Pressure on SPD to ease German chaos

‘Crisis can’t stop EU reforms’

BERLIN, Nov 22, (AFP): Pressure mounted Wednesday on Germany’s Social Democrat leader Martin Schulz to reconsider an alliance with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and stop Europe’s biggest economy from sinking into months of paralysis.

Schulz has repeatedly said the SPD would not return as the junior coalition partner in a government led by Merkel, after suffering a stinging defeat in September’s general election.

But after Merkel’s bid at forging a coalition with other parties fell apart, plunging Germany into a political crisis, voices within and outside the SPD have grown louder in questioning Schulz’s decision and push for early elections.

President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who holds the power to call snap polls and who is himself a senior Social Democrat, has said that this “is the moment when all participants need to reconsider their attitude”.

Steinmeier will meet Schulz on Thursday.

The president has already held talks with the leaders of parties in the failed coalition talks – the pro-business FDP – which halted the negotiations – and the ecologist Greens.

And he met with the leader of Merkel’s Bavarian allies the CSU on Wednesday.

As the crisis shows no signs of abating, the Sueddeutsche daily reported that “in the SPD, unease is growing over its clear refusal of a grand coalition”.

“One must speak with the president openly, without already insisting on your own point of view,” Johannes Kahrs, who leads the right-leaning wing of the SPD, told Bild daily.

EU Budget Commissioner, Guenther Oettinger, also urged the SPD to reexamine its stance.

“With a view on Germany’s ability to take action in Europe, the SPD should once again consider if it should not join a government,” Oettinger, a CSU politician, told Spiegel weekly.

“Resistance is growing” against Schulz, Bild reported, adding that the “most prominent secret advocate for a new grand coalition is deputy chancellor Sigmar Gabriel”.

Schulz has declared that he was ready for a snap poll, but latest surveys show that an early election would likely deliver similar results to September’s – and the risk of potentially getting a worse score than the record low 20.5 percent is something that SPD members fear.

Schulz

“While a majority of rank and file members is fundamentally opposed to another stint in government, parts of the party’s establishment feel that throwing a life-line to Merkel could well be preferable to unpredictable alternatives,” said Michael Broening, political analyst at the SPD-linked Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.

“At the very least it would enable the Social Democrats to push for a whole list of social democratic demands and basically dictate the terms of what is widely expected to be Merkel’s last government,” he added.

With former finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble out of the way, the SPD could even make a play for the powerful ministry at a time when the public treasury is bulging with 45 billion euros, noted German media.

Seemingly backpedalling from Schulz’s snap polls call, SPD parliamentary group chief Andrea Nahles said on Monday she would not rule out backing a Merkel-led minority government.

The party’s rank and file are also wondering if former European Parliament chief Schulz is the best man to lead them into any new election campaign, according to media reports two weeks before the SPD’s annual congress.

“Too many mistakes during the election, missteps with new appointments and – worst of all – a misjudgement of the public’s current mood,” Bild said.

Meanwhile, Germany’s political crisis “cannot stop our work” and the EU will push ahead with plans to reform the euro after Brexit, the European Commission’s euro chief vowed in an interview on Tuesday.

Valdis Dombrovskis, the commission vice-president responsible for the single currency, said Brussels would unveil its proposals for the 19-country eurozone as planned on Dec 6.

The collapse of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition talks has sparked fears that the EU’s largest economy will be paralysed just as it hopes to embark on ambitious reforms pushed by French President Emmanuel Macron.

“We cannot stop our work only because there is an election in one country or coalition building, and sometimes it takes time. Therefore, in any case, we are moving ahead with our work,” Dombrovskis told AFP at his office in the commission HQ.

The former Latvian prime minister rejected suggestions that the problems in Germany had closed the “window of opportunity” which commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said was available to reboot the bloc after the Brexit vote.

Merkel has been one of the strongest backers of Macron’s plans, which were developed in tandem with Juncker.

“In a union with 28 democracies, or potentially 27 democracies (after Britain leaves in 2019), there are always elections somewhere, and we need to accept this,” said Dombrovskis, who oversaw his country’s entry into the euro in 2014.

EU sources have told AFP that a meeting of EU leaders on December 15 to discuss the future of the euro is at risk because of Merkel’s woes, but Dombrovskis said that was a matter for European Council chief Donald Tusk, who organises summits.

BERLIN:

Majority

Also:

A Romanian truck driver has confessed to having raped and killed a woman, who was out jogging in a forest in southwestern Germany.

At the opening of his trial in Freiburg on Wednesday, German news agency dpa reported that the 40-year-old said he killed the woman out of “inexplicable aggression,” but that he didn’t have a sexual motive.

Senior prosecutor Tomas Orschitt accused the defendant, whose name was not given because of German privacy rules, of raping and killing the 27-yearold in Endingen in November 2016.

Investigators used highway toll and cellphone data to track him down.

In a separate case, the defendant is also suspected of having killed a French student whose body was found in January 2014 in Kufstein, Austria.