Inside Jakob Kaiser Haus, one of the several buildings belong to the Bundestag, there is a rarely used staircase, far away from the expansive corridors and galleries that are a hive of activity when German parliament is in session. It is flanked by washed concrete and wooden railings, the Spree River visible through slits in the milky glass. It is exactly 20 steps on this staircase from the fourth to the fifth floor, from Office 4.233 to Office 5.233. Or vice versa.

For the last few years, 4.233 was occupied by Rolf Mützenich, the SPD floor leader, and it will now be the realm of his replacement, Lars Klingbeil. The office immediately above him, 5.233, has belonged to Friedrich Merz in recent years. He will remain there for the next few week – until he moves into the Chancellery.

Mützenich and Merz had a decent relationship, frequently using the staircase to visit each other and for confidential exchanges far away from the big stage, the cameras and the microphones. The coming weeks will show whether Klingbeil and Merz take those same stairs to resolve potential conflicts or nip them in the bud before they can even begin developing – to eliminate misunderstandings and develop a personal relationship on the path to a coalition. Much will depend on it both for the two of them and their parties.

And for the country.

The End of the "Grand Coalition”

Germany is likely to end up with its fourth Grand Coalition government since 2005, though the name is no longer particularly accurate. There is nothing particularly grand about the approaching alliance between Merz’s conservatives (made up of his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) – a pairing knows as the Union) and Klingbeil’s Social Democrats (SPD). In the newly elected parliament, the two political camps will combine for a thin majority of just 13 seats, a coalition that only became possible because Sahra Wagenknecht’s left-wing populist BSW and Christian Lindner’s Free Democrats (FDP) failed to clear the 5-percent hurdle for representation in the Bundestag. Otherwise, the Union and SPD would have needed a third partner and everything would have grown even more complicated.

As it is, the Union and the SPD managed a total of 45 percent in the February 23 vote, even less than Gerhard Schröder’s coalition in 1998, which saw the SPD and the Greens ending up with 47.6 percent. Indeed, it might be time to retire the term Grand Coalition entirely. Little Coalition perhaps?

Merz, meanwhile, now has a much better idea of how Angela Merkel must have felt in 2005.

That year, Merkel was way ahead in the polls in the months leading up to the election, with Schröder’s government limping to the finish line, and the Union was looking forward to a strong majority to implement its platform: radical tax reform, an elevated retirement age of 67 and a brand new health insurance system. But then, the advantage evaporated and Merkel even almost lost to Schröder. Ultimately, the Union was forced into a coalition with the SPD and the parties managed just incremental reforms, including an increase to the VAT and the raised retirement age.

This time around, Merz never faced a serious threat from outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz, but his victory was far less impressive than hoped, with the Union managing just 28.6 percent instead of the target of 35 percent. And Merz will be forced into compromise in areas where he had, during the campaign, promised that he would be unbending, such as migration policy.

On the stump, he pledged to introduce a policy early on his term that would see migrants being turned away at the German border. Now, though, he’ll have to discuss it with Klingbeil, who said before the election: "We cannot do anything that will lead to Germany de facto closing its borders.”

It will, no doubt, be a difficult conversation.

Thus far in Germany’s postwar political history, if a coalition failed to deliver, the worst-case scenario was new elections, paving the way for the next government. Democratic routine. This time, though, there is more at stake. If this coalition fails, the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) could end up as the strongest party in the country – which would pose an immense threat to liberal democracy.

During the last three years of Scholz’s government, a tri-party coalition with his SPD joined by the Greens and the FDP, support for the AfD doubled, from 10.4 percent to 20.8 percent. In eastern Germany, meanwhile, the AfD won almost every single electoral district last week and almost achieved an absolute majority in some regions. The party profited from the recent deadly attacks in Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg and Munich, from the feeling that the state can no longer protect them and has lost control over immigration. It is also profiting from the high levels of frustration in the country, only magnified by the Scholz coalition’s constant bickering and numerous missteps.

Liberal democracy has faced pressures before, but the Scholz coalition was a disaster for the political center, triggering significant doubts among German voters that democratic politics is able to solve the country’s most pressing problems. And those problems are vast – not just domestically, where the economy is mired in a recession and the infrastructure is aging, but also abroad, where Vladimir Putin is likely to soon set his sights beyond Ukraine and China is expanding its power. Where an axis of authoritarians is gaining a foothold. Where the U.S. is turning away from Europe, forcing Germany to suddenly be responsible for its own security, which is likely to require hundreds of billions in spending in coming years.

