Draft for contract: Agreement on German coalition in Saxony

The leaders of the CDU, SPD and FDP in Saxony-Anhalt have agreed on a draft coalition agreement.

The party leaders announced on Monday.

The CDU and SPD members now have to decide on the draft, and a party congress for the FDP.

Negotiators from all three parties had expressed confidence over the weekend that they would be able to conclude the talks this Monday.

Actually, the black-red-yellow negotiations should have been concluded by Sunday.

In the next step, the parties will send the draft coalition agreement to the grassroots.

In the case of the CDU and SPD, the members then decide whether to join the first coalition of CDU, SPD and FDP for 61 years.

In the case of the Liberals, a party congress decides.

If everyone agrees, the new alliance could re-elect the incumbent head of government Reiner Haseloff (CDU) as prime minister in the state parliament on September 16.

After two deliberately harmonious first weeks of negotiations, the mood at the beginning of the third and actually last week of negotiations had deteriorated.

One of the reasons for this was that the parties had saved the disputes until the end.

In order to still keep to the schedule, the negotiating group had significantly increased its workload towards the end of the week.

The top group alone met for almost 30 hours in the third week of negotiations, 15 of them from Friday to Saturday. On Thursday, a smaller group of people spoke about the cuts and distribution of the ministries. The SPD chairmen Juliane Kleemann and Andreas Schmidt then showed themselves angry on Friday morning because details from the talks had leaked to the public. The Social Democrats stressed on Friday that the allocation of departments would only be determined when the other points of contention had also been resolved.

Before the round on Friday, this included finances and the minimum wage required by the SPD for public contracts. The negotiating group put the topic of finance at the very end of the talks, as many agreements in other areas are subject to financial feasibility. A big controversial issue was the amount of the planned Corona special fund.