SPD completes Merz's top team

The Social Democrats this week nominated their ministers to Germany's coalition cabinet, completing the line-up for Chancellor Friedrich Merz

Friedrich Merz must expect every day to be challenging now but this week may have exceeded his expectations. On Tuesday morning, the Bundestag assembled to endorse his chancellorship formally, in what everyone expected to be a foregone conclusion—and he lost.

You’re going to need a bigger vote

The leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) needed a majority in the 630-seat Bundestag, but that should have been straightforward: the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), have 208 seats, and Merz’s coalition partners in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) have 120. It doesn’t take a graduate-level mathematician to see that 328, while allowing only a slender margin of error, is a clear majority.

When the Bundestag voted to confirm Merz’s position as Federal Chancellor, he found himself with only 310 votes, six shy of the required majority. There was astonishment, and understandably so, as no candidate for Chancellor has ever fallen at this hurdle in the Federal Republic’s history. The requirement for a confirmatory vote may be in the constitution—Article 63 of the Basic Law—but the hard-nosed deals and the crunching of numbers has always happened beforehand, coalition agreements being secured firmly beforehand.

(The electoral system of the Federal Republic was created on the assumption of coalition government and it has always delivered one. There was a period between July 1960 and October 1961 when the government comprised only the CDU/CSU Union; the partnership had won an outright majority in the federal election in September 1957, the only time such a feat has ever been achieved, but the Minister of Transport, Hans-Christoph Seebohm, and the Minister of Bundesrat and State Affairs, Hans-Joachim von Merkatz, were members of the small national conservative and monarchist German Party (DP) but remained in the government even though the Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, did not need the DP’s 17 seats in the Bundestag. In July 1960, the DP left the government and it was thereafter CDU/CSU-only until the next federal election in October 1961. Seebohm and von Merkatz stayed in office, resigning from the DP, and they joined the CDU in September 1960.)

Merz’s defeat was not only a shock, it was a political humiliation. It had been taken for granted to such an extent that he was due to visit Paris and Warsaw the following day, as part of an unofficial victory lap of European capitals. Because the vote was by secret ballot, there is no way of knowing exactly what went wrong, but it is believed that 18 SPD members, who were unhappy at some of the terms of the coalition agreement, declined to endorse Merz.

The Basic Law does not set out a detailed timetable for subsequent ballots if a candidate for Chancellor is unsuccessful at the first time of asking, except that there is a maximum period of 14 days, after which, if no candidate can find a majority, the President of the Republic must either appoint the candidate with the highest tally or dissolve the Bundestag and hold new elections. That would have been a nightmare scenario given the low combined electoral tally of the CDU/CSU and the SPD (only 44.9 per cent combined), and the fact that the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right opposition, has been climbing in the opinion polls from its already-strong election performance of 20.8 per cent of the vote.

The President of the Bundestag, Julia Klöckner of the CDU, had initially intended for a second vote on the chancellorship to be held the following day, Wednesday, but there was a political and reputational urgency. With the agreement of the Greens and the Left, the Bundestag met again on Tuesday afternoon for another ballot, and this time Merz was confirmed as Chancellor, with 325 votes. The new head of government was visibly relieved, and must hope that the unexpected drama of Tuesday morning was an isolated incident, but the fractious and fissiparous nature of German politics at the moment suggests such unpredictability may now be a feature rather than a bug.

Completing the line-up

The coalition agreement allotted seven cabinet positions to the CDU and three to the CSU, with the remaining seven going to the SPD. Last week, as I examined, Merz announced his party’s and the CSU’s nominations, with some interesting and unexpected choices. Last weekend, the SPD membership formally endorsed the coalition agreement and said that its co-leader, Lars Klingbeil, would become Minister of Finance and Vice-Chancellor. This week, the other six SPD ministers and their portfolios were named. They are:

Minister of Defence: Boris Pistorius
Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection: Dr Stefanie Hubig
Minister of Labour and Social Affairs: Bärbel Bas
Minister of the Environment, Climate Protection, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety: Carsten Schneider
Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development: Reem Alabali-Radovan
Minister of Housing, Urban Development and Construction: Verena Hubertz

As before, I won’t rehearse each of the ministers in exhaustive detail (“Why not?,” you cry, “you usually do”) but there are a few points of interest which are worth highlighting as the new government begins its tenure proper.

