'Yay, we kept our jobs!'
There was relief in Berlin and Brussels today as Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and its Bavarian CSU ally announced that they were, in principle, on track to form a repeat coalition of Germany's previous government with Martin Schulz's left-center Social Democrats party (SPD). The deal is not yet clinched, however, as SPD party members won't vote on any arrangement until they hold a special congress on 21 January. And even then,
predicts Horst Seehofer, head of the CSU, a government may not be in place until April,
some 6 months since the election in late September 2017.
This is uncharted territory for modern Germany. Drawn-out electoral processes are something they're used to mocking Italians about, but with both Merkel's and Schulz's parties clocking their worst election results since the Weimar Republic, political instability has returned to Germany in a big way. Unlike the CDU/CSU-SPD 'grand coalition' government from 2013-2017, this time around the largest party they face in the Bundestag is the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), which, as a new right-wing nationalist party, poses a 'dangerous threat' (from the establishment's point of view) as the 'official' opposition.
Comment: Macron is only attempting to complete an agenda that has been at work in France for years.