This coalition-building exercise by Chancellor Merkel and the CDU-CSU....with the SPD? It' a bit of an odd 'dance'.
First, the SPD has been forced into this episode for two reasons. There's this great fear that a second election might go in a very negative way for the SPD. There's also this fear that if you went to a minority government, the band-aid fix.....that it'd be a dramatically weak government for weeks and months.
Second, the SPD really doesn't have a decent laundry list of things that they'd like to 'demand' upon the CDU-CSU team. They weren't expecting this to come up. So they've likely been busy over the weekend....developing a list and preparing to make major demands.
Third, the leadership core at the top of the SPD....namely Schulz himself.....isn't that keen to work as a junior partner of Merkel. In fact, if you guage comments of the past week by the secondary players of the SPD.....they aren't that pleased over Schulz and would like to see him gone.
Fourth, all of this demonstrating a weak political system within Germany, and setting up a worry situation for the EU elections in just two years.
Fifth, Merkel isn't viewed any longer as the long-term authority figure. Most Germans want a change....but they don't really want the SPD's Schulz as the change figure.
Where this goes? I think this will be a fairly quick discussion and the SPD folks get virtually everything they desire. The CDU voting crowd will be very dismayed over what was given over, and this will anger them for the foreseeable future (maybe affecting state elections for the 2018 and 2019 period).
As for Merkel staying around? I have serious doubts that she's still around in twelve months.
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