BERLIN, Oct 16: Germany’s incoming chancellor Angela Merkel was set to name the conservative ministers of her cabinet on Monday to put the finishing touches to a coalition government which will take the Europe Union’s biggest country into an uncertain political future.
Merkel won her fight to oust the incumbent Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder at the price of a power-sharing deal which gives his Social Democrats eight of the 14 cabinet posts, among them the powerful portfolios of finance and the foreign ministry.
On Monday, the first woman chancellor in the country’s history was due to announce who will fill the six cabinet posts her conservative Christian Union receives under the pact — economy, interior, defence, agriculture, education and family, and the parliamentary speaker’s chair.
Only economy, which will go Edmund Stoiber, the leader of the southern state of Bavaria, has been confirmed.
As soon as the names are announced, formal negotiations will begin to establish the programme of the new government. The cabinet may not be sworn in until mid-November.
Merkel has dismissed fears that her administration will be unable to put aside inter-party divisions and get on with the job of injecting new life into Germany’s stagnating economy.
“I see a spirit of camaraderie in this new government,” she told Monday’s issue of Der Spiegel magazine, made available in advance.
Merkel also sought to calm fears expressed by Stoiber and the future vice-chancellor and Social Democratic leader Franz Muentefering that she would lack the power guaranteed chancellors by Germany’s Basic Law to impose her will on policy decisions.
“Government discipline applies to all from the moment the government is formed,” she said.
Schroeder will play no role in the new government, yet many observers saw his hand in the line-up of Social Democrat ministers named last Thursday.
They included Peer Steinbrueck, the former premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, as finance minister and Schroeder’s former right-hand man, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, as foreign minister.
In contrast to the swift announcement by the Social Democrats, arguments about who should fill the conservatives’ roles were continuing at the weekend, according to press reports.
According to sources close to the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, the defence ministry will go to Michael Glos, the head of the CSU parliamentary group.
Franz Josef Jung, a leading member of the Christian Democrat government in the central state of Hesse, which includes Germany’s financial hub Frankfurt, has also been rumoured to be in the running for the job.
There is less debate over the interior ministry, where Wolfgang Schaeuble, a confidant of conservative former chancellor Helmut Kohl and who held the job from 1989 to 1991, will add some much-needed experience to the line-up.
Horst Seehofer, a social expert, is set to be appointed agriculture minister, sources close to the CSU said, although he has been very critical of the party’s proposals for reform of the health system.
A grand coalition government uniting right and left is not uncharted territory in Germany.
It was last in force between 1966 and 1969 when the Social Democrats under Willy Brandt joined forces with the Christian Democrats, led by a Christian Democratic chancellor, Kurt-Georg Kiesinger.
Merkel and her ministers will take office in starkly different surroundings, with unemployment of more than 11 per cent sapping economic growth, and intense competition from low-cost eastern European neighbours threatening job creation.
The conservatives have said four issues must be agreed on when coalition negotiations begin — a new budget, reviving the labour market and the welfare system and introducing tax reforms to promote economic growth.—AFP