Germany's GroKo in Trouble. How Long Before a Red-Red-Green Government?

Hopeful news was to be found over the weekend in Germany. Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans won the Social Democratic Party dual leadership contest, beating business-as-usual pro-centrists Olaf Scholz, Germany's finance minister, and Klara Geywitz. As Jeremy Cliffe reports for the New Statesman,

All agree that the result will destabilise the “grand coalition” of Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its conservative (CSU) sister party and the SPD. Esken, in particular, has questioned its future and suggested that the CDU and CSU will have to make hefty leftwards concessions to keep the SPD on-board. At a conference in Berlin next weekend the SPD will vote on whether to stay or to walk.

The pessimism is understandable. Since Gerhard Schröder lost the chancellery to Merkel in 2005, the SPD has governed as the junior partner in grand coalitions with her for 10 of the 14 succeeding years and along the way has has lurched from crisis to crisis. It has gone through 11 leaders, five of them provisional, and seen its vote share fall from its election-losing 34 per cent in 2005 to a record-low 20.5 per cent in 2017, which according to current polls would fall again by at least a third were elections held today.

The CDU's mini-Merkel, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, was dismissive of renegotiating the terms of the GroKo, saying that, according to Reuters, “We are concentrating on dedicating ourselves to work of substance — we are not a therapy facility for the coalition parties.”

We'll have a better idea what's in store for Germany's governing coalition after the SPD party congress begins on Friday. Reuters notes that

If the Social Democrats did decide to walk out, it’s unclear what would happen. Merkel’s bloc could seek to carry on in a minority government or, theoretically at least, negotiate an alternative coalition; or the result could eventually be an early election.

Merkel has said that this is her last term and she won’t run in the next election, currently due in the fall of 2021.

If elections to the Bundestag were to be held today, the CDU would nose out the Greens. The problem for the Christian Democrats is that parties aren't willing to govern with the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The only other natural partners for the CDU are the Free Democrats, but they're too small to create a majority. So this leaves the SPD as the key party.

Right now the SPD and AfD are essentially tied in polling as the number three party behind the Christian Democrats and Greens.

A red-red-green coalition appears to be the only path forward. The problem is that we might have to wait another two years before that path is chosen.