 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Nearly two months after the general elections in Germany, the country is said to have a new government. The traffic light coalition comprising the social democrats, the greens, and the free democrats under Olaf Scholz will be sworn in in early December. There has been a lot of commentary on the very disparate nature of the coalition, which was formed after a protracted negotiation process. What is the character of this coalition and what are its contradictions? What has each party got? And what compromises have they had to make? What kind of policies is the government likely to pursue? And what impact could it have on the common people of Germany? Pavel Vargen, organiser, researcher and coordinator of the International Secretariat of the Progressive International based in Berlin talks about these issues. As you say, we've had after the election a long process, a long complicated process of negotiating. The so-called traffic light coalition which refers to the colours of the parties that will make up the new German government. You have the social democrats for red, the free democratic party, a liberal kind of right wing party which is yellow, and then the green party obviously green. And I think it's most instructive to start by looking at the institutional architecture of this traffic light coalition. So you have the SDPs, Olive Schultz, who will obviously take the chancellorship, the social democratic party which came in the lead in the elections, and then the SDP will head six other ministries. But the key thing to look at was always going to be who controls the finance ministry, which is arguably the most important ministry in Europe and the historic enforcer of the EU's austerity programme. The finance ministry is going to the free democrats leader, Christian Lindner, who is a radical Austerian. Now why does that matter? Well first it reflects in my mind the grotesquely undemocratic nature of the German system. A lot of Germans thought they were voting for change and now it's clear that the most consequential political decisions are going to be taken by a right wing party that got 11.5% of the vote and whose leader was appointed to the role in a shady back room deal that was not open to the public. That's not democratic in my mind. But second it means that there's now no chance that Germany will abandon the debt break, that constitutional limit on structural deficit which operates as a as a ceiling on public spending, or its insistence on enforcing that debt break across the European Union. And actually on the contrary if you read the coalition agreement it says that Germany will continue to live up to its pioneering role as an anchor of stability which is of course a euphemism for the destruction that it brought to countries like Greece and Italy and Portugal, Ireland and Spain. Now interestingly because the Green Party rode this wave of climate concern which has been around in Germany for a while, that structural decision will be somewhat tempered at least optically by this classic sleight of hand which is that the Green Party co-leader Robert Habek will head a new climate and economy super ministry. Now what we see here is this attempt to ram through this artificial separation of spending which is controlled by the finance ministry and the green economy which is controlled by this new super ministry. And in really rough terms that separation of climate and finance mirrors the institutional architecture of the European Green Deal which also splits decisions on climate policy and decisions on financing with predictable effects. There's no money to spend on the green transition and a lot of the funding that's raised comes through various other mechanisms like public private partnerships which end up siphoning huge amounts of public money into private hands. If you compare that now with other policies in the coalition which got pushed through on the insistence of both the Greens and the FPPs like increased military spending, paying back the debts incurred during the Covid crisis, it's really not looking good and this ideological mishmash of parties that has kind of come to form this coalition looks like it's said to betray the core principles of every party and lead to a situation which is fundamentally not very different from the status quo. You've had several commitments on social justice increasing the minimum wage to 12 euros an hour which a lot of companies already pay 12 euros an hour. The minimum wage was already going to go up next year and so that's not that's not as big a change as it's being presented. It's very difficult to see how with the commitment to militarization we can talk about that a bit later and the commitment to repay debts and to maintain that ceiling on public spending that all of that is possible without further cuts to public welfare. So I don't believe you know Olaf Scholz when he says that this is going to usher in a fundamental transformation of the German economy. I think it's going to be more stagnation which is going to mean further austerity and is likely to accelerate those you know those centrifugal forces that have been fueling the far right for a long time already. How is the new government likely to deal with strategic issues and the realm of foreign affairs especially considering the various pools Germany is facing from the US? What position is the new government likely to take towards the US? Will there be any strategic autonomy? Pavel explains. So I have long been warning about a danger of the of the co-optation of the climate agenda by imperialism in particular by the German Green Party which I think is a case in point. You know the the German Greens in 1999 backed the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia. More recently they've been promising to get tough on Russia and China which is you know very overtly aligning them with US foreign policy interests. It's enthusiastic about military spending, NATO spending and so on and that alignment of Europe's most powerful economy with the agenda of US imperialism is incredibly dangerous you know at this point in the new Cold War. It's incredibly dangerous. You know there was a poll that came out in August I think that showed that green voters were most likely of all parties other than the FDP which are also in the coalition to support the US invasion of Afghanistan in which Germany also took part. Now make of that what you will. Now you have the Green Party's Annalina Barbeck who will run the foreign ministry and the coalition agreement makes you know her position within that within that within the government clear. There's a commitment to the nuclear deterrent. There's a commitment to new fighter jets. There's a commitment to more drones and so on and so forth. You know if the if the social democrats have one consistent political tradition that has survived the past century it really is its repeated capitulation to imperialist interests and now we have a situation where the coalition will fail to deliver on its already weak climate pledges because of the financing constraints implicit in the institutional architecture of the new government and at the same time the increasing military budgets could provide I think in the long run the cudgel with which to limit migration with which to discipline protesters with which to distract from domestic failure through foreign policy adventurism and that's the dangerous trajectory that I see implicit in green imperialism you know that's a politics that's green on the outside and and brown on the inside and they've already said things about reducing you know irregular migration increasing regular migration by supporting citizenship for skilled workers so all the signs that they're going to align themselves in terms of foreign foreign policy with some of the more reactionary currents in Europe are there and they're not looking promising and finally as a new government takes power what is the situation of the left and other radical alternatives in germany the left did suffer a major setback in the elections what space remains for oppositional forces that's a difficult question we know that in germany in the last election the left suffered a massive blow losing half of its seats we know that you know a lot of the a lot of the left forces have had already been fatally weakened after the collapse of the gdr and this kind of total disaggregation of the left that followed and the loss of its material and popular base of support and so it's very difficult to see now there are signs in places like berlin but berlin is an island within germany where you have radical movements for the expropriation of housing from mega landlords but again that's very specific to the conditions of berlin and they're very there's a very interesting phenomenon during the elections which points also to the shortcomings of that of those gains which is that about half the people that voted for the expropriation of properties from mega landlords also voted for parties in the elections that promised to veto that outcome if if the referendum went through so it's very difficult today to see a pathway for the left especially as the social democrats have been co-opting a lot of that energy and framing themselves as that left-wing force that is going to deliver the change which it has clearly set itself up institutionally to fail