On the horns of a dilemma. The imperative of a grand coalition is risky--especially for the Social Democrats.
| Verfasser | Merkel, Wolfgang |
| Posten | Essay |
The grand coalition earns broad approval in the polls. But it is unlikely to find sustainable solutions to the major problems it was formed to tackle. For the coalition partners are under pressure to burnish their escutcheons for the upcoming Bundestag election. Coalition compromises are a risky matter, particularly for the Social Democrats (SPD) in the present situation. As a result, coalition policy is reduced to the lowest common denominator.
Grand coalitions are the exception in Germany. Prior to 2005, the only instance was in West Germany, the old Federal Republic, between 1966 and 1969. The Free Democrats (FDP) had abandoned the coalition with the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), the labour market was hit by a crisis for the first time, and qualified parliamentary majorities were needed to pass emergency powers legislation. Having adopted this legislation, having implemented the "concerted action" and major financial reforms under then Minister of Finance Karl Schiller, and having prepared the ground for the first change of government in the history of the Federal Republic to bring a shift in political direction, the first grand coalition is usually considered to have been a success, although the commonalities appeared to have been exhausted after three years. Can the second grand coalition hope for such success?
Parties have three important goals. They want to put their platforms into effect (policy seeking), gain the approval of the electorate (vote seeking), and occupy as many government positions as possible (office seeking). This poses particular problems for coalitions. Coalition parties must have a sufficiently large programmatic intersection in important policy questions. The political scientist George Tsebelis has described this intersection as a "winset", a concept from rational choice theory. The governing parties must therefore give priority to putting through reforms they can all support (policy seeking).
Grand coalitions have the disadvantage of being formed by parties from different political camps. In coalitions composed of parties from the same camp, joint policies are easier to define, not least because the preferences of their constituencies are more likely to be compatible and any centrifugal competitive forces are not so strong.
In a grand coalition, the greatest hindrance to governing together is an unbridled urge for the constituent parties to enlarge their share of the vote. If competition between the most important parties obeys this rational urge, it continues without interruption as a zero-sum game in the governing coalition. What the one loses, the other gains. If coalition parties are unable to resist temptation, effective cooperative will hardly be possible.
The coalition agreement of 2005 identified five policy areas where reform was particularly urgent: family policy, federalism, public debt, the labour market, and health. How do the common reform goals of the coalition partners in these fields relate to the parties' goals and implementation strategies? What intersections and compromise options are available? The table provides a simplified overview.
Table 1 Reform Policy Options Reform project Reform goal Party positions Winset...
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