In the final phase of this election campaign, the call for a new beginning, for transformation, for “unleashing” awakened a combination that was actually obvious: red-green-red.
That would indeed be something radically new, it would indeed promise a great transformation (another word for revolution that is not quite so off-putting to bourgeois ears).
But what would that unleash?
The possibility of such a coalition has also been in the air at the federal level for years. In the countries at the latest with Bodo Ramelow's career it is no longer a general bogeyman. In the federal government, everyone involved has made their peace with it - most recently the SPD under Sigmar Gabriel, who used it to doctor the wound that Oskar Lafontaine and Agenda 2010 had torn in the federal party. Could Olaf Scholz of all people, one of the architects of the Agenda, be the executor of this left-wing reconciliation?
It is safe to expect that he will try.
Even if he crosses the finish line in second.
Scholz likes to flirt with having a heart for liberal-Hanseatic entrepreneurship, but he has yet to discover his heart for the FDP.
Which is definitely based on reciprocity.
The FDP would bend a lot in a traffic light coalition if it had to accept a minimum wage of twelve euros, could not prevent tax increases or help to soften the debt brake.
That is why the Jamaica possibility is much closer for them, even if Armin Laschet and not Scholz should cross the finish line in second place.
Who falls over
The FDP or the Left?
Otherwise, Dietmar Bartsch is right, the FDP threatens the accusation of electoral deception, or at least of the “party that fell over”, which flashes to the right during the election campaign, but then turns left.
The left party's top candidate, however, has to take care not to wake up in a party that has fallen over.
He's currently trimming her on government course.
The government opponents in the Left Party hardly give a peep.
The crucial question of NATO would have been an easy matter for them.
But the party leadership evades it subtly: After all, no commitment to NATO does not mean that one insists on its abolition.
Foreign and security policy, so far the last hurdle before the red-green-red alliance, disappears in the fog of non-commitment.
For Scholz and Annalena Baerbock it would certainly be more pleasant if this question did not arise until the evening of the election.
Because now it is interfering with their journey to the political center, that is, to the place where elections are won.
Merkel's clear demarcation from Scholz aimed in this direction.
For the Greens, too, it has always been the Achilles heel of their strategy to penetrate the middle-class electorate who traditionally leaned towards the CDU.
Not just a couple of rolls
Baerbock's candidacy for chancellor was always under this sword of Damocles.
Your admirers may want a transformation, but are not toying with the system change.
The battle cry of the left, on the other hand, that they don't just want a few rolls, but the entire bakery, would be the yeast of a red-green-red alliance.
The SPD and the Greens will spend the rest of the election campaign portraying critics of this perspective as alarmists. They have to do this for contradicting reasons: to reassure their bourgeois target groups, but also to reassure their core troops and those who are weighed down by the media, whose eyes light up at the thought of a united left.
Where the CDU, CSU and FDP understand unleashing to mean the dawn of a new economic miracle around climate protection and the reduction of bureaucracy, they sense the revival of neoliberal dreams of capitalism, the opposite of what is understood by the red-green milieu as “great transformation”. This kind of unleashing consists of a new economy, a new society and a new state in which climate protection serves as a vehicle for well-known ideologies. Not only the Left Party, but also this part of the SPD and the Greens is concerned with the whole bakery.
The CDU itself has encouraged the innocence of such upheavals. At the end of the Merkel era, which is threatening to be captured by Scholz, she has recently spoken of a “revolution” and a “new state”. If even she wants it that way, what should be so bad about the red-green-red New State? That it is aiming in the opposite direction of Laschet, namely in the direction of “multiple states”, that perhaps no new state is needed because the old one has worked very well in the many crises of recent years, cannot be explained in this election campaign more is possible.
But it is not too late to explain that the ideological cores of three parties would meet in a green-red-red or red-green-red coalition, which are anything but what their top candidates want to broadcast. Scholz is the best example. He does not embody a lively, pragmatic SPD. The candidate for chancellor is their last roll.