Berlin CDU to offer Greens and SPD exploratory talks as alternative to left-led alliance
CDU parliamentary leader Stefan Evers plans to invite the Greens and SPD to talks on Nov. 3 about a coalition without the Left Party, citing a Spiegel report on Left lead candidate Elif Eralp.
Archive image · Photo: Martin Rulsch, Wikimedia Commons / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Berlin's Christian Democrats want to offer the Greens and the Social Democrats exploratory talks on forming a government. CDU parliamentary leader Stefan Evers said on the sidelines of the new state parliament's inaugural session that he was ready to discuss "an alternative to a left-led alliance." He said he would extend the invitation at a meeting with both parties already scheduled for Nov. 3.
Evers cited a Spiegel report saying Left Party lead candidate Elif Eralp fears for her family's safety if she comments explicitly on a well-known Palestinian activist. The fear Eralp expressed of a partly "extremist, Islamist milieu" in her own party showed such a coalition must "under no circumstances" happen, Evers said.
The Left, the Greens and the SPD plan to open coalition negotiations after a Left Party congress on Saturday and describe their meeting with the CDU as a discussion of the transition period, not exploratory talks. After the Sept. 20 election, a CDU-Greens-SPD coalition would also be arithmetically possible, but only with a very narrow majority.