The country hasn’t faced such a huge challenge since reunification. And it now must rely on the 69-year-old lawyer Friedrich Merz, a former supervisory board member for the German offshoot of the wealth management company Blackrock, and the 47-year-old political scientist Lars Klingbeil, the former guitarist for the rock band Sleeping Silence. Neither of them has ever been part of a government before.

Can they do it?

Rambozambo

Sunday evening after the election, CDU headquarters in Berlin: The party’s victory celebration takes place in a world in which chili con carne is still served with real meat and a cold draft beer is the drink of choice. The vast majority of those present are men, and many of those men are older. Roland Koch has made an appearance, the man who was elected governor of Hesse almost a quarter century ago on the strength of a campaign stunt which saw him gather signatures against dual citizenship. Clemens Tönnies, whose expansive butcheries occasionally make the headlines as examples of what responsible animal husbandry should not look like, is also present. The evening’s motto, as conceived by the election victor Merz, is "Rambozambo.”

At SPD headquarters, meanwhile, a few young families have shown up to mourn the party’s loss, mothers and fathers in outdoor jackets, some with children on their arms. Sausages are on the grill outside while party staffers mill about inside, many of them in the SPD uniform of jeans and suitcoat. There are more men than women here as well, though the ratio isn’t quite as imbalanced. It feels a bit like an unmotivated teachers’ room.

The CDU and SPD have always been divided by a deep political and cultural chasm. Under Angela Merkel, that chasm became less formidable as the CDU moved to the left, but in recent years, the divisions have again grown larger. Part of that has been due to Merz, for whom many in the SPD continue to harbor significant disdain and who charted an aggressive course against the Scholz administration as opposition leader. He consistently pledged that, were he to become chancellor, he would reverse center-left projects such as cannabis legalization. Scholz himself, though, also played a role, treating Merz and the entire Union with haughty arrogance throughout his three years in the Chancellery.

The fronts hardened further during the campaign. When Merz introduced an asylum policy motion in the Bundestag together with the AfD, many SPD members were genuinely appalled. From then on, Scholz claimed that Merz was preparing to work together with the AfD after the election, which the CDU regarded as impudent propaganda.

In the televised debates, the two candidates were civilized with each other, but on the day before the election, Merz – stumping in Munich – was provoked by a couple of demonstrators into saying that he would be pursuing policy for the majority and not "for some Green and leftist crazies.” And: "Left is over! There is no leftist majority and no leftist politics in Germany anymore!”

Now, he has to form a coalition with a party that sees itself as being on the left side of the political spectrum. And a party that has grown even more mistrustful since a parliamentary inquiry from the Union encompassing fully 551 questions for the Scholz government, became public. The focus of the inquiry is the financing of NGOs, with the Union submitting detailed questions about which charitable groups received federal funding in the last legislative period. To some, it looks a lot like intimidation, like a latent threat to strike funding in the future. The group Omas Gegen Rechts (Grandmas against the Right) alone was the focus of 25 questions.

The inquiry, Lars Klingbeil said last week, was "foul play,” adding that it "casts suspicion” on groups that stand up for democracy.

Coalitions tend to work when the leaders of the parties involved get along. The Grand Coalitions under Merkel’s leadership stayed together in part because she was able to deal with her vice chancellors from the SPD – with Franz Müntefering’s detachment, with Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s pompousness, with Sigmar Gabriel’s impulsivity and with Olaf Scholz’s intellectual vanity. Sometimes, politics can be that simple.

Master of Mudslinging

Merz would have much preferred to negotiate with Mützenich, the SPD floor leader who just stepped down, or with Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. He respects and trusts both. Klingbeil, by contrast, is seen by many within the CDU as the master of mudslinging.

They haven’t forgotten how Klingbeil, in the 2021 federal election campaign, denigrated the North Rhine-Westphalian CDU politician Nathanael Liminski as an arch-reactionary bigot in a video that quickly went viral. Liminski at the time was the right-hand-man of Armin Laschet, the CDU’s chancellor candidate. Since then, the term "Klingbeilization” has become synonymous in the CDU with unfair campaigning.

Klingbeil is fully aware of how the CDU sees him. But he also has doubts about his future coalition partner. Ever since Merz made common cause with the AfD in the Bundestag, trust has been anything but a given.

Since the election, the two have tried to take a couple of steps back and Klingbeil and Merz have spoken on the phone a number of times. Merz even called Klingbeil at midday on election Sunday to wish him happy birthday. Their discussion was brief but apparently good-natured, with jokes exchanged about the fact that Klingbeil, with his party’s election loss looming, would have little to celebrate. Klingbeil then called Merz that evening to congratulate him on his election victory.

