Germany will have a new government before Christmas, probably the week of December 6, with the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz as chancellor. Social democrats, greens and liberals have presented this afternoon in Berlin the coalition agreement that will give way to a tripartite unprecedented since the fifties of the last century and that will end Angela Merkel’s 16 years in power. The leaders of the formations have made known the main lines of the contract that will unite them for the next four years and that are based on the decarbonization of the economy, the digitization and modernization of the country and social protection. The details of the agreement have been captured in a 179-page document.
The objective of energy neutrality stands out in the coalition agreement both for the number of measures it contemplates and for the forcefulness with which it refers to a climate crisis that “endangers our livelihoods and threatens freedom, prosperity and safety”. The tripartite has agreed to favor a faster development of renewable energies (80% of electricity demand in 2030 must be covered with renewables), ensure a minimum price (60 euros per ton) of CO2 emissions to encourage the exit of the fossil fuels as soon as possible and increased investment for green hydrogen related projects. Despite the increase in investments in green technology and digitization, there will be no tax increase, something promised in the campaign by the leader of the Liberals, Christian Lindner. The country will return from 2023 to comply with the debt brake, according to the document.
The coal exit is scheduled for 2030, eight earlier than Merkel’s grand coalition government had agreed, but the word “ideally” still appears in the document, indicating that the Greens have failed to get the liberals’ commitment. to set the date by contract. Raising the minimum wage to 12 euros per hour and building 400,000 new homes a year (100,000 of which are officially protected) are other agreements that are reflected in the document, already known because they were agreed at the beginning of the negotiations. The coalition has included among the measures the legalization of cannabis, the faster naturalization of immigrants and lowering the voting age to 16 years.
The coalition agreement leaves foreign policy for last, starting on page 131. With regard to the European Union, the tripartite emphasizes respect for the rule of law and affirms that Germany will “apply and develop” in a “more consistent” way the instruments available to the EU to guarantee the rule of law, including the conditionality mechanism. The Greens reserve the right to appoint the next European Commissioner, but only if the President of the Commission is not German. That is, only if Ursula von der Leyen does not repeat a second term in that position.
The three government partners are open to considering the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact, although the formulation of their intentions is ambiguous enough to allow room for maneuver in future negotiations. The pact “has shown its flexibility,” the agreement assures. “On this basis, we want to ensure growth, maintain debt sustainability and ensure sustainable and climate-friendly investments,” he adds. “The further development of fiscal policy rules must be based on these objectives to strengthen their effectiveness in the face of the challenges of the moment.” This instrument, says the tripartite, should be “simpler and more transparent, also to strengthen its application.”
The Government agreement includes the distribution of the ministries, which will be 16 in the next Government. Seven of them will be managed by the Social Democrats. It is about Interior, Labor, Defense, Health, Housing and Cooperation and Development. A seventh position for the SPD is that of head of the Foreign Ministry, which has the rank of minister. The Greens will have five government departments: Foreign, Economy and Climate Protection, Family, Environment and Food and Agriculture. Liberals from the FDP will lead Finance, Justice, Transportation and Education.
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The parties of the call traffic light coalition (thus known by the colors associated with the parties: red for the Social Democrats, green for the environmentalists and yellow for the Liberals) have met in recent days also at night to speed up the closing of agreements on relevant points such as policies finance and climate and ministerial posts. The German press has published that one of the last obstacles has been the Health portfolio, because apparently no party had an interest in occupying it. Germany suffers record numbers of infections in its fourth wave after relaxing restrictions in the summer and has one of the worst vaccination rates in Western Europe, 68%. Health powers are in the hands of the federal states, which gives the ministry of the branch in Berlin very little room for maneuver.
The indifference for the Health portfolio contrasts with the battle that has been fought during the negotiations to take over the position of Finance Minister. The second most powerful government post after that of chancellor has fallen to the side of the liberals of the FDP and it is assumed that its leader, Christian Lindner, will occupy it. The Greens also coveted it, considering it a key task to launch the million-dollar climate investments that the country will need in the next four years.
In exchange for handing over the portfolio to Lindner, the environmentalists will obtain a super-ministry of Climate that will encompass competencies until now distributed by other government departments, such as Economy and Energy. The position would be filled by the co-leader of the environmentalists, Robert Habeck. The other party leader and candidate in the elections, Annalena Baerbock, will be Foreign Minister.
Schoz has avoided giving the name of the person who will occupy the Ministry of Health, a question for which they have asked him directly during the press conference. Instead, it has announced that it will form a crisis team made up of specialists in epidemiology, virology and sociology to face the fourth wave of the pandemic.
Up to 21 members of the three parties have met this morning to outline the agreement that they had promised to present in the afternoon. The three formations will vote internally on the contract. In the case of the SPD and the FDP, it will submit to the opinion of their congress, while the Greens will ask all their affiliates if they support what was agreed by their leaders.
If the planned schedule is finally met and the Social Democratic candidate and still Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz is elected by the Bundestag the second week of December, that will mean that the outgoing Chancellor, Angela Merkel, will not exceed the record of tenure at the head of the German Government. He would have to stay until at least the 17th to equal Helmut Kohl’s days in office. This morning, before what has probably been her last Council of Ministers, Merkel received a large bouquet of flowers from Scholz as a farewell and thanks for her work at the head of the country for the last 16 years.
Formal coalition negotiations began on October 21, which means that the three parties have needed little more than a month to reach an agreement. Since the general elections, which were held on September 26, just over 70 days will have passed until the appointment of the new government. The last time, after the 2017 elections, it took 171 days to form the so-called grand coalition between Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD). Then the attempt to form a tripartite between CDU, Liberals and Greens failed because the Liberals got up from the negotiating table when their demands were not met.
After elections that showed the great fragmentation of the political landscape, it was immediately clear that the Greens and the Liberals were going to have the key to the new Government. The two largest parties, the CDU and the SPD, each got about a quarter of the votes, while the Greens achieved their best ever result with 14.8% and the Liberals came in third with 11.5%. of the votes. Neither Christian Democrats nor Social Democrats wanted to repeat a grand coalition, so a tripartite was the most viable option. The CDU tried to lead a coalition despite losing the elections with its worst historical result, 24.1%, but Greens and Liberals decided to try an agreement with the SPD, which obtained 25.7%.
Despite their initial huge differences on issues such as finance and climate policies, greens and liberals have managed to bring positions closer and make concessions to move the agreement forward. In mid-October the three parties agreed on a minimum document that was the basis for the negotiations. Among other things, they agreed to increase the interprofessional minimum wage to 12 euros per hour – Scholz’s electoral promise – and not to raise taxes – the main demand of the liberals -, in addition to leaving an early outlet for coal almost closed, as the Greens wanted.
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