Boys and girls

One very straightforward observation is gender: four of the seven SPD ministers are women, while the CDU has only three of seven and the CSU one of three. In total it makes a cabinet of 10 men and eight women, which is not an unacceptable balance, I wouldn’t have thought, but the female ministers are not evenly distributed. The Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor, and the ministers of foreign affairs, finance, defence and the interior are all men, as is Merz’s close ally Thorsten Frei, who is Minister of Special Affairs and Head of the Federal Chancellery. That said, it is worth noting that the positions of Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy and Minister of Research, Technology and Space, both of which might seem to be “male-coded”, for want of a better expression, are occupied by women from the CDU, Katherina Reiche and Dorothee Bär respectively.

A strong defence

A key appointment, and the only minister who continues in his portfolio from the previous government, is that of Boris Pistorius as Minister of Defence. He was appointed by Olaf Scholz in January 2023—how long ago that feels!—after Christine Lambrecht, a rather hapless lawyer who had previously been Minister of Justice, announced her resignation. It came after a string of blunders, oversights and political misjudgements, the catalyst for her departure being a mind-bogglingly ill-judged New Year’s Eve speech on 31 December 2022: in it, she declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine that February had led to “a lot of special experiences” and the chance for “many encounters with great and interesting people”. As is so often the way, the speech itself, while foolish and tin-eared, was not sufficient cause for her removal, necessarily, but it encapsulated why she should not remain any longer.

Choosing a successor to Lambrecht was challenging. Klingbeil’s name was floated (he was co-Leader of the SPD and a member of the Bundestag but did not hold federal office), and some suggested Dr Eva Högl, a former SPD member of the Bundestag currently serving as Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces. In the end, Scholz surprised many by choosing Pistorius, a former Lord Mayor of Osnabrück and Minister of the Interior and Sports in the Lower Saxony state government. He had been one of Lower Saxony’s representatives in the Bundesrat and in that capacity had been part of Germany’s delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. As Minister of the Interior, Pistorius had taken a tough stance against organised crime, terrorism and the threats from Islamic and far-right extremism, but he was not a well-known figure in national terms. His appointment to replace Lambrecht also breached an undertaking Scholz had given to maintain a gender-balanced cabinet.

Pistorius was not without experience in national terms. He had been part of the SPD’s negotiating teams which had agreed the coalition governments of 2017 and 2021, working on internal and legal affairs in the first and migration and integration on the second. With fellow Lower Saxony minister Petra Köpping, he had been a candidate for the co-leadership of the SPD in 2019, but the pair finished a disappointing fifth, with only 14.4 per cent of the votes. What was important, however, was his air of weight and competence, and the fact that, at almost 63 when he was appointed, he had undertaken national service, spending 1980-81 in an army anti-aircraft unit. It was hardly a long and celebrated military career but neither Klingbeil nor Högl had served at all, and, as compulsory military service had been suspended in 2011, there were fewer and fewer politicians with any experience of the armed forces at all.

From the beginning of his tenure, Pistorius had a sense of purpose and authority that Lambrecht had never possessed. He was forthright and wholehearted in his support for Ukraine and his condemnation of Russia’s invasion, calling it a “brutal attack”, and he announced two substantial tranches of military assistance to Kyiv within months of becoming Minister of Defence, €2.7 billion in May 2023 and €1 billion in October. He was one of six cabinet ministers who accompanied Scholz to Tokyo in March 2023 for a joint cabinet meeting with the government of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and set out ways to deepen defence ties between Germany and Japan while he was there. He also moved forward on closer relations with the Philippines, and committed Bundeswehr forces to the United Nations Command in South Korea, making Germany the 18th country to join the United States-led force.