Their next phone call took place on Monday evening, with people familiar with the call saying it lasted for about half an hour. Much of the discussion focused on organizational details and the path ahead.

Merz, born in 1955, is from a family of lawyers in the Sauerland, a region in west-central Germany and wanted to become a reserve officer after graduating from his school but was, according to his own account, stopped by a knee injury. His impulsivity is feared by many in his own party, though he largely kept it under wraps during the campaign. It will, though, almost certainly make a reappearance. Nobody ever had any doubts that Merz dreamed of one day moving into the Chancellery.

Klingbeil, born in 1978, is the son of a non-commissioned officer from Lower Saxony. He refused military service and has the habit of weighing every decision extremely carefully to eliminate any risk. When he became SPD general secretary and, later, head of the party, his friends from his early political days were amazed. They had always thought he was too nice to play in the big leagues.

Merz and Klingbeil do, though, have one thing in common: They both once had long hair – or longish. Merz’s hair only just barely reached his earlobes.

As important as the two of them are, however, much will depend on their immediate deputies. And they are just as different as their bosses.

It’s 1:30 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon and Friedrich Merz is rushing out of the North Rhine-Westphalia state representation in the heart of Berlin. His armored sedan is waiting outside in the February sun. Merz has places to be.

Senior CDU members from the state have just finished an important post-election meeting and, with Merz having hurried off, the others are now strolling toward the exit, including Jens Spahn, Armin Laschet and Carsten Linnemann, the CDU general secretary. Linnemann stops at the group of waiting journalists, greeting everyone with a handshake.

25 Push-Ups

Linnemann, as always, is consumed by nervous energy. He can hardly stand how slowly everything is moving, with the Union and SPD having agreed to wait a few days after the election before starting their exploratory talks, mostly because of elections in the city-state of Hamburg one week after the federal vote. Linnemann gesticulates wildly with his arms, hopping from one leg to the other as he repeatedly pushes up his glasses.

For him, it’s standard behavior. A few years ago, during an interview with DER SPIEGEL in his office, he dropped to the floor and did 25 push-ups after an angry voter yelled at him over the phone because of the coronavirus rules.

Now, in front of the NRW representation in Berlin, he talks himself into a rage: "We cannot just keep going as before!” he says. "We need complete disruption!”

It’s the kind of thing you are not likely to hear from Matthias Miersch, the SPD general secretary – a quiet lawyer from Hannover who would likely rather drink a glass of cod liver oil than do push-ups in front of a journalist. Miersch is part of his party’s left wing, Linnemann belongs to the economy wing of the CDU. They are essentially exact opposites.

And yet, everyone seems to agree that they get along famously.

The two write messages to each other regularly, talk on the phone and, last Tuesday, met up for a meeting in person. They know each other from back when they were both deputy floor leaders and both responsible for energy policy.

Even during the brief, intense campaign, Linnemann and Miersch kept in close contact, the one calling the other when members of their opponent’s party went a bit too far on the stump. Sources in the SPD cite the example of CDU lawmaker Roderich Kiesewetter speculating in early January about a planned visit to Putin by Chancellor Scholz. After a call, Kiesewetter deleted his post on X.

Good personal relations are important, but that alone won’t be enough for the upcoming legislative period. There are huge problems that must be addressed. And on the most important questions, the two sides are far from agreement.

Defending Germany

Issue number one: Foreign and security policy. At first glance, there are no fundamental differences. Both the Union and the SPD view Russia as a threat, even if a peace deal in Ukraine takes shape. The pro-Russian voices in the SPD have fallen silent after the developments of recent years. The two sides have also reached the conclusion that an historic shift is currently taking place and that Germany can no longer rely on the trans-Atlantic alliance – and must defend itself in concert with its European partners.

Things are bound to get difficult, though, when it comes to how much money the two parties are willing to spend on that effort and where that money should come from. Already, Germany has a hard time achieving the NATO goal of defense spending equal to at least 2-percent of GDP. Currently, Berlin is only reaching that target because of the 100-billion-euro special defense fund passed by the Scholz administration after the Russia invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The fund will be used up by 2027, however. Should the NATO target increase to 3.5 percent, as many believe it will, Berlin will have to come up with 150 billion per year for defense – roughly three times as much as the standard Bundeswehr budget at the moment.

During the campaign, the SPD and, in particular, the Union focused on where this money should come from. On the day after the election, Merz suddenly expressed openness for the outgoing Bundestag to pass a constitutional amendment to either increase the special fund or to reform the current balanced budget rules. He is fully aware that in the incoming parliament, the AfD and Left Party will have a minority large enough to block any amendment to the Basic Law, which requires a two-thirds majority.

