And indeed, the conference vote ended up being remarkably close, with only 56 percent of the assembled delegates endorsing the negotiations for a new “GroKo” — the German media’s awkward abbreviation for “große Koalition,” a grand coalition between the country’s two main parties, the CDU and SPD. But fifty-six percent is still fifty-six percent. Formal talks to assemble a grand coalition — the third in sixteen years — will soon be underway. [...]
An uninspired character, Schulz did his best on Sunday to play the part of the passionate statesman forced to join the government out of a sense of national duty, while at the same time insisting that he and his team had wrung substantial concessions from Merkel. The initial agreement between the SPD and CDU, which forms the basis of coalition negotiations, includes several noteworthy, arguably “Social Democratic” reforms. [...]
Schulz and company want their supporters to believe that these concessions are the result of hard bargaining, but the fact is, after two decades of neoliberal convergence, very little difference remains between the two major parties. As Oliver Nachtwey argued in the lead up to last year’s elections, Merkel largely abandoned fiscally conservative policies after taking government, and has since presided over a stable spending and social welfare policy that has even seen her overturn the most extreme of the SPD’s neoliberal reforms of the early 2000s. Tweaking a few details to appease the Social Democrats probably didn’t take much work. [...]
At the same time, this will not be a grand coalition like any other. Last year’s elections not only delivered humiliatingly low results for both of the major parties, but also witnessed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s meteoric rise. With the SPD back in government, the AfD will now be the largest opposition party in parliament, posing the very real danger that further hollowing out of the political center will benefit not the Left, but the radical right.
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