there s a lot of frustration and anger though that you know it is amongst the electorate especially amongst east germans a lot of frustration against the establishment that has been building up since the refugee crisis and that could so on sunday in in the outcome of this they liked ok so prosperity on the one hand frustration and anger on the other german you ve been going up and down the country what are your impressions what have you learnt i ve learnt that germany is sort of superficially very calm as you ve said but i think that there is under the surface some interesting trends going on you know there s been this tradition almost grown up that people will turn up at merkel s rallies and heckle her and throw tomatoes and yes this is representative of a small and noisy minority but i think it speaks to the sort of slights it s symbolic of the sense that there are all tensions under the surface of german society the perhaps being fully confronted by the the two main parties at least
also on the issue of education for example on a reform of the intelligence services so many topics they could address together where they are at least quite a bit on the same page and where they could push forward and make me a bit braver in the four years to come. well that all makes sense on paper but i think i think the problem is that these parties are just too different from one another at the end of the day and especially the people who vote for them the typical green voter is not going to really be happy when he or she reads the free democrat party program or when they hear what the f.t.p. leader christian linton wants to do with asylum seekers for example or the way they approach europe and the euro zone so i think you know this is an idea that sort of sounds good but when you really look at it closely it would be very difficult to make work i don t think that angela merkel once of either people forget the last time that she had a coalition with just the free democrats in two t
you get to this point in twenty twenty one where the structural difficulties about germany s future the structural questions about germany s future haven t been answered the f.t. has strengthened maybe angela merkel has decided not to run for a fifth term if we can assume a she s been. at one this time around. you have a lot of sort of tensions that have built up in the c.d.u. during her years as chancellor come out into the open. and you suddenly get this very situation where there are priorities a looming on germany difficult challenges are sort of now perhaps more obvious to the german electorate the c.d.u. is perhaps in a sort of identity crisis the s.p.d. well it s already an identity crisis and we will be in even more of one after another four years with the c.d.u. and the f.t. has had four years to borate everything absolutely everything at least we re already running scared from the prospect of another grand coalition some of them there s this this is i think we very significan
pension age they ve introduced quotas for women on boards that was the gay marriage vote they didn t seem to get any credit for it and this is this is in some ways angela merkel s great achievement she s very good at appropriating social democratic achievements for herself you know you hear it said sometimes in berlin that germany has to social democratic parties and so you know if you are social democrat and you look and you think we ve been in government with angela merkel for eight of twelve years in total and it s been we ve received very little credit for it and i think especially if the party gets less than twenty three percent of the election on sunday which is its record low election results in two thousand and nine i think people will ask you know we re going to be a wreck by the end of this if we have another four years with maybe better go back into a position refresh regenerate think of think hard about germany s challenges maybe bring forward some new younger leaders and t
the celebration of well i hope things just remain the say. which which was sort of directed not just detroit being finance minister but that merkel as chancellor which we all know is going to happen anyway but i think just one last point on this on this jamaica idea you know i think it s very true that these smaller parties everybody wants to get into power which is why they re there in politics but there s a disconnect here i think between some of the people who are running these parties particularly the greens and their party base who are not isn t easy asked about these ideas about the jamaica idea for example and it s not just the f.t.p. that they have problems with it s also the c.s.u. keep a very insistent party of miracles christian democrats so i think there are all kinds of difficulties in that kind of a constellation ok we talked at length about which who which coalition germany should get in your opinion which coalition is germany going to get on something i