This all had an effect, and by last year opinion polling showed Pistorius was the most popular politician in Germany, and the only figure with an overall positive rating. As the year wore on, and the SPD’s popularity remained stubbornly and disastrously low at around 15-16 per cent, more and more people asked the obvious question: why not remove Scholz as Chancellor candidate at the next election, and install Pistorius instead? True, it would have been a brutal and transparent act of regicide, but politics is a contact sport, and if it would make a significant difference to the SPD’s electoral performance, it was surely worthy of consideration.

In fact the evidence suggested the overall effect, while positive, would be small. In any event, Pistorius was not agitating to supplant Scholz, although his denials of ambition were both light-hearted and potentially flexible.

The question doesn’t even arise for me. We have a candidate for chancellor. He is the current chancellor. It all boils down to that. I’m really very happy with my job. I like being defence minister.

However, he had previously remarked with jollity to reporters, “In politics, you should never rule anything out, no matter what it’s about. The only thing I can definitely rule out is becoming pope.”

His achievements as Minister of Defence over the past two years have been significant. He has brought a clarity of purpose and frankness to the brief which many German politicians, perhaps for understandable reasons, have been unable to find, stating unreservedly that the Bundeswehr needs a huge amount of investment and reform to make it “fit for war”, and revitalising the recruitment process to replenish numbers without, as yet, resorting to conscription. This has all had an effect, managing to persuade a majority of voters in a country which has a dark and tortured relationship with its armed forces and its military past to support rearmament and strengthening of the Bundeswehr. He has also consistently argued that Germany must match and then exceed NATO’s minimum military spending level of two per cent; the country spent 1.39 per cent in 2022, 1.52 per cent in 2023 and two per cent in 2024, its highest level of spending since 1991.

Pistorius still has a great deal of work to do. But there is also a huge opportunity. As I wrote in March, Friedrich Merz used the favourable arithmetic of the outgoing Bundestag to secure agreement to make changes to the Basic Law and relax the country’s so-called “debt brake”. This will allow the new government to borrow more freely for investment. The Scholz government had already created a €100 billion Sondervermögen, or “special fund”, for defence, which comes to and end next year, and has so far mostly been used to replenish stocks of ammunition and modernise equipment. It has been suggested that Germany’s spending on defence might rise to as high as 3.5 per cent of GDP over the next decade, equating to an overall increase of around €600 billion.

There are still major challenges. The Bundeswehr’s level of readiness has fallen to around 50 per cent in recent years, with a shortage of artillery and air defence, inadequate levels of recruitment inventories exhausted to assist Ukraine. It has virtually no drone capability, despite the transformative effects of unmanned aerial vehicles shown in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, and both the regular armed forces and the reserved need markedly better levels of recruitment and retention to create a credible force that could help NATO resist hostile action by Russia and maintain that resistance for a sustained period. Pistorius has the drive and the personal authority to maintain the momentum on reequipping and restoring the Bundeswehr, and he will be able to call on large financial resources. Nevertheless, he must make more rapid progress, as well as managing the new parliamentary arithmetic which gives the anti-militarist AfD and the Left a potential, if uneasy, coalition of over a third of seats in the Bundestag, enough to block certain measures like amendments to the Basic Law.

The natural world

When Merz announced the appointment of CDU and CSU ministers, he made several changes to the division of responsibilities between ministerial portfolios, the most striking of which has been the creation of a Ministry of Digital and State Modernisation. Various other ministries have seen their empires amended, but a potentially significant policy area, because of party boundaries, is that of climate action and protection.

When the SPD-Green-Free Democratic Party (FDP) coalition was agreed in 2021, one of the co-Leaders of the Greens (who are formally Alliance 90/The Greens), Robert Habeck, became Vice-Chancellor to Olaf Scholz and was appointed Minister of Economic Affairs, but his department was expanded to reflect his party’s priorities and their place within government. The Ministry of Economic Affairs had gained responsibility for technology from the Ministry of Research in 1998, and from 2002 to 2005 it took on parts of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs to become a much more expansive Ministry of Economic Affairs and Labour, described not wholly in complimentary terms as a Superministerium. It was an attempt by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to coordinate several of his government’s policy priorities in one administrative unit, but it was regarded as having failed; partly the failure was institutional, but the only minister to head the department in that form, Wolfgang Clement of the SPD, had a torrid time in office implementing ambitious and far-reaching labour market and welfare reforms, the so-called “Agenda 2010”.

