Everyone wins as Germany gets the coalition it longs for

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/germany-grand-coalition-angela-merkel

Version 0 of 1.

The term GroKo was voted Germany's word of the year on Friday. A day later it was confirmed that a Grosse Koalition of the country's two biggest parties will provide the next government.

Three-quarters of Social Democrat (SPD) members voted in favour of a coalition with Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU). The chancellor and her new ministers will be sworn in on 17 December – almost three months after the general election.

The new government is one that Germans had been expecting and, according to several pre-election polls, has been longing for. If leaks to the press are to be believed, it will contain many familiar faces.

During the coalition talks, the SPD had tried to claim the finance ministry, considered the most important post after the chancellory. However it now looks like Wolfgang Schäuble, 71, will keep his job. A change of economic strategy in the eurozone, which would have been doubtful even under an SPD finance minister, therefore now looks highly unlikely.

The foreign minister will again be Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who held the post from 2005 to 2009. As tensions between Russia and Europe run high over protests in the Ukraine, it will be interesting to see if Steinmeier will gain the relatively diplomatic approach to the Kremlin from his previous term in office.

Criticism of Russia's human rights abuses was relatively rare in those days, with the emphasis on what Steinmeier called a "modernising partnership".

Even SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel, who will become deputy chancellor as well as taking charge of energy and economic affairs, had a post as environment minister in the previous grand coalition. The only surprises are the fairly inexperienced new justice minister, Heiko Maas of the SPD, and that in the CDU's Ursula von der Leyen, Germany will have its first female defence minister. By insisting on letting his party membership vote on the coalition agreement, Gabriel had gained a strong hand in the coalition negotiations. "Do you really think we'd get that past our members?" was a strong counter to any of the Christian Democrats' more daring policy proposals.

The coalition agreement, which was released on 27 November, contains pledges to introduce core SPD policies, such as the introduction of a minimum wage, rent controls in major cities including Hamburg, Munich and Berlin, and dual citizenship.

But the party's youth wing and a number of senior figures had severely criticised the party for compromising on too many issues, and lobbied for a "no" in the membership ballot.

The Social Democrats will hold six posts in the government. With Sigmar Gabriel and Barbara Hendricks, it will now provide both the energy and environment ministers: key posts, given that Germany's handling of the Energiewende, the pledge to phase out nuclear energy by 2022, has come increasingly under fire domestically, and is now the subject of a legal complaint from the EU.

Supporters of the phase-out will view Hendricks sceptically, given that the 61-year-old social scientist hails from North-Rhine Westphalia, the region where the coal lobby is thought to hold most sway.

Last week, it emerged that a first-time SPD policymaker and former mining union executive had managed to insert a clause into the coalition agreement committing to the use of lignite, or brown coal, one of the most polluting fossil fuels.

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.