Merkel battles to save future as parties split over migrants
"I realise that a huge piece of work lies ahead over the next few days. I think it can succeed."
Angela Merkel, German chancellor
GERMANY: Angela Merkel began a five-day battle for her political survival yesterday as talks opened in Berlin to build a ‘‘grand coalition’’ between her divided conservatives and Martin Schulz’s social democrat party.
The German chancellor described as enormous the challenge of bridging political divisions both within her own Christian democrats and with the left-wing SPD in order recreate the coalition that ran the country from 2013 to 2017.
A failure by Merkel to agree a Grosse Koalition, or ‘‘Groko’’, will trigger new elections at a time when her own conservative alliance with the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) is under strain and losing support to right-wing nationalists.
Merkel has been struggling to form a new government after elections in September saw her party lose 65 seats to Germany’s anti-migrant Alternative for Germany party. The AfD came third as 5.8 million voters registered their disapproval for Mrs Merkel’s policy of welcoming more than one million refugees into the country.
The new talks will last until Thursday with 39 negotiators around the table, 13 from each party - Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the CSU and SPD.
As talks opened opinion polls put Schulz’s SPD on just 20 per cent support, even lower than the party’s disastrous election result which followed the previous coalition with Merkel.
Both Schulz and Horst Seehofer, the CSU’s leader, have admitted that their political careers are over if coalition negotiations fail and Germany is once again plunged into divisive elections. Facing the most difficult political test of her 13 years in power, Merkel expressed her ‘‘optimism’’ as the talks opened at the SPD’s headquarters, the WillyBrandt-Haus, yesterday.
‘‘The challenges that lie ahead are enormous,’’ she said. ‘‘I realise that a huge piece of work lies ahead over the next few days. I think it can succeed.’’
An Emnid opinion poll for the Bild am Sonntag newspaper giving the SPD its worst support rating since 2009 will rattle Schulz, who must show left-wing opponents that a coalition does not mean betraying his party’s principles. His decision to hold talks are a U-turn after the last SPD coalition delivered the party’s worst election result since 1933 and angered left-wingers, who have formed a ‘‘NoGroko’’ campaign.
The last grand coalition government, made up from the same three parties, the CDU, CSU and SPD, accounted for 67 per cent of the vote when it was formed in
2013. Since then and following the
2015 migration crisis, the share of the main three parties has fallen to
53 per cent as voters have switched to fringe parties such as the nationalist AfD party, which won
12.6 per cent of the vote last year. Next Friday, Schulz hopes to make a recommendation for a coalition to the SPD followed by a conference of suspicious rank and file party members on January 21.
According to press reports, an unlikely alliance has emerged between Schulz and the CSU’s right-wing leader Seehofer, who faces opposition from Bavarian hardline conservatives to Merkel’s refugee policies.
In talks last Wednesday, Schulz is said to have told Merkel and Seehofer that ‘‘if this fails my political career is over’’. ‘‘Not only yours,’’ replied the CSU leader, according to the Bild newspaper.
To avoid elections and to patch up a coalition, Merkel must bridge deep political divisions.
SPD sources say Schulz can achieve his promises only on increased social security spending and infrastructure investment by winning control of the finance ministry for his party.
To show his party that he has not betrayed them, Schulz has also demanded sweeping reforms to Germany’s health insurance system and the creation of a ‘‘United States of Europe’’ by 2025.
While these are demands that are opposed by many in the CSU and CDU, Schulz’s call for a more liberal refugee policy, allowing asylum seekers to bring family members into Germany, is a major sticking point in talks.
While the SPD will agree to speeding up deportations of rejected asylum seekers and funding for refugees to return home, Schulz has rejected conservative proposals to extend a ban on reuniting refugees with their families which runs out on March 16.
Often clashing with Merkel, Seehofer supports tougher new refugee policies such as welfare cuts in a bid to stop voters switching their support to the AfD, after the CSU and CDU lost 8.5 per cent of their vote in the last elections.
In a sign of Germany’s increasingly polarised and heated debate over migration following an influx of almost one million asylum seekers in 2015, Manfred Weber, a senior CSU politician was forced last weekend to apologise after calling for ‘‘final solution’’ to the migration crisis.
Weber, an MEP who leads the European Parliament’s largest conservative grouping, used the phrase, finale losung, or ‘‘final solution’’ in German, which was considered too close to the term Endlosung, used by the Nazis to describe extermination policy against Jews and others.
‘‘My choice of words was wrong and I regret it,’’ he said.
Gerd Muller, Germany’s development minister, proposed creating a euros 650 million fund to promote the return of refugees to their home countries, especially in Africa or Iraq.
‘‘Nobody should return as a loser. For example, they could receive a wage of euros 10 per day for reconstruction work in housing and road construction,’’ he said.
Germany will demand that other European Union countries support the fund, especially countries such as Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic that have refused to accept refugees allocated under quotas decide in Brussels.
‘‘The Eastern Europeans, who have so far received no or too few refugees, must help with the financing,’’ he said.