The ministry was reshaped again in 2005 under Chancellor Angela Merkel and returned to the title of Economic Affairs and Technology. In 2013, it gained additional responsibility for energy, as the SPD’s Gabriel Sigmar, Vice-Chancellor in the grand coalition, was made Minister of Economic Affairs but also took on Germany’s transition away from nuclear and fossil fuels and towards renewables, dubbed the Energiewende or “Energy Transition”.

The addition in 2021 of climate protection from the Ministry of the Environment was obviously born partly from a desire by the Greens to have direct ministerial control of the issue which was the fons et origo of their party, but there was also—at least it seemed to me—a potentially appealing logic and policy coordination about explicitly linking the economy and industry, the energy sector and climate protection and security. Although it’s less the case now, governments often kept “green issues” in a slightly isolated portfolio, whereas Habeck’s department offered the possibility of “mainstreaming” the way the Federal Government would address environmental protection, climate change mitigation and the reduction of carbon emissions: he described it as the “reconciliation of prosperity and climate protection”.

This interdependence was sharpened after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, since Germany had been heavily dependent on natural gas supplied from Russia through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline as the Energiewende required replacment sources of energy to nuclear power. When this relationship was threatened after the invasion (and later dealt a severe blow in September 2022 by the sabotage of the pipeline), Habeck emphasised that climate change, fossil fuels and security were all linked:

In times like these, it is clear that carbon neutrality and the development of a green economy, as well as peace and security policy need to go hand in hand more than ever before… Carbon neutrality and renewable energy sources have become even more important. We need to use energy more efficiently. We need to accelerate the expansion of renewables like never before. We are repositioning trade relationships. The war has only stressed the urgency of many things that were already urgent before.

Habeck had a turbulent time in office during a period of economic turmoil and geostrategic insecurity, but I have no reason to think that the ministerial portfolio was a mistake. There will be many opinions on the scale, speed and manner of Germany’s Energiewende, but in purely administrative and procedural terms, the linkage of economic affairs and climate change seemed potentially beneficial.

In any event, it is being reversed. The CDU’s Katherina Reiche, a former member of the Bundestag who left politics for the private sector and was until recently CEO of energy supplier Westenergie, has been appointed to the restored post of Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy; “climate action”, as it was broadly termed, now returns to the Ministry of the Environment where it sits alongside issues like the preservation of the natural environment, air pollution, biodiversity and chemical and industrial safety. In addition, international climate policy has been transferred from the Foreign Office. This ministry was allocated to the SPD and is to be run by Carsten Schneider, a veteran political operator who was elected to the Bundestag in 1998 at the age of 22. He was SPD chief whip in the Bundestag 2017-21 then served in the Federal Chancellery in the Scholz administration as Minister of State and Commissioner for Eastern Germany. Coincidentally, both Reiche and Schneider are from the former German Democratic Republic, Reiche born in Luckenwalde in Brandenburg and Schneider in Erfurt in Thuringia.

At least in official terms, Germany’s policy on energy and climate change and the targets to which the government is committed have not changed. Climate mitigation, especially “net-zero”, has become a sharply political issue across Europe, seized on by populist parties in the United Kingdom, Hungary, Spain and the Netherlands as well as Germany. The news service Clean Energy Wire announced optimistically that “it is clear that the topic [of climate change] has largely been mainstreamed across all policy fields”, which could equally be read as no single minister or department having overall responsibility. Table Media admitted that the effective designation of the Ministry of the Environment as Germany’s “climate ministry” could lead other departments to move their focus elsewhere, but also noted that “the traditional conflicts between the one ‘green’ ministry and many other ministries are inevitable”.

