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Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans, elected to the leadership of the SPD on November 30, 2019, are critical of the Merkel coalition. REUTERS / Fabrizio Bensch

The failed SPD in the polls has chosen to lead a skeptical tandem vis-à-vis the coalition with conservatives Angela Merkel.

With our correspondent in Berlin, Nathalie Versieux

The vote of SPD activists is a blow for Angela Merkel. The Chancellor needs the Social Democrats to complete her term until 2021. But the new leadership of the party to be inducted by the congress next week is rather favorable to the exit of the coalition.

The new party leaders Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans, known as "Nowabo" in-house, will ask the activists to vote for or against the continuation of the coalition, for or against further negotiations with the CDU.

Although Walter-Borjans repeated several times during his short speech that his priority was the unity of the party. " We are very conscious of the fact that we do not have here to make a victory or a defeat, but that it is a question of maintaining together this fantastic party that is social democracy, and of bringing together its different elements where she began to break up . "

This is a real challenge for the social democracy of Germany, broken by six months of internal quarrels , and threatened with extinction, according to the latest regional elections.