Thursday October 21, 2021
Traffic light presents schedule
Coalition agreement should be ready in a month
The schedule is tight: the new federal government should be in office as early as the second week of December. For this to work, the coalition agreement must be in place at the end of November.
At the start of the coalition negotiations starting today, the general secretaries of the SPD, Greens and FDP presented the schedule of the talks. The 22 working groups are to come together for the first time on Wednesday. The working groups are due to present their first papers on November 10, said SPD General Secretary Lars Klingbeil.
The working groups should then – with the exception of the weekends – meet for discussions almost every day in order to develop position papers on the individual areas by November 10th. The final editing and clarification of the unresolved questions should then be taken over by the main negotiating group, which should present a coalition agreement by the end of November.
After that, the parties still have to agree to the coalition agreement, the Greens, for example, in a digital ballot, the FDP at a party congress. The schedule is tighter than previously known: So far, the traffic light parties had promised the formation of a government by Christmas.
“The problems don’t get smaller if you talk too long”
“It is good for discussions when contentious issues are dealt with quickly,” said FDP General Secretary Volker Wissing. “If you talk about things too long, the problems don’t get any smaller.”
The German Bundestag should elect Olaf Scholz as the new Federal Chancellor in the week of December 6th. “That is ambitious and ambitious,” said Wissing. But he also said: “The soundings have given us courage.” Hurdles have already been cleared. Michael Kellner, the director of the Greens, was also optimistic.
Thematically, the coalition negotiations are divided into seven large blocks: modern state and digitization; Climate protection; World of work; Family and children; Freedom and security; Appearance and defense; Public finances. Representatives of the three parties are to work out a government program in a total of 22 working groups.