Grand coalition again

To no-one’s surprise, Germany’s centre-right (CDU) and centre-left (SPD) parties announced overnight that they had agreed on terms for forming a coalition government. CDU leader Friedrich Merz will become prime minister (chancellor) when parliament resumes in early May, after his party won the largest number of seats at last February’s election.

It’s been described as “a swift coalition agreement,” but of course that’s all relative: in Australia, taking more than two months to form a new government would be seen as catastrophic. In the proportional systems of Europe, however, it’s nothing to worry about. And this time, with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin between them sowing chaos across the world, there’s a consensus on the need to move quickly.

This is the fifth time the two parties have governed together; one was back in the 1960s, but the others have all been in the last twenty years. No longer an exceptional expedient, grand coalition has become a routine option. And for most of that time I’ve been warning about its dangers; here I am, for example, in Crikey in April 2006:

Certainly in the short term it gives more of the electorate something like what they want. But it does so at the cost of longer-term damage to democracy. Voters cannot give a verdict on the coalition as a whole, only on individual parties, and discontent with the coalition’s policies can only be expressed by embracing one of the small parties that have been left out of it. Because opposition is confined to the extremes, they gain increased exposure and credibility.

For democracy to (sort of) continue working, voters have to have real choices, and if the outcome is going to be coalition either way then no real choice gets made. As anything other than an emergency measure, grand coalitions make democracy unworkable …

But the landscape has changed in those twenty years. Back then, a grand coalition meant a large majority: in 2005 the two major parties won 69.4% of the vote between them and 448 of the 614 seats. This time, it was touch and go on election night as to whether they would win a majority at all. They ultimately emerged with 328 of the 630 seats, but with 44.9% they were well short of a majority of the vote.

It’s clear that working together is not helping the two parties’ electoral fortunes – and especially not the SPD, who have been the junior partner each time and have now recorded their worst result since the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, as their share of the vote declines, the argument that grand coalition is undemocratic loses some of its force. But the problem of driving voters to the extremes is still very real, with the three anti-mainstream parties (far left, far right and combo) this year collecting 34.6% of the vote between them.

And as grand coalition becomes routine, it’s harder to convince voters that this time the situation truly is exceptional. Given the challenges Europe faces, the case for unity is stronger than usual; Merz’s problem may be not that his government is too broad, but that its base is too narrow. At some point, an effort will need to be made to bring either far right or far left within the democratic tent: the far-right AfD’s allegiance to Putin makes that impossible at present, but some overtures to the far-left Left party (Die Linke) might be on the cards.

All coalitions involve tensions, as, for example, the grand coalition in South Africa has recently discovered. But they need not be related to the ideological breadth involved; close allies can have poisonous relationships as well. Merz will have some differences with his colleagues, but their biggest task is to recover the confidence of the electorate and lure it away from the extremes.