Olaf Scholz’s coalition prepares to take office in Germany

THREE-AND-A-HALFSPDFDPSPD years ago German politics looked exhausted. Angela Merkel had just assembled her third “grand coalition”, a tired centrist alliance that left no one satisfied. Today, two months after an election that saw Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats booted from office, the mood is markedly brighter. On November 24th the leaders of Germany’s Social Democrats (), Greens and Free Democrats (), a pro-business party, exuded optimism as they gathered in a converted Berlin warehouse to hail their new “traffic-light” coalition (named after the parties’ red, green and yellow colours). In 177 pages and 52,000 words—a shade more than “The Great Gatsby”—their three-party deal lays out a policy agenda for the next four years.Seeking to conjure coherence from an unwieldy project, the parties are pushing a narrative of “modernising” Germany after 16 years of Mrs Merkel’s conservative rule. The notion that three disparate parties might so quickly sand away their differences looked dubious. But their leaders insisted that the two-month coalition negotiations—which proceeded relatively smoothly, on time and mostly without leaks—built a bedrock of trust. Olaf Scholz, the ’s taciturn chancellor-to-be, says he hopes the parties will campaign jointly at the next election. People were sceptical of traffic lights when they were introduced in Berlin in the 1920s, he noted, but they are are indispensable today.