Union and SPD: The real problem of black and red (opinion)

It is to be feared that the deceptive “spirit of Würzburg” will also blow through the Berlin Chancellery this evening. It is the supposed spirit to have discovered the Union and the SPD last week at the exam of their parliamentary group tours, a corps spirit that makes them forgotten that builds bridges and finds solutions.

The only problem is: there are no ghosts, not either.

If the government leaders from the Union and the SPD come together this afternoon to the coalition committee, the first after the parliamentary summer break, they still want to send the signal to the proclaimed “autumn of reforms”. In fact, the CDU, CSU and SPD reveal their weakness.

The recent strikes and disputes show one thing: the coalition currently does not unite much than the feeling that they have to keep their own people happy. And in office after just 120 days. With a view to the coming months, the upcoming super election year 2026, this only suggests evil.

If one thing became clear in Würzburg, then this: how little the coalition partners dare to come across. In the Lower Franconian, the board members of the black and red Bundestag factions have conjured up a new, common spirit after two days of team building. Basically, they only made the decision to faithfully implement the appointments that have recently been made together in the coalition agreement. Oh what? Apparently this mutual statement was bitterly necessary.

“We are committed to success,” Union faction leader Jens Spahn had issued as a solution. If the one faith of having to profile himself at the expense of the other, it will not work. It’s as banal as it is right. Only then it has to be lived by everyone, especially the head of the coalition, Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Only a few days earlier, Merz had advised the SPD to become a little more like the CDU. Literally, he said the comrade from a CDU party conference stage: “If this party has the strength to become migration-critical and become industrial, then this party also has a chance to take the government.”

Has strength? Take? The patron of the Chancellor and CDU chairman, how the 15-survey percent SPD had to behave, could not like the comrade on the matter or in the form. Co-party leader Bärbel BAS spent when visiting the SPD youngsters in North Rhine-Westphalia with a coarse “bullshit” quote. The Chancellor’s statement that the welfare state can no longer be financed is exactly that: nonsense.

Both Merz and BAS want to keep your own clientele on the shelf and want to prove that you don’t just throw yourself in the dust in front of the coalition partner.

Now this bullshit bingo could be dismissed as an election campaign rhetoric, on September 14th there are local elections in North Rhine-Westphalia. But what vocabulary will the coalitioners only prove when they come really hard chunks?

The economy shrinks, unemployment increases. In the household for 2027 alone, a 30 billion euro hole is clipped, which will still require painful savings-which has not yet been provided by a federal government in this short time and magnitude. The talks about it fall into the 2026 election year with five state elections.

Not to forget: The welfare state’s agreed major reform, from retirement to care, has not even started. So far, the commissions used have not submitted any reform proposals. But a dispute over the costs of the citizens’ allowance breaks out.

Political hard work comes to the coalition. However, the greatest effort seems to be the temptation to resist the temptation to profile themselves at the expense of the coalition partner.