“Grand” isn’t what it used to be. When Angela Merkel built her first “grand” coalition between her center-right Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) back in 2005, its parliamentary majority was 448 out of 614 seats. (In the first-ever postwar grand coalition, which ruled from 1966 to 1969, it was an overwhelming 486 out of 518 seats.) Fast forward to Merkel’s last government and her third such coalition (2018-21), and that majority was reduced to 399 seats out of a 709-strong Bundestag—not so grand anymore.
Now, after Germany’s February 23 election, Merkel’s long-time party rival Friedrich Merz is seeking to form yet another such government with the SPD, but both parties together will be left with a relatively slim majority: 328 out of 630 seats. This is (just) solid enough, but DIE ZEIT newspaper is already lobbying to abolish the phrase Große Koalition, or GroKo, for good. KleiKo perhaps, for little coalition?
Indeed, its diminishing grandness speaks of the accelerating fragmentation of Germany’s political spectrum—and the fact that with Merz and Scholz both of the former big people’s parties fielded candidates who were hugely unpopular among German voters. What’s more, another “not-so-grand-anymore coalition” is only possibly because the anti-migration, pro-Russia, economically hard-left Bewegung Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW, Sahra Wagenknecht Movement), just narrowly failed to clear the Bundestag’s “5-percent hurdle,” registering 4.97 percent of the vote. You can call this a close shave.
Had the BSW made it into parliament, the only viable option would have been a “Kenya” coalition of CDU/CSU, SPD, and Greens (so called because of the parties’ colors corresponding with the African country’s flag). After the decidedly mixed record of the wobbly, permanently-at-odds three-party Scholz government, however, the appetite for building yet another three-way coalition is strictly limited in Berlin.
A Declaration of Independence
Merz, who needed three attempts to become party leader after Merkel relinquished the CDU leadership in 2019, does not mind too much. A majority is a majority, and the 69-year-old prospective next chancellor is in a hurry. “The world isn’t waiting for Germany,” Merz said on election night, which is a bit of an understatement. Given US President Donald Trump’s alliance-splitting solo negotiations with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and the possibility of the Trump administration withdrawing the US security guarantee for Europe, one of Germany’s postwar pillars—the transatlantic partnership—looks like crumbling to dust at any moment.
Such a potentially existential crisis demands a quick government formation, and Merz wants it installed by Easter. He addressed the rapidly changing world order in surprisingly straight fashion immediately after his party’s victory. Like the CDU at large, Merz is a natural transatlanticist and was president of Atlantik-Brücke, Germany’s foremost transatlantic network, for a decade (2009-19). But when asked about his foreign policy, he said that “strengthening Europe” was his “absolute priority,” so it could “become independent of the United States step by step.” This was because the Trump administration seemed “largely indifferent to Europe’s fate.” Merz also said that the interventions by Elon Musk and others from Washington in the German election campaign in support of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), had been “no less dramatic, drastic, and, in the end, outrageous than the interventions we’ve seen from Moscow.”
Zigzagging Ahead
It's not clear how literally Merz should be taken on this. At the start of a week that saw French President Emmanual Macron and British Prime Minister Kier Starmer visiting Trump at the White House in efforts to pull the US president back from his gonzo imperialism at Europe’s expense, Merz’ comments might seem rash. At a press conference the following day he stressed that he would “do everything in his power” to keep up the transatlantic relationship. Expect more zigzagging in the future.
The general approach, however, is likely to make forming a foreign policy consensus within a future CDU/CSU-SPD government easier, as the Social Democrats, forced to give up their Ostpolitik illusions over Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine, share the sentiment. And if Europe’s urgently required military build-up is facilitated not only to keep Putin’s Russia away, but also to give an appropriate answer to the shocking behavior of the Trump administration—in the United Nations this week, it sided with Russia (and North Korea) on a question of European security—it may be even more easily accepted.
SPD at the Ready
The SPD leadership has certainly moved fast to make a quick government formation possible. Party co-chairman Lars Klingbeil, who reportedly had tried to convince Scholz to make way for the far more popular Defense Minister Boris Pistorius to lead the SPD campaign, will take over the leadership of the parliamentary caucus. He also seemed to have made sure that the party rank and file are willing to accept the junior role in a CDU/CSU-led coalition again. So far, there has been no serious criticism of this course within the party. (During the Merkel era, large parts of the SPD were sick and tired of the GroKo which, in their view, led to ever-diminishing election results.)
It's the return of the power-conscious, pragmatic Lower Saxons: Klingbeil, who like Pistorius hails from that federal state (as does disgraced former SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder) has his eyes on the foreign office, while Pistorius would likely prefer to stay put. The CDU/CSU wants both ministries, too, but would need convincing arguments to make Pistorius move to the interior ministry (where he would have to deal with migration policy) and to make Klingbeil give way (Markus Söder, the leader of the CSU, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, is rumored to have foreign ministerial ambitions).
So, it seems likely that the CDU/CSU will focus on finance and the economy (another priority after two years of recession) while the SPD will look after foreign affairs and security—underpinned by some sort of National Security Council structure that brings together all the security-relevant portfolios, with a national security advisor at Merz’ side in the chancellery with a coordinating role. (So far, German chancellors have foreign policy advisors, usually career diplomats, in a more limited role.)
New Flexibility?
On the thorny question of where the money for big spending on defense (and also infrastructure) is to come from, Merz has sent mixed messages in recent days, which doesn’t bode well. In the next parliament, which constitutes itself on March 25 at the latest, it will be difficult to find a constitution-changing two-thirds majority, given the strong showing of the far right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the hard-left Die Linke, which won 20.8 and 8.8 percent of the vote respectively. In the current parliament, the CDU/CSU, SPD, and Greens still have such a majority.
On Monday, Merz floated the idea that the “old” Bundestag could either change the constitutional “debt brake,” which limits new borrowing to 0.35 percent of GDP, or agree additional sums for the extra-budgetary “special fund” for Germany’s armed forces. The following day he was already rowing back on the first idea, saying that debt brake reform would not be attempted “in the short term.” This leaves as a quick option another Sondervermögen—the number circulating is a top-up of at least €200 billion—which also would need a two-thirds majority to get approval. It seems that Merz failed earlier to clear all this with his own party, and the SPD is hesitating.
This is worrying. A solid agreement on an expansive fiscal policy will be the key to success for Germany’s next government. As Merz has hinted, it might be the last chance for a GroKo to turn the tide, getting its act together on defense, but also reversing the ever-growing support for the AfD’s far-right extremism. The election outcome and its immediate aftermath don’t offer many grounds for optimism.
Henning Hoff is executive editor of INTERNATIONALE POLITIK QUARTERLY.
