If you talk to politicians from the coalition parties, only one thing seems to be certain these days: Nobody from the upper levels of the CDU/CSU and SPD wants to risk a break in the coalition. The result would be new elections, which in the best case scenario would replace a complicated alliance with a very complicated alliance including the Greens. In the worst case scenario, ungovernability would be the result. No one in their right mind wants that. The collapse of the Weimar coalition in 1930, which resulted in a sharp rise in right-wing extremists in the following Reichstag elections, has been cited often enough as a chilling example in today's government district of Berlin.
The iron will to hold out explains, alongside the upcoming elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin, the caution with which coalition politicians are speaking out these days. If you ask around the key politicians what will happen to the government's current reform plans after September 20th, they first make one caveat: This is a calculation with many unknowns. After all, no one knows who will be brought down by the post-election turmoil.
But if things continue on a somewhat regulated path, the consequences for the government's reform plans will become quite clear. Rhetorically, everyone involved is committed to the reforms that were agreed before the summer break. In concrete terms, however, they already indicate which building blocks could be dismantled.
Paradoxically, this actually applies regardless of how things end up in Berlin and Schwerin. In the city-state with a population of four million, according to the polls, everything boils down to a neck-and-neck race between the CDU and the Left Party. The weakening SPD only plays a role as a possible coalition partner; from the perspective of the federal party, the disaster could be written off as homemade. Things get more interesting in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. It is the most important election for the SPD because it is fielding the popular Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig, with a realistic chance of victory.
If the positive trend in the surveys is not ultimately reflected in the election results, it would be a debacle for the party leadership anyway. If Schwesig ends up being the shining election winner, with three times as many percent as in Berlin or Saxony-Anhalt, that would also be a defeat for the federal leadership's line. Because then the woman who wants to hold on to the early pension for those who have been insured for a long time would have won - and whose Nordstream entanglement also reconciled Putin's friends.
When it comes to pensions at 65, i.e. the possibility of retiring earlier without deductions after 45 years of contributions, the Chancellor recently struck a noteworthy note. At the cabinet meeting in Neuhardenberg at the end of August, he coolly dealt with the East German Prime Minister's criticism of the abolition of this exit option. "We agree that we have to end all incentives for early retirement. It has to stay that way. That is a core part of the reform," he said. To add in the style of pure exception: “There may be hardship cases that we then have to talk about.”
It sounded completely different in the Bundestag these days. “How we deal with people who have worked for 45 years and paid into pension insurance is of course a topic that we will talk about,” he suddenly explained. When he made a similar statement in his post-election statement at the beginning of the week, those around him assured him that this only meant those hardship cases that Merz had already spoken about before. Nevertheless, he at least keeps everything open with his choice of words. You never know how the debate will develop, even within the Union's own ranks.
There is a precedent for this. When Angela Merkel moved into the Chancellery in 2005 and the Social Democrat Franz Müntefering took over the role of Vice Chancellor, the two agreed not to roll back the labor market reforms of their predecessor Gerhard Schröder, but on the contrary to add a higher retirement age. Then a prime minister got in their way, in this case Jürgen Rüttgers from the CDU from North Rhine-Westphalia. He ensured that older unemployed people again received the standard unemployment benefit I for twice as long.
The argument is also interesting: After all, it was said that these older people had already paid into unemployment insurance for their entire lives. Although this contradicted all common insurance rules, a person who has had household contents insurance for many years will not have duplicate inventory replaced after a house fire. But it touched a nerve among the population. “Lifetime achievement” was the key word that suddenly recurs in the debate about early retirement – and which obviously cannot be wiped away with cool, factual arguments.
In this purely financial policy issue, the AfD's campaign in Saxony-Anhalt was similar to Friedrich Merz's election campaign a year and a half ago: no debt, no cuts for the broad masses - and the money for this comes from those who cannot show any "lifetime achievements", for example recipients of citizens' benefit or asylum seekers. Except that in the end the calculation doesn't add up.
However, the surveys do not make it entirely clear how views on this are distributed among the population. According to the election analysis by the Infratest dimap institute, 30 percent of those surveyed expressed the view that the government should implement its social reforms even in the face of resistance. Conversely, 71 percent thought it was right that the Christian Democratic Prime Minister Sven Schulze contradicted his own Chancellor and, for example, advocated sticking to early retirement.
According to figures from the same institute, only 13 percent nationwide want the reforms to be carried out as planned. However, the opinions of those surveyed vary widely as to which direction they would like to see change: 33 percent would like the CDU to be more influential in its positions, 39 percent hope that this will happen in view of the wishes of the SPD.
An online survey by the trade union-affiliated Institute for Macroeconomics and Economic Research came up with similar figures overall, but with one important difference: changes to sick leave and a higher retirement age were rejected by three quarters of those surveyed. And the rejection of the reforms is therefore more pronounced among AfD supporters than among voters of the Union and SPD, but less strong than among fans of the Left Party and BSW.
The coalition could accommodate both critics who want more SPD and those who would like to see a stronger CDU signature. More SPD, this mainly affects pensions. The intervention of the CDU Prime Minister has made it difficult for the Social Democrats to stick to their line of the unchangeable “total work of art” of pension reform: Nobody can expect the Social Democratic Labor Minister Bärbel Bas to fight for the abolition of early retirement against resistance from Christian Democrats, it is said.
The situation is a bit like it was during the nuclear phase-out, when the former nuclear power supporters from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg suddenly demanded the immediate shutdown of reactors, with Christian Socialist Markus Söder leading the way: The then Chancellor Merkel no longer saw any reason to stick to the then unpopular form of energy.
Klingbeil has been more specific on television these days than Merz. “If someone says: I actually wanted to retire without deductions after 45 years of contributions, then I say very clearly: solutions have to be found.” So there will be transition periods, which, however, can be long and expensive. If you follow the Vice Chancellor's calculation model, that would have to be at least two years until retirement, plus four years of early retirement until you reach the standard retirement age of 67: That means six years of additional costs for the pension fund, plus the additional contributions that will then already be incurred for the planned capital pension.
Labor Minister Bas made similar comments. She spoke of “temporary solutions and protection of trust”. In addition to the pension after 45 years of contributions, she also brought another point into play: She also wants to maintain the option of dividing the partial retirement into an active and a passive phase and thus actually retiring earlier - "especially against the background of the changes in the labor market". This refers to job cuts in large companies such as Volkswagen, which are traditionally accompanied by generous early retirement deals, even if employer associations otherwise call for a higher retirement age. A concrete draft law from the minister is expected in October.
Conversely, the Union could also get something. There is a lot of frustration there about a so-called income tax reform, which for many people doesn't even adjust the tariff to inflation. “If the government factions now say: We want to create even greater relief, we want to find even more money, then I am totally open to that,” says Klingbeil now. This failed in the coalition committee because the money for it was not collected. The Social Democrats accuse the Union of having rejected all proposals for reducing subsidies, such as the deductibility of company cars or tradesmen's services.
