What's Keeping The German Grand Coalition Talks Alive?

Background

Heading into the last election, SPD failed to distinguish itself. Voters reacted appropriately, abandoning SPD, leading to its worst performance ever.

When SPD initially declined the opportunity to form a government, Merkel attempted a three-way coalition of CDU/CSU, FDP, and the Greens.

Differences were irreconcilable, and FDP broke off discussion.

Under pressure from the German president, a largely symbolic position, CDU/CSU and SPD are now back in talks

No Rank-and-File Support

Within the SPD, there is little or no support for another Grand Coalition. Party members want a new election, fearing, rightfully so, that another compromise is likely to cost SPD votes at the next election, and likely sooner than later because a coalition cannot last.

Today, Eurointelligence notes the SPD regional party preemptively rejected another grand coalition, before the talks even start. But the talks will start anyway.

It may not mean all that much that the SPD organization in a state of Thuringia has already, and preemptively, rejected the grand coalition. The talks haven’t even started, there is no deal on the table and, who knows, Martin Schulz may pull off a few surprises in the upcoming talks.

But, as of now, we sense no support for a grand coalition and no shift in the overwhelmingly negative views of SPD members. [Yet] two senior SPD leaders spoke at the regional party congress: the deputy leader Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel and Carsten Schneider, who represent the left and right wings of the party respectively, and who both support the official policy of seeking talks with the CDU/CSU.

One of the people who is pressing hard for a new grand coalition is Sigmar Gabriel, who hopes to secure the job of finance minister in such a construction. He writes in Der Spiegel that it does not matter for the survival of the SPD whether it is in government or not. This is a statement many SPD members, including Schulz, do not agree with.

Gabriel is urging the party to shift to the right by embracing a nationalist concept – the notion of the innate superiority of German culture (“Leitkultur”), a notion once championed but later dropped by the CDU, and bitterly opposed by all the other parties in the Bundestag.