Infighting, bleak economy move Germany’s coalition to shaky ground

Berlin — The parties in Germany’s governing coalition are under pressure to assert themselves after regional election defeats, dismal polling numbers and questions over whether they can form a joint response to the darkening outlook for Europe’s largest economy.

Elections are scheduled for September, but another spat over the budget has triggered speculation that one of the three parties could leave, potentially triggering a new poll.

Here is how the coalition works, why it is under pressure and what could lead to it falling apart:

Who is in the government?

Germany’s government is an ideologically diverse coalition comprises Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), the environmentalist Greens and the neoliberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).

Formed after the 2021 election, it was the first such coalition at a national level and promised to speed up digitalisation and the transition to a carbon neutral economy.

The FDP surprised its partners on Friday evening with a leaked draft economic programme which proposed tax and spending cuts and deregulation as a way of spurring growth — a prescription dramatically at odds with the other parties’ preference for targeted government support.

All three parties in the coalition have faced a string of poor electoral results lately as populist parties on both sides of the political spectrum have surged.

The Greens were ejected from two regional parliaments in September after failing to reach the 5% threshold to enter. The FDP was also ejected from a regional parliament, while failing to re-enter two others it had already fallen out of.

At a national level, the three parties are polling less combined, on about 30%, than the opposition conservatives, and Scholz is the least popular chancellor on record. Once considered one of two big-tent parties in Germany, his SPD is polling in third place behind the conservatives and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The opposition said the coalition no longer has the legitimacy to keep governing and has urged it to call snap elections, as French President Emmanuel Macron did earlier this year.

Why is the coalition so unpopular?

The coalition took office shortly before the outbreak of the Ukraine war, which ended cheap Russian gas deliveries to Germany, Europe’s largest economy, accelerating a cost-of-living crisis and fears of deindustrialisation.

That bleak economic situation has made voters less receptive to the government’s costly green policies.

The arrival of more than 1-million Ukrainian refugees also fed anxiety about irregular migration and the strain it is placing on public services. Germany took in more than a million migrants largely from the Middle East in 2015/16.

A court decision last year blew a €60bn hole in the state budget by ruling unconstitutional an accounting trick the parties had been relying on to paper over their deep ideological differences and forced it to cut spending.

Finally, public infighting within the coalition fostered doubts about its ability to deal with the multiple crises facing the country. The FDP’s fiscally hawkish stance in particular has put it at odds with the SPD and Greens over the budget.

If one party leaves the coalition, the other two could continue as a minority government but would likely struggle to pass laws.

On the rare occasions that this has happened in the past, it has led to political crises prompting the formation of a new coalition, without new elections.

In 1966, the withdrawal of the FDP led to then-conservative chancellor Ludwig Erhard resigning a month later and his party forming a new coalition with the SPD.

In 1982, the withdrawal of the FDP led a month later to a constructive vote of no confidence in then-SPD chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the election of the conservative Helmut Kohl as his successor. Kohl formed a new coalition with the FDP and triggered early elections to legitimise his mandate.

The FDP and the conservatives do not have enough seats to form a government, making a direct repeat of 1982 impossible. Only the SPD and the conservatives would together have the seats to form a government, but ideological differences make a repeat of former chancellor Angela Merkel’s “grand coalition” unlikely unless voters force it upon the two parties in new elections.

Can the chancellor call an early election?

No, in Germany the chancellor cannot call a snap election but can effectively trigger one by calling a vote of confidence. If the chancellor loses, Germany’s president can dissolve parliament and call an early election. The system was designed to prevent a repetition of the instability of the interwar years when small parties were able to cause chaos even from outside the government.

Reuters