Germans vote for Merkel’s successor in close elections-News

The Germans will vote in the national election on Sunday. It seems too close. The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has challenged the conservatives of the retired Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Merkel has been in power since 2005, but plans to step down after the general election, making voting a time-changing event and charting the direction for the future development of Europe’s largest economy.

Divided voters means that after the election, the major parties will test each other and let the 67-year-old Merkel take the caretaker role before starting more formal alliance negotiations that may take months.

Conservative candidate Amin Raschelt said in a campaign with Merkel in his hometown of Aachen on Saturday that a left-wing coalition led by the Social Democratic Party, the Green Party and the far-left Link Party would destabilize Europe.

“They want us to withdraw from NATO, they don’t want this alliance, they want another republic,” said 60-year-old Lashet. “I don’t want Link to enter the next government.”

Competing with Laschet is SPD’s Olaf Scholz, who is the finance minister of Merkel’s left-wing coalition, who has won all three televised debates between the main candidates.

The 63-year-old Schultz did not rule out the possibility of alliance with the left, but said that joining NATO is the red line of the Social Democratic Party.

After a domestically focused campaign, Berlin’s allies in Europe and elsewhere may have to wait months to see whether the new German government is ready to deal with foreign issues as they wish.

The divided political landscape means that a tripartite alliance may emerge. The final opinion poll showed that the Social Democratic Party was leading by a narrow margin, but the conservatives have narrowed the gap in recent days, and many voters have yet to decide.

The most likely joint plan is for the Social Democratic Party or the conservative CDU/CDU group-no matter who comes first-to form an alliance with the Green Party and the Liberal Democratic Party (FDP).

Schultz told supporters in his electoral district in Potsdam near Berlin that he still hopes that the Social Democratic Party and the Green Party can gain a majority of seats and rule independently without a third-party partner.

“The stronger the Social Democratic Party, the easier it is to form alliances,” Scholz said. “I don’t know what is possible, but it may be possible, for example, to form an SPD-Greens alliance. I believe this is possible. We will wait and see.”

Both the conservatives and the FDP refused to establish a European “debt union” and wanted to ensure that the EU’s joint borrowing to fund the EU’s coronavirus recovery plan would still be a one-off. The Social Democratic Party talked about taking steps to establish a fiscal alliance.

The Green Party supports a common European fiscal policy to support investment in the environment, research, infrastructure, and education.