Tuesday, October 12, 2021
Interim balance after day two
For traffic light probes comes the “moment of truth”
After the second official day of negotiations, the SPD, FDP and Greens are cautiously optimistic. It should be decided on Friday whether the three parties will enter into formal coalition negotiations.
After the second day of exploratory negotiations, the SPD, Greens and FDP drew a positive interim conclusion. The general secretaries of the three parties want to develop a “basis for decision-making” by Friday, “on the basis of which we will then decide whether we can recommend our bodies to start coalition negotiations,” said FDP general secretary Volker Wissing.
SPD Chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz, in his capacity as Federal Finance Minister, will be at the G20 Finance Ministers’ Meeting in Washington in the coming days. He will be back on Friday. After various preliminary discussions, the actual explorations did not begin until Monday.
SPD General Secretary Lars Klingbeil said that the explorations had “got off to a good start”. There will still be “one or the other hurdle”, but he is sure that they can be overcome. “The tasks are not too small, but I think this can be a good thing.”
Greens Federal Managing Director Michael Kellner said that in the past day and a half, the amount of similarities has increased and the amount of differences has become smaller.
Wissing emphasized that they had spoken to each other in a polite and factual manner, but it was another question to put the results of such conversations in writing. That is “the moment of truth”, so the FDP general secretary.
The three did not want to reveal any details about the state of the debate, and there were not even rough hints about it. “This is a very serious and difficult exploratory process, but that does not mean that we are not having very good conversations with one another,” said Wissing. “The conversations, I can only emphasize that, have a very good tone and are also very serious and objective. We all feel that this is extremely important, which is why we negotiate in a confidential room.” Only there can one speak openly with one another. “We don’t want to inspire ourselves with lip service, we want to convince ourselves with facts.”