Olaf Scholz replaces outgoing German chancellor Angela Merkel as a new center-left coalition is announced



The German Chancellor and the German Minister of Finance attend a cabinet meeting on August 19, 2020 in Berlin, Germany.

A coalition deal has been announced in Germany after almost two months of talks.

The Social Democratic Party candidate is set to be the next chancellor of Germany, replacing the current leader, who has led Germany for 16 years.

Christian Lindner, the leader of the Free Democratic Party, is set to be the next finance minister according to the deal which was announced Wednesday afternoon. The co-leaders of the Green Party, Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck, are poised to take on the roles of foreign minister and economy and climate minister, respectively.

The estimates were broadcast in Berlin on September 26, 2021, after the German general elections.

The coalition agreement includes plans to use all suitable roofs for solar energy and align an expansion of its power network with a new renewables target, as well as immigrants who are eligible, according to the report.

A parliamentary investigation will be launched into the Afghanistan evacuation operation. Germany will stop funding renewable energy once it stops using coal.

Germany will try to dedicate 2% of its land surface to wind power infrastructure and will continue to exclude nuclear power from its energy mix, which is different from the policy of its neighbor France.

The country will remain part of NATO's nuclear-sharing agreement under the new government and the Greens will have the right to nominate the country's European commissioner if the EU Commission's president is not from Germany.

The agreement is the result of weeks of coalition talks between the Greens and the FDP, and will see them govern together for the first time.

The alliance has been described as a traffic light coalition.

Germany is Europe's largest economy and the parties want to transform it into a more digitalized economy and invest in infrastructure.

German businesses are anxious to see what this transformation means for them in terms of energy prices and business costs.

The Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union will now be in opposition.

The alliance is described as acontinuity coalition by the chief economist at Berenberg Bank.

New faces don't mean a major change in policies. He said in a note Wednesday that they expect the new government to continue the gradual tilt towards more government spending on pensions and investment as well as a green transformation that has been the hallmark of the last eight years of the reign of the chancellor.

The new government includes both sides of the political divide, just like the one that preceded it.

The centre-right is much weaker in the new government than before and the centre-left is much stronger. The FDP advocated a harder line on many issues, notably domestic and European fiscal policies. We always expected the compromises struck between the new coalition partners to be similar to what the old government would have delivered.

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