Green parliamentary group head Hofreiter warns of premature coalition optimism

The head of the German Greens’ parliamentary group, Anton Hofreiter, says a coalition with the conservative CDU/CSU and free-market FDP is far from a fait accompli. “It’s not a done deal at all,” Hofreiter said in an interview with Frankfurter Rundschau. The environmentalist party’s left-leaning parliamentary group leader said his party was ready for “constructive and open-minded talks” with its potential government partners but added that the Greens would only join a government that had “the will to shape” topics such as migration or climate protection. “The coal exit is a decisive factor,” Hofreiter said, adding that also in the transport sector progress on climate had to be made. He stressed that while every party had its particular areas of competence, collaboration was necessary in all policy fields. “Compromises cannot mean that we just find the smallest common denominator.”

Read a CLEW interview with Hofreiter from 2016 and a CLEW factsheet on the potential coalition partners’ climate and energy policy stumbling blocks for background.