There’s no success like failure, as Bob Dylan once observed. Nearly six months after Germans went to the polls and gave the country’s coalition government a bloody nose, the same two parties are back in government in another ‘grand coalition’ – yet another unholy alliance of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, with Angela Merkel at the helm again.
Haven’t we been here several times before? Well, yes and no. Merkel’s centre-right CDU agreed a coalition deal with the soft-left SPD last month, but SPD protocol demanded they put this deal to their 464,000 members, and after an all-night count the result of that postal vote was announced this morning. As expected, SPD members have approved the terms of this latest grand coalition (or GroKo, as Germans call it) but the margin is wider than many pundits had anticipated: 66pc to 34pc, very nearly two to one.
This is a significant defeat for SPD radicals, personified by 28 year-old Youth Wing leader Kevin Kühnert, who’d campaigned against another GroKo.
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