BERLIN – After the failure of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to form a four-party coalition, she's turning to an old flame to salvage stability: Germany's Social Democrats.After many meetings and handwringing, the Social Democrats announced Friday that they'll enter into exploratory coalition talks with Merkel's Christian Democrats come January, a process expected to last two weeks that must pass the muster of the party's some 440,000 members.
The prospect of another four years tied to Merkel and her Christian Democrats is a bitter pill to swallow for many Social Democrats, who viewed the results of Germany's Sept. 24 poll – their worst-ever showing in a national election – as a referendum on the catch-all constellation that governed Germany for 8 of the last 12 years.
But for Germany's right-wing, populist Alternative for Germany, or AfD – now the nation's third-largest faction in parliament – a renewed Grand Coalition isn't the most welcome development, either.
Although the party gained traction in recent years by criticizing the political stagnation of the Grand Coalition, a revival of that constellation in one form or another leaves the party in direct competition for voters' hearts and minds with another conservative faction in parliament arguably more apt at criticizing the government: The pro-business Free Democrats.
A four-party coalition with the Free Democrats "would have been better for the AfD because the differences between those parties involved would have made for impassioned and gruesome discussions, above all else on the topic of migration, that would have been better for their anti-establishment strategy," said Florian Hartleb, a German political scientist specializing in European populism and right-wing extremism.
"Now their achievements can be measured against those of the Free Democrats, who will probably be more constructive in the parliamentary opposition than the AfD," he added.
Germany's Sept. 24 parliamentary election resulted in a fractured political landscape that left Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats flailing to piece together a majority coalition. After receiving only 20.5 percent of the vote – their worst ever showing – the Social Democrats, Merkel's go-to partner for most of her tenure, proclaimed on election night that they wouldn't be entering into another coalition arrangement with Merkel.
The tables turned, however, when last month, the pro-business, conservative Free Democrats, normally a paramour of Merkel's, abandoned the experimental coalition talks that would have wed the two conservative parties with the environmentalist Green Party, citing irreconcilable differences.
"It’s better not to govern, than to govern badly," the Free Democrats' leader, Christian Lindner, proclaimed last month in his announcement that his party would be exiting coalition talks.
The move sent Merkel into a political crisis never-before-seen in Germany's post-war history. Faced with either the prospect of new elections or an unprecedented and unstable minority coalition, Merkel and other high-powered political elites dragged the Social Democrats back to the table to talk out a Grand Coalition 3.0.
"Whether or not the talks will result in the formation of a government is open," the Social Democrats' party head Martin Schulz said Friday after his party's leadership unanimously voted to begin exploratory talks with Merkel – albeit under different circumstances than previous marriages.
"We want a different culture of governance," Schulz added.
While the AfD celebrated the collapse of coalition talks between Merkel, the Free Democrats and the Greens as a sign of the end of Merkel's reign, the party's spokesman, Jörg Meuthen, told reporters in October that the motely constellation would ring in "golden times" for the AfD.
"It would have probably been better for the AfD under a Jamaica Coalition for the party to launch fundamentally oppositional attacks against all parties involved because this alliance would have been extremely difficult," said Hartleb.
By contrast, a Grand Coalition leaves more room for the pro-business Free Democrats, who reentered parliament this year after a four-year hiatus, to continue to reinvent themselves as a no-nonsense oppositional party – much to the disadvantage of the AfD, Hartleb added.
"The Free Democrats are in an interesting position because they've spent the past four years out of parliament and tried very hard to criticize the government in the meantime," he said. "It could be the case that the Free Democrats better position themselves as a bourgeois, democratic oppositional party and become perceived as a better alternative for protest voters unsatisfied with the performance of the government."
Even so, the AfD – which grew in prominence by utilizing an anti-immigrant, ethno-nationalist platform after Merkel's decision to open Germany's borders to some 1 million asylum seekers from the Middle East and elsewhere – could still benefit under a Grand Coalition, said Tyson Barker, a program director and senior fellow with the Aspen Institute, a non-partisan policy think tank in Berlin.
While the AfD and the Free Democrats are both conservative parties, the AfD has gone all-in on their firebrand form of right-wing nationalism, a realm untouched by other conservative parties, including the Free Democrats, he said.
"No other party is positioning themselves there," said Barker. "I don't think anybody will give the full-throated embrace that the AfD can in the same way."
Sticking to such nationalist politicking – a no-man's land in the German political realm – leaves room for the AfD to bolster their base and grow their numbers, regardless of the what constellation a future government under Merkel takes, Barker added.
"The AfD still has room to grow, no matter which one of those constellations would have come together," he said. "It doesn't seem like anyone is going to attempt to undercut the concerns of the AfD."
Photo: German Chancellor Angela Merkel's new coalition could boost far-right groups in Germany
Credit: ARA Network Inc.
Story/photo published date: 12/17/2018
A version of this story was published in The Washington Times.
