Germany: SPD leadership steps up pressure for coalition with Merkel
By
Johannes Stern
19 January 2018
The leadership of the Social Democratic Party is trying to close party ranks and pave the way for a renewal of its grand coalition with the conservative Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union (both parties known as the Union) in the run-up to the SPD special congress on January 21 in Bonn. SPD Chairman Martin Schulz and the party’s parliamentary faction leader, Andrea Nahles, both visited the state of North Rhine-Westphalia this week to secure the votes on Sunday of delegates from the most populous and industrialized state.
The ensuing discussion was intense, emotional and controversial, Schulz declared, following his debate with party delegates in Dusseldorf. It was “encouraging that in the exchange of arguments there was more unity than divergence.” He had encountered similar thoughtfulness in Dortmund one day before and that left him “hoping we win a strong mandate at the party congress to enter coalition negotiations.”
On Sunday, 600 delegates and the 45-strong SPD executive committee will vote in Bonn on a possible continuation of the grand coalition. The delegates are not bound by previous resolutions from state party congresses or executives. In the past few days, the SPD state associations in Berlin (23 delegates) and Saxony-Anhalt (six) spoke out against a renewal of the grand coalition. The SPD state groupings in Brandenburg (10 delegates) and Hamburg (15) voted in favour of coalition negotiations. The state with the most SPD delegates—NRW with 144 delegates—will not hold a formal vote in advance of Sunday’s congress.
The SPD leadership has adopted an increasingly aggressive stance in order to achieve its goal –the…