But almost as soon as he said it, Merz backpedaled in the face of opposition from within his own party. Talks about a new special fund, he said last Tuesday, "look difficult at the moment.”

Those obstacles, however, shrank significantly after Donald Trump threw Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the Oval Office last week. Suddenly, all of Europe is scrambling to figure out how to augment the Continent’s defensive capabilities. On Tuesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced an 800-billion-euro plan for boosting European defense. In Berlin, meanwhile, the idea of pushing a vast spending bill through the outgoing parliament before the new one is constituted appears to be back on the table.

Financing any large spending program promises to be tricky, but the waves from Washington appear to have focused minds in Berlin, with both the SPD and Union eager to move forward quickly with their coalition negotiations.

Domestic Complications

There are, however, other sticky issues, and migration promises to be one of them. The SPD is not fundamentally opposed to stricter asylum rules. The party understands that changes are necessary. But Merz played the hardliner during the campaign, which has injected a degree of complexity into the issue before negotiations have even had a chance to get going. On the stump, he declared his five-point plan, including comprehensive rejections at the borders, to be non-negotiable. Linnemann, the CDU secretary-general, seconded Merz’s sentiment: If nobody wants to go along with it, "then we’ll just not be able to form a government.”

Since the election, Merz has been making an effort to soften the message. The rejections at the border, he said on Monday, will only be necessary for a certain time period. After all, he added, the reform of the European asylum system – negotiated by the Scholz government and blasted by Merz on the stump as being insufficient – will take effect in 2026.

But Germany’s future chancellor doesn’t have much leeway on the issue, having struck such a strident tone on the campaign trail. Should he make too many concessions to the SPD, the AfD will have a field day. In the coalition negotiations, Merz will constantly have to be thinking about how AfD leader Alice Weidel will spin the results – and the SPD is already drawing its lines in the sand. Alexander Schweitzer, the SPD governor of Rhineland-Palatinate says that his party rejects the idea of permanent border controls and entry bans on people without valid papers. That, he says, would be a "prosperity destruction program” and "a triumph for the AfD.”

Negotiators will have plenty to talk about on that issue. And not just there.

The Union hopes to eliminate the welfare benefit known as Bürgergeld, hoping to replace it with a different system that foresees payments being suspended for those who refuse to work. The SPD, however, wants to keep the Bürgergeld system, though the party is open to modifications and more controls.

Should the SPD make concessions to the Union on this issue, they would likely demand trade-offs on minimum wage. The Union does not want a possible increase to the minimum wage to be decided in the Bundestag, preferring instead to leave it up to the Minimum Wage Commission. The SPD, for its part, is demanding that the minimum wage be increased to 15 euros per hour by 2026 at the latest.

Merz believes that the parties are not particularly far apart on energy policy, at least when it comes to their aims: the lowering of prices for electricity and natural gas. The SPD believes that subsidies are the best way to reach that goal, which the Union rejects. But Merz believes the two parties will be able to quickly reach agreement on the construction of new natural gas power plants.

On another issue, pensions and old-age care, the Union’s campaign platform is rather vague, intentionally so. But one leading Christian Democrat fears that the lack of specifics could come back to bite the party in the ongoing negotiations. "It could prove quite expensive for us,” he says. The Union, he believes, is rather unprepared while the SPD will apply significant pressure on social issues.

The SPD insists that the average pension level not be allowed to drop below 48 percent of the last paycheck earned. Under current laws, maintaining that level would require that contributions be increased or money be pumped into the pension system from the federal budget. The Union also wants to keep pensions stable but reject increasing contributions and providing federal money. Instead, German conservatives hope to return the economy to growth so that pension funds can boost revenues. That hope, though, falls far short of an actual plan.

While the system is ripe for significant reform, the two sides are likely to postpone such a project until the next legislative period, which is when the problems with the current pension system are likely to grow more severe.

Things are sure to be more complicated on the tax front. The Union hopes to lower corporate taxes, with the plan calling for a number of steps to reduce the current rate of 30 percent to 25 percent. The SPD, by contrast, would like to use a tax premium to encourage companies to invest in machinery and equipment.

The two sides, though, have similar goals when it comes to corporate taxes. That cannot, however, be said on income tax. The Union wants to lower taxes for the wealthy, the SPD would like to raise them for the extremely wealthy. And they are far apart on the issue of inheritance tax.

