Friedrich Merz is convening an emergency working session of his black-red coalition leadership at the Chancellery in Berlin on Tuesday afternoon, in what aides describe as a final attempt to revive a stalled tax and pension package before the Bundestag's summer break. The Chancellor has invited SPD chair Lars Klingbeil, finance minister Achim Post and CSU chair Markus Söder to a four-hour session that will resume on Wednesday morning if necessary.
The package on the table is roughly the same one that has been on the table since early March: a corporate-tax cut from 30 to 25 per cent staged over four years, a partial reversal of the Scholz government's pension-age phasing, and a redirection of about €18 billion in subsidies from energy-price relief into industrial-policy programmes. The CDU has insisted on the corporate-tax cut as the price of any pension move; the SPD has insisted on pension generosity as the price of any tax move.
A round of polling published over the weekend has sharpened the political stakes. INSA's Sunday poll showed the AfD level with the CDU at 27 per cent each, with the SPD at 12 per cent. Forsa's separate Sunday survey put the AfD a full point ahead — its highest score in any national poll since reunification — and the SPD at 13 per cent. The collapse in SPD support has fed the coalition's internal tensions and made Klingbeil less willing, not more, to compromise.
Merz has explicitly ruled out the two pressure-relief options that most chancellors at this stage of a crisis would consider. A minority government, he told a Bild interview on Sunday, was "no option for Germany"; snap elections were equally off the table because "nobody should dream of new elections". The defiance closes the menu but does not solve the underlying coalition arithmetic.
The CDU's parliamentary group is divided. Around 30 conservative deputies — many of them from the Bundestag's younger Bavarian intake — have privately told reporters that they would prefer a confidence-vote reset to the slow asphyxiation of an unworkable coalition. Söder, who has spent the past month carefully positioning himself as both Merz's loyalist and his potential replacement, did not respond to questions on Sunday.
For the SPD the calculation runs the other way. The party is haemorrhaging votes to the Greens on the left and to the AfD on the right and has no obvious leadership replacement for Klingbeil if a coalition crisis forces him out. SPD officials have argued in private that breaking the coalition now would deliver the AfD the largest parliamentary group at any new election and effectively hand it the agenda-setting role at the start of the next legislature.