Merkel Faces `Divided’ Germany as Talks on Coalition Begin

BERLIN (Capital Markets in Africa) – Angela Merkel is facing pressure to put her stamp on Germany’s next government as the chancellor begins talks on uniting four disparate parties into a coalition to govern Europe’s biggest economy.

Almost a month after her Christian Democratic-led bloc emerged weakened from a national election, Merkel meets separately with the pro-market Free Democratic Party and the Greens on Wednesday to sound out the potential for a pact on cabinet posts and policy. It’s an untested combination at the national level, making the stakes that much higher and putting the onus on Merkel’s consensus-building skills.

Party leaders say the talks could delay the start of Merkel’s fourth term until early next year as all sides stake out competing stances on everything from European policy and energy to immigration. The Free Democrats are making a play for the finance ministry led for the past eight years by Wolfgang Schaeuble, a Christian Democrat.

“In a divided country, which is what we are now, it is the task of this coalition to overcome this division — first of all among ourselves,” Green co-leader Katrin Goering-Eckardt said in an ARD television interview.

Merkel told her parliamentary caucus on Tuesday that while the aim must be for her side to put its stamp on every issue, they also need to be prepared for policy compromises, a party official who attended the meeting told reporters. The official asked not to be identified discussing the closed-door session.

Holidays Loom
“It’s clear that speed can’t be the decisive factor, but it would be nice to sign a coalition agreement before the end of the year, by the Christmas break,” said Merkel’s caucus leader, Volker Kauder. After Wednesday’s meetings, all sides plan to meet jointly for the first exploratory talks on Friday.

Competing demands rained down on Merkel, 63, as the three smaller parties jockey for leverage. The Christian Social Union, her Bavarian sister party, is sticking to its demand for a cap on migration, which the Greens reject. The FDP stepped up its bid for the Finance Ministry as Merkel’s bloc nominated Schaeuble to become president of the Bundestag, parliament’s lower house.

Schaeuble was too close to Merkel, though “a different finance policy is more important to me than which person sits in which ministry,” FDP head Christian Lindner told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. CDU politicians bristled at early claims on cabinet posts, with Kauder warning all parties against “drawing red lines.”

CDU Defeat
Merkel heads into coalition talks fresh from an election defeat for her CDU in a state election in Lower Saxony on Sunday. That loss, the arrival of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party in the Bundestag in last month’s national election and a victory for anti-immigration conservatives in neighbouring Austria are increasing pressure from the CSU for a tougher line on immigration.

Merkel leads a ranking of Germany’s most trusted politicians with a 63 percent approval rating, 4 percentage points lower than in August before the federal election, according to a Forsa poll for Stern magazine published Wednesday. Among the principals in the coalition talks, the FDP’s Lindner ranks next with 50 percent.

The outcome in Lower Saxony “will make the talks significantly more difficult,”Juergen Trittin, a veteran Green politician and former environment minister, told the Passauer Neue Presse newspaper. “The CSU’s calls for a shift to the right are becoming louder and louder.”

Source: Bloomberg Business News