Angela Merkel has already passed one thing on to her successor - whoever it will be -: Even after these federal elections, there is no clarity about who wants to and will form a government with whom.

But the mechanisms of the forthcoming explorations and coalition negotiations could be surprisingly different from what is known.

Eckart Lohse

Head of the parliamentary editorial office in Berlin.

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It was already clear on Sunday evening that the small gap between the SPD and the Union encouraged both parties to claim the chancellorship for themselves. The difference is, on the one hand, that the SPD under top candidate Olaf Scholz landed 1.6 percentage points ahead of the Union with its chancellor candidate Armin Laschet. Politically and even more important for the balance of power, however, it is likely that the Union lost almost nine percentage points, while the SPD gained more than five. Despite the SPD's only 25 percent, Scholz comes from a position of relative strength, Laschet with a historically poor 24 percent for the Union from a position of not just relative weakness.

The SPD is already beginning to fundamentally question the Union's claim.

According to the previous rules for forming a government, the SPD and the Union would direct the negotiations to form a coalition from the start.

You invite the partners who are mathematically and politically possible and you sound out with whom more in-depth discussions make sense.

In fact, there are already contacts and discussions between individual actors.

FDP and Greens sit down together

But it is already becoming apparent that this time it could be the other way around. Already on the evening of the election and increasingly the morning after, there were signals from the Greens and the FDP that they would first like to discuss with each other what ideas they have of an alliance. Basically, despite a vote increase of almost six percentage points compared to the 2017 election, the Greens are negotiating from a position of perceived weakness, because in the meantime they were much better in the polls and were allowed to dream of being Chancellor. The FDP is indeed the smallest partner, but with an improvement in its result of just under one percentage point, it landed in the clear double digits and is satisfied. You feel your own position is strong.

The FDP can feed its self-confidence from two sources: The voters seem to trust the party and its chairman Christian Lindner, although he refused to rule four years ago.

In addition, the FDP can feel confident that it is needed to govern, that is, that it will be part of a coalition.

The latter also applies to the Greens.

This creates the unusual situation that the two parties, who have been critical of each other for decades, could be the ones who could set the conditions for a coalition between the SPD and the Union.

A weak Laschet should be more willing to swallow than the stronger Scholz.

In any case, the Greens and the FDP together collected more votes than the Social Democratic election winner than the Union anyway.