German Chancellor Angela Merkel hopes to relaunch a new drive to build a coalition between her conservative political bloc and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), despite tensions between the two parties, europe online magazine reports.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has called Merkel, of the Christian Democrats (CDU), SPD chief Martin Schulz and Horst Seehofer, who heads up the CDU‘s Bavarian-based Christian Social Union (CSU) allies, to a meeting in Berlin on Thursday.
The talks on possibly building a new CDU-led government are aimed at ending the country‘s political crisis, following the collapse of talks to forge a new three-way coalition.
The failure of last week‘s talks forced Schulz to back-pedal on his original refusal to join Merkel in a rerun of the current coalition. He had previously said the SDP planned to return to the opposition after suffering its worst result since 1949 in the September election.
SPD officials believe that coalition talks could take until March next year to complete.
The SPD has attempted to lay the blame for the break-up of the three-way coalition talks on Merkel.
However, this week‘s decision by German Agricultural Minister Christian Schmidt to go against the government line in a vote in Brussels on EU licensing for the controversial weedkiller glyphosate has inflamed tensions between the two political camps.