German Election Winner Wants Quick Negotiation to Form Government, But Kingmaker Left May Hold All The Cards

The security and economic factors facing Germany are too urgent to allow long months of government coalition-forming talks, election winner Friedrich Merz says, handing yet more negotiation leverage to the political left who lost big in Sunday’s election yet gained kingmaker status.

The leader of Germany’s soft centre-right conservatives, the Christian Democrats (CDU), Friedrich Merz, will likely be the next Chancellor of Germany, but at what cost? Since his party came first in Sunday’s federal elections, he’s said almost everything possible to minimise his chances of getting a good deal in the bargaining process to form a government.

Because, as is typical with European elections where many parties vie for power and expect to have to build post-election coalitions, Merz’s CDU can’t command parliament and pass laws on its own; it needs to recruit a junior partner. Yet straight out of the gate, he said he’d only consider talking to one of the two parties with enough seats to make that happen, leaving the more ideologically aligned but unfashionable AfD out in the cold while reaching out to the left, instantly weakening his own bargaining position.

Having gifted the left-wing Social Democrats (SPD) sure knowledge they could play hard ball in negotiations and make demands of concessions for their own interests because the only other option open to Merz is fresh elections, he went further on Tuesday, saying he wanted the negotiations to be fast. This, he said, was because the threats facing Germany are so great it needs a functioning government as fast as possible.

Yet the SPD was quick to respond that they had no intention of being rushed and would not agree to anything unless they were satisfied. In other words, to get that fast result, all of the concessions will have to come from Merz, who was supposedly the winner of Sunday’s election.

It’s quite the power dynamic. And millions of Germans who voted for border control and fiscal probity, seeing them bartered away to appease the defeated left, may harden their hearts by the next election.

Merz confirmed on Tuesday after a one-and-a-half-hour meeting in Berlin that “the talks have begun… I assume that we will intensify them in the next few days” and said he wanted the new government live and kicking by Easter because of pressing issues such as the Ukraine war, Germany’s stuttering economy, and border control. “All of this requires a government capable of taking action,” he said, optimistically stating that he believes he can achieve a “good coalition agreement… within a reasonable period of time.”

It’s a nice thought. Yet in the same breath as acknowledging the outgoing government-leading party had suffered a “clear defeat” in the election, SPD group leader Rolf Mützenich also insisted there was no way the faction would be pushed around and would only prop up a Merz coalition on their own terms. He said: “[we] must bring all the strength, all the authority and all the consistency of the Social Democrats to the election winner… We will not allow ourselves to be pressured into anything that we cannot take responsibility for.”

SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil also stated expectations that the winning CDU would pander to the loser SPD, not the other way around, or they would simply walk away from negotiations. He said it is imperative “that Merz will change his course and his tone significantly” and, playing it cool, there would be no way the SPD would accept the idea that their participation in the next government was somehow inevitable or a matter of duty.

While German coalition negotiations have been completed as quickly as in weeks in the past, where the agreement had to be forged between parties that simply want different things and promised different policies to their voters at election time, it can take longer. The last such ‘grand coalition’ bringing left and right together under Angela Merkel took over six months to negotiate.