08 August 2013

Waiting and speculating – Potential coalition calculations in the German media

With less than seven weeks to go before Germany's 22 September general election, opinion polls continue to point to a solid plurality for Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU/CSU. Whilst pollsters calculate potential coalition majorities, politicians claim to exclude the more unusual combinations.

Translated from the German

Even if the NSA affair and the mismanagement of the Euro Hawk project do not feature among the major political issues in Germany, they still seem to have given the opposition parties a slight boost and push the government to the defensive, reports the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen e.V., a renowned German institute for election analyses. If the parliamentary elections were to take place next Sunday, the CDU/CSU would obtain 40 per cent (minus 1) of the votes, whilst the SPD could improve to 27 per cent (plus 1). Figures for the FDP (5 per cent) and the Left (7 per cent) remain unchanged, while the Greens would be able to secure 14 per cent (plus 1) of the votes. All other parties would remain below three per cent, and thus not take the five per cent hurdle to enter parliament.

These figures mean that the classic combinations, CDU/CDU/FDP and SPD/Greens would both be unable to form a government majority. The only coalitions with a majority would be a grand coalition with CDU/CSU/SPD, a CDU/CSU and Green government or a centre-left coalition including the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party. In this case then, in the opinion of 58 per cent of all respondents, the CDU/CSU should try to form a government with the SPD. Only 30 per cent would instead favour a CDU/Greens coalition and only 23 per cent would like to envisage a coalition between the SPD, the Left and the Green Party.

There is still a significant, yet shrinking gap between direct approval rates for Ms Merkel and Mr Steinbrück: Angela Merkel would be the favoured candidate for 60 per cent of the respondents now (compared to 62 in mid-July) and Peer Steinbrück can improve his rating from 29 per cent to 31 per cent.

Even though the polls show that the outcome of the elections might be more open than it looked several weeks ago, politicians keep ruling possibilities of unlikely or unprecedented coalitions:

In an interview with German public broadcaster ZDF, the SPD Chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück personally ruled out a grand coalition with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU and referred to wide opposition within the SPD to become, again, the junior partner of the CDU. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports, however, SPD sources have suggested that the party would be willing to enter a grand coalition if the CDU put forward an alternative Chancellor candidate instead of Merkel.

Also, both Peer Steinbrück as well as the top candidate of the Green Party, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, said it would not come to a red-green alliance with the Left Party. The Left Party has "no programme that would enable them to form part of a government", said Göring-Eckardt of the newspaper Tagesspiegel.

Leader of the parliamentary group of the Left Party in the Bundestag, Gregor Gysi, said in turn to the print edition of Bild am Sonntag that "without us, the SPD will not be providing the chancellor". To support a minority government of SPD and Green Party, however, he ruled out in an interview with the broadcaster ZDF.

And only recently again, Jürgen Trittin of the Green party has ruled out a potential coalition between the CDU/CSU and Greens in an interview with the Zeit, whereas a potential "traffic light" coalition between the SPD/Greens and FDP has never appealed to the latter – so little that they aim formally to rule out this possibility during a party convention in Mainz before the election. A further declination of the possible coalitions has been published by the Tagesspiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Thorsten Denkler, writing for the Süddeutsche Zeitung explains this by the parties’ fear that they have all adopted policies and programmes (with exception of the Left Party) that are so close to the centre that individual profiles are hard to distinguish. Democratic parties should always be able to form coalitions amongst themselves, despite the sweeping statements about impossible combinations that inevitably form part of the pre-election rhetoric – and of course it will happen, he argues, in one way or another, under Merkel’s pragmatic approach.