Germany Enters The Post-Merkel Era

The post-Merkel era is set to kick off in Germany, as the ‘traffic light coalition’ of Social Democratic Party (SDP), the Greens, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) have agreed to form a new government headed by the SDP’s Olaf Scholz. Success was anything but assured given the wide variance in the parties’ ideological stances. The new government will seek to bridge the gap between the Greens’ environmental focus, the FDP’s free market orthodoxy, and the SDP’s redistributive social democracy – and all after 16 years of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) dominating the highest levels of…