from the Centre for European Reform.

This is the CERR podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the CER podcast.

My name is Beth Oppenheim and I'm a researcher at the Centre for European Reform.

We have a bit of a role play today actually because I'm here with Sophia Bess, your usual host

and a research fellow here at the CER. Hi, Sophia. Hi, Beth. This is so strange. She's hijacked my microphone.

And today I will be talking to her about her recent policy brief with Christian Odendahl,

The Good European, why Germany's policy ambitions must match its power. So the German political conversation

has been more or less engulfed by coalition talks over the past few months. Could you just set the

scene for us? Sure. I mean, easier said than done, but I'm going to try to sum up the drama that was

German politics over the last six months or so. We did actually write an insight last summer with

Christian calling it

how to make German politics interesting again. And I guess it's kind of a be careful what you wish for

situation now. But yes, so we had German federal elections in the fall of last year where both

the CDU, Merkel's Conservative Party and the Social Democrats got the worst results since World War II. The SPD came to just 20.5% of the total vote, which led to them saying,

right, not another coalition with the Merkel's Conservative, we're going to go into opposition now.

Q an attempt to form a Jamaica government, which was dubbed Jamaica government because of the three

parties that try to go together, the black conservatives, the greens and the yellow business party.

That didn't work. Talks failed right at the end of last year because the business party walked out.

And now the SPD has had a change of mind, at least its leadership did. So under Martin Schulz, the then-SPD leader, the party did decide to enter into coalition talks with the Conservatives one more time and try and form another grand coalition as the junior partner of the CDU. They have entered into coalition talks. They have written up a coalition paper.

And now we're at the deciding moment where the SPD membership, around 460,000 people will have

to ratify that paper. So we will find out on Sunday, I believe, on the 4th of March, whether

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