Energy is clearly central to climate policy in terms of reducing emissions but also finding new, efficient, cost-effective and secure means of generation. Schneider’s department will therefore have to work closely with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy. It will be interesting to see how the dynamic between the two works, particularly as they are headed by politicians of different parties, who, although less than three years apart in age and both from eastern Germany, have very different backgrounds. Schneider has effectively grown up in the SPD and in Bundestag politics, and what professional experience he does have outside that context is in banking. Reiche, by contrast, graduated in chemistry and worked in a research laboratory; although she was elected to the Bundestag at the same time as Schneider, in 1998, she stepped down in 2015 to work in the private sector and became CEO of Westenergie in 2020.

They do say that diversity is the key to success. We shall see.

The youth wing

The SPD also provides the only two members of the cabinet under 40, both of them women. Reem Alabali-Radovan (35), Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, was born in Moscow to Iraqi emigré parents who sought asylum in Germany in 1996 and settled in Schwerin. At 29, she was appointed Commissioner for Integration in the state government in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, then the following year, at the 2021 federal elections, she was elected to the Bundestag for Schwerin—Ludwigslust-Parchim I—Nordwestmecklenburg I. Olaf Scholz appointed her to the Federal Chancellery as Minister of State and Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration, and a few months later she also became Commissioner for Anti-Racism.

Alabali-Radovan is on the left of the SPD, and has identified very strongly and personally with her previous roles in immigration, the treatment of refugees and immigration, saying on her appointment to the Chancellery, “The issues associated with my office have accompanied me throughout my life”. She has spoken in strongly principled terms about her new office overseeing economic cooperation within Germany as well as international development aid:

Combating poverty, hunger and inequality will always be core aims of a development policy guided by fairness and compassion. Justice and security will also be two core pillars of my development policy. As Development Minister, I will advocate for just economic cooperation that benefits both sides—Germany and its partners. This partnership-based win-win effect is something we want to pursue more strongly in future, in areas from resource extraction to green hydrogen.

This may be more idealistic than the almost self-consciously hard-nosed pragmatism and economic reality which Chancellor Merz has made his stock-in-trade, and she will face the tension any development minister in a Western country faces in straitened economic times: she will have to work hard to make the case for spending money on foreign populations thousands of miles away, while very pressing economic and social difficulties remain in Germany itself.

The other young minister is Verena Hubertz (37), Minister of Housing, Urban Development and Construction. Her background is almost a study in contrast with Alabali-Radovan’s: she was born in Trier on the Mosel River in the Rhineland, the daughter of a locksmith and a parish worked, and studied business administration at Trier before taking a postgraduate degree in management at the private WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management. In 2013, she moved to Berlin and co-founded Kitchen Stories, a start-up video-based cooking platform, of which the household appliance giant BSH acquired a majority share only four years later. She stayed on as managing director until 2020.

Hubertz was elected to the Bundestag for her home town of Trier at the 2021 federal elections and served as a deputy chair of the SPD parliamentary group with responsibility for economics, tourism, construction, housing and urban development. In February this year she was defeated in the direct mandate contest for Trier but retained her place in Bundestag through the SPD party list for Rheinland-Pfalz. Her background as an entrepreneur marks her out from her political colleagues in the cabinet. She has won a reputation for combining private-sector success with a social conscience, identifying sustainable urban development and responsible house-building as two of her priorities. Although she is not entirely new to politics, it will be worth watching to see if her experience of entrepreneurship and education in management allow her to perform efficiently and creatively as a minister or if she quickly becomes frustrates with some of the process and bureaucracy which bedevils ministerial life.

Go team!

With the coalition assembled and Merz installed as Chancellor, the new government can set about its tasks. Rarely has a post-war German government come to office with problems on so many sides to tackle: the ongoing war in Ukraine with all its collateral effects, Russian expansionism, a sluggish and outdated economy, political polarisation, increasing controversy over immigration, asylum and integration, a surging populist, far-right opposition, a sometimes-abrasive Chancellor and a low and grudging level of public support. Will the CDU/CSU Union and the SPD grow closer in adversity, or will the headwinds against which they are battling drive them apart? Can they stem the rise of the AfD and demonstrate to the electorate that they are responsive to their concerns, and have the policies and abilities to address them head-on? If they can’t, if they fail to make headway, it is hard to predict where German politics goes next.

So, no pressure, then.