German Chancellor Angela Merkel pushes for trilateral ‘Jamaica’ coalition

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who won a fourth term in office in the September 24 parliamentary elections, has pledged that she would support a three-way coalition with two less popular parties.

Merkel said on Saturday that she would support efforts to build a new coalition with the Free Democratic Party and Greens, a potential partnership that the public has chosen to label “Jamaica” as the parties' colors match those of the flag of the Caribbean country.

Merkel, who was addressing a youth wing of her Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) in Dresden in eastern Germany, said talking more about another potential coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) would be a waste of time.

“It is apparent that the SPD is not in the position to govern at the federal level for the foreseeable future, therefore I advise all of us not to waste further time on it,” Merkel said of the SPD, which came second in the recent elections with 20.5 percent of the vote.

Senior leaders of the SPD, a major partner to Merkel’s previous governments that formed a grand coalition between Germany's two major parties, said right after the poor vote results was announced that the party would certainly go into opposition.

Many view plans for forming the three-way "Jamaica" coalition with suspicions as the formula is a rarity in Germany and has not been tested in the country’s governance system before.

More important than the formation of the coalition for Merkel would be how she would sort out differences with the CDU’s Bavarian-only sister Christian Social Union (CSU) party. CSU leaders have called on Merkel to revise her controversial liberal policies on accepting and accommodating refugees. Merkel said during the Saturday speech that her government was working intensively to allay concerns about how the refugees, many of them Muslims from the Middle East, would be integrated into the German society.

“We are doing a lot, but it will still take a while,” Merkel said, adding, however, that she would work for an agreement with the CSU.