalitions to form?
Eight political parties are currently represented in the Bundestag, the German parliament, which currently has 709 seats.
The three largest parties are Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU, 200 seats) with Armin Laschet as candidate, the Social Democrats (SPD, 153 seats Olaf Scholz) currently leading the polls and the Alternative für Deutschland ( AfD, right), 94 seats, candidates: Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupallathe.)
The big surprise of the 2017 elections was the liberals of the Free Democratic Party (FDP, 80 seats, Christian Lindner) who returned to parliament after four years of absence.
The radical left party Die Linke (currently 69 seats, candidates: Janine Wissler and Dietmar Bartsch) is the ideological heir of the East German Communist Party SED, and struggles to reach the five percent threshold to enter the Bundestag.
Meanwhile, the Greens (Bündnis 90 Die Grüne, 67 seats, Annalena Baerbock) are campaigning to become the third largest party in Germany.
The candidates
Armin Laschet
Laschet was born in 1961 in Burtscheid, a suburb of the German city of Aachen and raised in a Catholic Catholic family. He studied legal journalism at the universities of Bonn and Munich, then worked as a journalist, serving as the Bonn correspondent for the bavarian radio, a Munich-based radio and television broadcaster. He was also editor-in-chief of the Catholic newspaper church diary in Aachen.
Laschet entered politics in 1994 as an elected member of the Bundestag and has been a member of the European Parliament ever since. He has held several state posts for North Rhine-Westphalia, including Minister of State for Families, Women and Integration and Minister of State for Federal Affairs.
The journalist-politician has developed a reputation for perseverance in politics and has always been a staunch ally of current Chancellor Angela Merkel. If he manages to land Germany’s top job, he intends to continue his moderate and centrist approach to politics. He declared that he defended “a balanced approach and avoiding extremes” and wished to move towards societal cohesion and “the social market economy”.
Olaf Scholz
Olaf Scholz has been Minister of Finance and Vice-Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany since March 2018. He was born in Osnabrück in 1958, grew up in Hamburg and is married.
In 1985 he obtained his law degree from the University of Hamburg. He joined the SPD in 1975 and was a member of the German Bundestag from 1998 to 2001 and from 2002 to 2011.
Scholz became Minister of Labor and Social Affairs in 2007, and from 2011 to 2018 he was mayor of Hamburg. From February to April 2018, he was interim president of the SPD.
It could be characterized as typically associated with bourgeois, or the ruling class, in his hometown of Hamburg: pragmatic, outspoken (“I’m liberal, but not stupid,” he was famously quoted when speaking of law and order) and Protestant – no alcohol was served at his farewell party at Hamburg city hall, as it was a “working day”. Currently leading the polls.
Annalena baerbock
Baerbock was born in Hanover in 1980 and grew up on a farm with her two sisters and two cousins. She studied political science and public law at the University of Hamburg in 2000 and made a stint at the prestigious London School of Economics and Political Science, where she studied international law.
She started a thesis on natural disasters and humanitarian aid at the Free University of Berlin but did not complete her thesis – her political career hindered her.
She joined the Green Party in 2005. In 2013, she was elected to the European Parliament and has held her seat from her seat. She was the Greens spokesperson for climate policy between 2013 and 2017, before becoming the party’s co-leader alongside Robert Habeck in 2018.
Within the party, Baerbock played an important role in burying the decades-old divide between fundamentalists and realists.
Possible coalitions
As neither party will be able to obtain an absolute majority, they are forced to enter into negotiations to form a coalition.
Coalition “fires” (SPD, Greens, FDP)
If Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats come out on top, the Greens, now third in the polls, would be his obvious choice for a coalition partner. The parties largely agree on environmental policy and on increasing taxes and social spending, although the Greens are much more hawkish on Russian policy.
But if the SPD is to reclaim the Chancellery for the first time since 2005, it will also have to rally the Free Liberal Democrats to form a traffic light coalition, so called because of the party colors red, green and yellow.
FDP leader Christian Lindner sounded cool about the possibility, saying that legalizing cannabis is about the one thing his party could easily agree with with the SPD and the Greens.
While the liberals are far to the right of the SPD and the Greens on the economy, they could compromise if it meant keeping the far left Linke, hated by many of their constituents, out of power, and if that means that they gain control of the finance department.
Probability: 45% of victory, according to the Eurasia group.
“Jamaica” (CDU / CSU, Greens, FDP)
Armin Laschet’s Christian Democrats would prefer to team up with the FDP. “Christian liberal” governments ruled Germany for much of the postwar period, and the two are closely linked in economic policy.
But the two parties are unlikely to have enough seats to rule on their own. So they could ask the Greens to form a Jamaican coalition – the party colors black, yellow and green make up that country’s flag.
However, such an alliance will not be easy either: Liberal leader Christian Lindner unexpectedly withdrew from talks on forming a Jamaican coalition in 2017.
When it comes to environmental policy, the Greens and the FDP are far apart, while the conservatives and liberals are much more hawkish when it comes to defense spending.
Probability: 30%, according to the Eurasia group.
Grand coalition (CDU, SPD or CDU, SPD and Greens)
The SPD has been a reluctant junior partner of Merkel’s Tories for 12 of the past 16 years. They ruled out working together again, but said the same in the 2017 election, and ended up agreeing when other options failed.
Probability: 10%, according to the Eurasia group.
“Red-red-green” (SPD, Linke, Greens)
If the SPD and the Greens fail to team up with the FDP, the conservatives have raised the specter of a “red-red-green” coalition with the far-left party Linke, heir to the Communist Party which led the ‘East Germany.
The SPD and the Greens have also ruled out working with any party refusing to engage in the NATO military alliance or Germany’s membership of the European Union, which Linke questioned.
The Linke party could fall below the five percent threshold needed to enter parliament, but is likely to directly win three constituencies, meaning it would still bring enough seats to a left-wing coalition to reach a majority.
Probability: 5%, according to the Eurasia group.
(With Reuters)
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