A Difficult Road Ahead

This success or failure of this coalition, though, will go far beyond the details of the coalition agreement. Germany has lost its way of late. The economy is poor, the Western alliance seems fragile, and Berlin spent much of Scholz’s tenure in the Chancellery bickering and making little headway on the biggest issues facing the country. Now, the Union and SPD have the enormous task of demonstrating that they are able to solve problems and address the challenges facing its citizens – both big and small. Patience for the trivialities of conventional party politics will be thin.

It takes time for the democratic process to produce results, which is why this coalition will have to put on a more confident face and practice a different communication style that Scholz’s coalition did. Five state elections are on the slate for next year, including in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – two states where the AfD is polling above 30 percent. Some Christian Democrats fear the worst in Saxony-Anhalt if the Union-SPD coalition is unable to produce rapid results.

Whether they are able to do so will not just depend on Merz, Klingbeil, Linnemann and Miersch – but also on two men who will not be part of the cabinet. But who nevertheless would have liked to have become chancellor themselves.

On early Tuesday morning last week, two days after the election, the two spoke in Berlin at almost exactly the same time. The first, Hendrik Wüst, the CDU governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, was in his state’s representation in Berlin. The second, his counterpart from Bavaria, Markus Söder of the CSU, was in the Bavarian representation.

Wüst shows up on time. He is an expert at delivering his message sugarcoated in a veneer of friendliness. On this day, he has three of them.

The first: Don’t forget about me. "We can look back with confidence,” he says. "We have achieved something that has only been done once in 15 federal elections since 1969, namely to be above the national average.” He is speaking of the CDU’s results in his home state, but between the lines, the message to Merz is clear: We helped you to victory. And if you had cut a slightly more liberal figure on the campaign trail and avoided the hardliner rhetoric, you would likely have done even better.

Wüst’s second message is reserved for Söder, his rival from Munich. "When I now read that other state groups even lost support,” he says, adopting an almost patronizing tone, "I want to say quite clearly that the CSU, of course, also made a very, very important contribution to the election result.” Söder, take me seriously.

The third message is a friendly threat for the future chancellor: Listen to us or we will fail together. "For me, it’s clear,” says Wüst. "Without the contributions from North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria, this election success would not have been possible.” And to make sure that the message is clear enough for everybody, he says: "And as large, industry-driven states and hotspots for technology and science, we have a lot of common interests that we will be representing together at the federal level.”

Three kilometers away in the Bavarian state representation, Söder is anything but punctual. The gathered press begins grumbling, with many wondering of perhaps Söder is watching the speech of his rival Wüst.

Ultimately, he does show up, together with Alexander Dobrindt, who has just been unanimously re-elected as the head of the CSU group in the Bundestag. And Söder also has a couple of messages for Merz.

The CDU and CSU hadn’t shown so much unity for 20 or 25 years, he says. Bavaria contributed the best conservative result to Merz’s election victory, he pointed out, adding: "We want to strengthen Germany. We want to support Friedrich Merz. But we also want to strengthen our profile as well.”

Söder then praises the SPD, going all the way back to the Weimar Republic to do so, reminding his listeners of the resistance put up by the SPD against the growing Nazi threat. "It remains an historical moment, an historical achievement, that the SPD was the only party in the Weimar Republic to not capitulate, to not vote the Republic out of existence.”

In other words: The coalition with the SPD will be a successful one.

But how? And how quickly?

Söder says he would prefer things to go as quickly as possible, but perhaps not quite as fast as Merz has envisioned. Merz wants the coalition agreement to be done by Easter. "I think the timeline is a good one. The most important thing, though, is that we form a solid foundation,” says Söder. The Scholz government demonstrated, Söder continues, that disagreements cannot be ignored.

"Söder hasn’t left Berlin for days,” says a Christian Democrat, adding that she finds that worrisome. Or, to be more precise: She thinks that Merz should be worried. Her view is that Söder is keeping close tabs on Merz to see what the future chancellor might have up his sleeve.

The Last Alliance

What happens next?

The initial exploratory phase is likely to be brief. It is unlikely that anyone has an interest in this potential coalition falling apart before it has even begun. And Merz is hoping for a short coalition agreement. He wants to do things differently than Scholz, whose coalition was a long list of projects that the government stubbornly checked off even as the world around them changed significantly with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The CDU, CSU and SPD must solve the country's problems and at the same time remain recognizable as different parties. This is becoming even more important than before because the confrontation with the AfD is already pushing the democratic parties into a common corner, forcing them together into a united front as defenders of the system. The AfD has used this in recent years to present itself as the only true alternative.