Right on schedule: The traffic light parties SPD, Greens and FDP presented their coalition agreement on Wednesday afternoon.

It has almost 180 pages.

It is the first alliance of its kind at the federal level.

Accordingly, the title of the treaty has a historical reference: “Dare to make more progress” is reminiscent of “Dare to be more democratic”.

With this, Willy Brandt had overwritten the first social-liberal coalition in 1969.

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The contract itself states that it is an alliance with partners “of different traditions and perspectives”.

The parties meet once a month for the coalition committee to discuss fundamental issues.

The coalitionists want to be more transparent to the outside world: more frequent government surveys, more public documents.

The current coalition agreement bears the subtitle: "Alliance for Freedom, Justice and Sustainability".

Each of the parties involved can already be recognized in it.

The preamble says that the new coalition wants to make life easier for citizens.

"We will modernize the public infrastructure, public spaces and networks and significantly accelerate planning, approval and implementation." The living conditions should be improved, which means: affordable housing, fast internet, accessible health care and good mobility offers.

Climate protection has top priority.

Renewable energies are to be expanded rapidly, and the coal phase-out “ideally” should be brought forward to 2030.

That was what the exploratory paper had already said;

the Greens could not evidently enforce a stricter regulation.

The word “respect”, the SPD's campaign slogan, appears very often in the treaty.

"We want to promote a culture of respect - respect for other opinions, for counter-arguments and arguments, for other worlds and attitudes."

What else did the traffic light parties agree on?

Climate protection

In order to stop man-made climate change, Germany should obtain 80 percent of its electricity from renewable energies by 2030.

So far, the goal has been to have achieved a share of 65 percent by 2030.

The future coalition partners now want to promote an ambitious expansion of wind and solar energy and remove obstacles on the way there.

Last year, according to industry information, renewable energies had a share of around 45 percent.

The expansion should succeed with faster planning and approval procedures and new specifications.

This includes a solar roof requirement: In future, "all suitable roof areas" should be used for solar energy.

This should be mandatory for new commercial buildings and the rule for new private buildings.

There are also new stipulations for the expansion of wind turbines: In the future, two percent of the land area should be available for onshore wind energy, while the capacities for offshore wind energy will be increased to at least 30 gigawatts by 2030.

According to the contract, these capacities are to increase to 40 and 70 gigawatts respectively in 2035 and 2045.

In 2030, 50 percent of the heat in Germany should also be generated in a climate-neutral manner.


Significantly more clean electricity should also enable the targeted phase-out of coal in 2030. So far, the climate-damaging coal-fired power generation in Germany should be ended by 2038 at the latest.