Trust comes from confidentiality. The three traffic light parties took this sentence to heart. But they are overdoing it.
As of today, 22 working groups, sorted by topic, have been meeting in Berlin, each with a total of 10 to 15 representatives from the SPD, Greens and FDP. Place (s): secret. Time: secret. The groups organize themselves and want to change meeting places. You can overdo it, what’s that supposed to mean?
Of course, negotiations need a certain degree of confidentiality so that you can think out loud at the table without having to answer publicly. And of course, not every twist in the negotiations is of public concern to the media and citizens. Not everything that happens in a “back room” is a conspiracy.
Citizens and journalists alike should have a certain understanding of this. Also for the fact that the FDP and the Greens in particular want to learn from the failure of the coalition negotiations in 2017, which got out of hand early on. The negotiations at that time did not fail because of excessive observation or transparency, but mainly because of poor negotiation or politically irreconcilable contradictions.
So why do the three traffic light parties have to go from one extreme to the other? One cannot get rid of the suspicion that the SPD, FDP and Greens are now intoxicated with their own harmony and stubborn silence. But secrecy and self-isolation are noticeably acting like a castle of wagons according to the motto: “We in here. The ones out there.”
Alone: ”Those out there” – these are the voters. And they’d like to know what’s in store for them before it really matters. They would like to know whether the party they voted for is really fighting for the things that were on the election posters. They would like to know not only how it will end in the end, but how the path is there and why. The formation of political opinions – especially the formation of a government – must be reasonably understandable for everyone.
It is time for the SPD, Greens and FDP to take citizens seriously. Too much secrecy is at least as bad as too much talk.