German Social Democrat Olaf Scholz vowed on Monday to strengthen the European Union and keep up the transatlantic partnership in a three-way coalition government he hopes to form by Christmas to take over from Angela Merkel’s conservatives.
Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) came first in Sunday’s national election, just ahead of the conservatives, and aim to lead a government for the first time since 2005 in a coalition with the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP).
Scholz (63) projected a sense of calm assurance when asked whether the close election result and the prospect of prolonged coalition negotiations sent a message of instability in Germany to its European partners. “Germany always has coalition governments and it was always stable,” he said in fluent English, standing beside a statue of Willy Brandt, a Cold War-era SPD chancellor awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for fostering dialogue between East and West.
The SPD, Germany’s oldest party, won 25.7% of the vote, up five percentage points from the 2017 federal election, ahead of Merkel’s CDU/CSU conservative bloc on 24.1%, provisional results showed. The Greens came in with 14.8% and the FDP won 11.5%.
