Last night, ARD (public Channel One in Germany), ran a public chat forum at 9:45 PM....the Anne Will Show....which the the topic was "How Much Green Can There Be in Black". Basically a long chat with only two guests....CDU's Wolfang Schauble (Finance Minister) and the Green's Cem Ozdemir.
The hype here was that the CDU could possibly take the Greens as a coalition partner. Shocker?
For the past two years, there's a hint here and there that the CDU would like to reach a stage where there was an optional partner beyond the FDP or SPD. Around four years ago, when Hessen's election resulted in a CDU win....they laid out an invitation to the Greens of Hessen....to join, and they've been a coalition government for four years. I won't call it a bold success but they have been able to work together and rarely have they argued in public.
The idea nationally of the Greens and the CDU forming a government? Some older folks will sit and laugh because they can't see it happening. Around the CDU VIP group...I'd say that the vast majority believe it could happen.
I watched around 15 minutes of the conversation. Schauble is on the verge of retirement, and is the more clever of the CDU leadership in Berlin. If you were looking for a convincing argument on this idea....he was giving it his best effort.
Why put this up on the front stage two weeks prior to the election? For the CDU, it does bring up an uncomfortable idea and might persuade two or three percent of the CDU voters to step away from voting for them....especially from the folks over the age of fifty. On the positive side, the Greens are in a low spot (maybe 7-percent expected), and it's possible that some SPD voters might be persuaded to vote for the Greens.....to get different coalition situation. So it might bump the Greens up one or two-percent.
Presently, if you add up the poll numbers...the combo of the CDU-CSU won't go past 37-percent. The Greens are likely at 7-percent. If you add up the numbers....I don't think it'll go to the 50-percent or more point (after you discard the votes for parties with less than 5-percent of the vote). So all this hype and talk may be worthless. You really need another three-percent of the vote to come up between these parties, to make the coalition idea occur.
Why hype this now? I suspect that in this diesel car mess....the Berlin figures of the Green Party would be able to halt this legal battle if they were dealt a leadership position in the government, and Merkel would like to make that happen.
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