Germany’s traffic light coalition gets stuck on red

Opinion: It all began with a selfie. Four beaming politicians captured their own optimism in the late German autumn of 2021. Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck of the Greens, Christian Lindner and Volker Wissing from the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) projected unity and hope for Germany’s first three-party coalition since the 1950s.
The image went viral, with each politician posting it simultaneously with identical messages about building bridges across Germany’s political divides. German media celebrated this new style, contrasting it with the staid approach of Angela Merkel’s 16-year conservative chancellorship. It was the birth of the ‘Traffic Light Coalition’ of the Greens and the FDP with the Social Democrats under Olaf Scholz.