Growing pressure on Merkel

Chancellor criticised by her party after offering posts to win coalition support

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing a storm of criticism from members of her conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) after she was forced to forfeit top ministerial posts to ensure Social Democrat (SPD) backing for her new coalition Government.

“Phew! At least we still have the chancellery!” tweeted CDU lawmaker Olav Gutting after the SPD grabbed the key Cabinet jobs of finance, the foreign office and the big-budget labour and social affairs portfolio as part of the deal announced on Thursday.

The sense of unease in the CDU ranks is likely to set the stage for a turbulent party conference on February 26, which has been called to vote on the coalition agreement that Merkel hammered out with the SPD over the last three weeks.

As a result, the CDU party conference could turn into a major test of Merkel’s political authority after more than 12 years as chancellor.

The CDU’s powerful business wing in the southwestern state of Baden Wuerttemberg said it was “appalled” by the planned allocation of three top ministries to the SPD, which secured just 20.5 per cent of the vote in the September elections.

“It is difficult to understand why a party with about 20 per cent of the vote can gain 40 per cent of the ministerial posts, including the heavyweights of foreign affairs, finance and justice,” the group said.

But Horst Seehofer, the head of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian-based allies of Merkel’s CDU, told reporters that the SPD had been “very insistent that it wanted these three ministries otherwise they could not join the Government”. He was speaking after the CSU executive unanimously approved the new German coalition agreement at a meeting yesterday.

The more than 170-page agreement faces a more unpredictable vote by the SPD’s 460,000 members.

About 76 per cent of SPD members backed forging a coalition with the CDU-CSU after the 2013 election.

This time, however, large sections of the centre-left party are opposed to signing up for another four years as a junior member of a Merkel-led coalition after its disastrous showing in September.

“The SPD is helping Merkel back into power,” an SPD member, Susanne Neumann, told dpa. “And the loser will not be the CDU, but the SPD. They are now digging their own grave, and not with just a normal spade, but with an excavator.”

The results of the SPD ballot are due to be announced on March 4.

An SPD vote to back teaming up with Merkel for her fourth term in office would finally bring to an end months of political uncertainty in Europe’s biggest economy.

The party’s rejection of the coalition contract could trigger fresh elections, or possibly the formation of a minority government led by the CDU-CSU.

While the SPD mayor of the northern city of Hamburg, Olaf Scholz, is tipped to be finance minister and vice-chancellor, SPD leader Martin Schulz is, under the current plan, to become foreign minister with the CDU’s Ursula von der Leyen retaining the defence portfolio.

Seehofer is slated to head a “super ministry” — an upgraded Interior Ministry handling construction and the critical areas of immigration, refugees and domestic security.

The CDU’s Peter Altmaier is expected to become economics minister in a new Merkel-led coalition.

The names of the other ministers have not yet been decided.