A turning point is looming in Schwerin.

After the state elections at the end of September, it was only a few days before Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig (SPD) dropped her old coalition partner.

Since 2006, the Social Democrats in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania have always ruled with the CDU as their junior partner, but that should now be over.

The left, although it has clearly lost votes and is behind the CDU, is now the preferred coalition partner of the SPD.

While the coalition negotiations are only just beginning at the federal level, they are already advanced in the Northeast.

Negotiations number three took place in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Friday, and the coalition agreement should be in place by mid-November.

Julia Löhr

Business correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

In another federal state, too, the signs are on red-red, there with an additional green component.

In Berlin, Franziska Giffey is negotiating a continuation of the previous alliance of the SPD, the Greens and the Left.

Similar to her party colleague Schwesig, Giffey would theoretically have other options.

A traffic light with the Greens and the FDP, for example, or a coalition with the CDU and FDP.

And yet, even in the capital, it looks as if the left will belong to the next state government.

"Social policy is the number one topic"

How is it that a party that is represented as a parliamentary group in the new Bundestag only because of the direct mandates it has won is so sought-after as a coalition partner at state level? For Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Wolfgang Muno, political scientist at the University of Rostock, has a simple answer: because no other party constellation is as close in terms of content as the SPD and the Left. “Social policy is the number one topic in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The same wages as in the West, pay according to the tariff: that's what people want, ”Muno analyzes. “The only difference in the election manifestos was that the left wanted a little more of everything.” Muno describes the behavior of the left as “endlessly supporting the state”.Even in the Corona crisis, there was hardly a critical word about Schwesig's course. "That was more of a cuddle course." Schwesig made the decision easy because the future leadership of the CDU in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania was unclear. Between 1998 and 2006 the SPD ruled with the SED successor party, the PDS, from which the Left later emerged.

Claudia Müller, member of the Bundestag for the Greens from Rostock, makes similar observations as Muno.

“The left has behaved more like a coalition faction in the past few months.

The CDU was sometimes more of an opposition. ”Müller regrets that a traffic light coalition in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has not even come close to being discussed, unlike at the federal level, but it does not surprise her either.

"Unfortunately, large parts of the population here are still alienating us Greens."

“On the one hand, we have a lot of abandoned regions with high vacancies.

And at the same time cities such as Rostock, Greifswald or Neustrelitz, where we also have problems with rising rents. "