The start of the coalition negotiations is a windy affair.

The hurricane gusts in Berlin on Thursday afternoon are so strong that the climate activists, who are waiting for the politicians in front of Hub 27 at the exhibition center, hold onto their banners stretched in wooden frames so that they are not blown away.

Gradually the delegations arrive, the Greens chairmen Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck are early, the SPD is taking its time.

Black bodies with blue lights arrive eight minutes before 3 p.m. It is Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.

At the very end, so it should be, the boss comes.

At 3 p.m. sharp, the wind blows Olaf Scholz into the sober exhibition building, the future chancellor floats up the escalator.

Helene Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Peter Carstens

Political correspondent in Berlin

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Eckart Lohse

Head of the parliamentary editorial office in Berlin.

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Markus Wehner

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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What Lars Klingbeil for the SPD, Michael Kellner for the Greens and Volker Wissing for the FDP put forward as a timetable for the negotiations does not sound windy, but firm and determined.

After the opening round on Thursday, to which only the leaders of the 22 working groups are invited, the groups should meet from next Wednesday, the day after the constitution of the Bundestag.

You have two weeks to negotiate and record the results in papers by November 10th, which are then to be approved by the main negotiating round as parts of the coalition agreement. The contract should be in place by the end of November. In the St. Nicholas week, which begins on December 6th, a Monday, Scholz is to be elected Chancellor and a government is to be formed.

In the week before that, the partners could obtain the approval of their parties to the coalition agreement.

Kellner announces a "digitally supported ballot" for the Greens, Wissing a special party conference for the FDP.

The schedule is "ambitious and ambitious" and not set in stone for every case, says Wissing.

But they agreed to form a government as soon as possible.

"If you talk about things for too long, the hurdles don't get any smaller," says the FDP General Secretary, recalling the Jamaica talks four years ago.

No night sessions

There will be no meetings on the weekends and no night sessions, promises Kellner. The task of the working groups is to resolve conflicts within their group as far as possible, so that “as few or no parentheses as possible” are to be discussed in the main negotiation round - parentheses stand for unresolved questions. While the Federal Managing Director and the two General Secretaries speak in the foyer, loud laughter and cheerful noise descend from above. The mood seems to be good at the beginning.

The negotiations for the next few weeks will be conducted on the basis of the exploratory paper of October 15. In it, the chief negotiators of the SPD, Greens and FDP have already laid down the basic lines on twelve pages. For example, there should be no tax increases, which is particularly important to the FDP. The minimum wage will be increased to twelve euros, which is a concern of the SPD. It is particularly important to the Greens that coal-fired power will be phased out by 2030. In the exploratory paper, however, this goal is given the restriction “ideally”.

With the exploratory paper, the shell of a coalition was created quickly, discreetly and in an allegedly warm atmosphere.

The expansion has now begun, and the skilled workers from the three parties are arriving at the joint construction site: health experts, labor market politicians, climate experts, housekeepers, foreign politicians, to name just a few.

There are a total of seven main topics such as “Climate protection in a socio-ecological market economy”, each with two to four sub-groups, in the example mentioned, for example, environmental and nature protection, mobility, agriculture and climate / energy / transformation.