The citrus coalition of the Greens and FDP shows its fault lines. Nevertheless, those talks begin on Thursday that could end with a Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
When Annalena Baerbock approached the journalists in Berlin’s government district shortly after ten o’clock, she had no way of knowing whether the plan would work. She had just announced that the German Greens had committed to talks for a traffic light coalition.
The goal: to increase the pace and move the exploration in the direction of an alliance with the social democrats. She informed her essential partner, the FDP, just a few minutes beforehand by text message.
“We do not know whether the FDP has already answered, because we are not currently carrying our cell phones with us,” explained Baerbock frankly. It was a notable break with the confidentiality between the greens and the yellows that was flaunted with an Instagram photo just a week earlier. The political enterprise in Berlin called the strategic alliance between the camps of conflicting content “citrus coalition”.