Tag: Martin Schulz

The image that sticks most in my mind from the uniquely disruptive political year that was 2018 is of Angela Merkel with Horst Seehofer on the balcony of the Chancellery building. The chancellor, a glass of white wine in her hand, has turned her back and is stalking away from her rebellious interior minister, as though he were a dog she'd just caught going through the kitchen garbage can. If a current article in The New Yorker magazine is to be believed, one major reason Merkel decided to run for a fourth term in office in 2017 was because she felt the world needed a counterweight to US President Donald Trump. The incipient dissolution of the SPD The irony is that much of the political disruption in Germany was due to factors beyond the control of a chancellor whose preference — indeed whose whole political brand — is to remain above the fray. Merkel spent the first months of 2018 doing something familiar: negotiating a third centrist grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD). The SPD began to disintegrate. It started with then-SPD Chairman Martin Schulz flip-flopping on whether Social Democrats would form another Merkel-led government and whether he himself would serve in it. Such is the state of Merkel's current partners. The Greens, whose popularity has yo-yoed over decades but who have never been a dominant party, are now Germany's second strongest political force, at least if public opinion polls are true, while the SPD is battling it out for third with the upstart AfD. Together, the conservatives and the SPD would be unlikely to be able to muster anywhere near a parliamentary majority.