Global Economy

German Coalition Party Pulls Out of Deal on Spy Chief



BERLIN—An agreement reached four days ago to stabilize German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fractious government collapsed Friday, renewing doubts about the coalition’s staying power.

The center-left partner in Ms. Merkel’s coalition said it would pull out of a deal to transfer a top intelligence official to another post, citing public outrage at the settlement. The three-party alliance had agreed on Tuesday to move the domestic intelligence chief to a new position at the interior ministry after he had publicly questioned reports about anti-immigrant riots in eastern Germany.

The decision—a face-saving promotion for the official—ended days of wrangling between the center-left Social Democratic Party, whose leaders had insisted the chief should go, and Horst Seehofer, the conservative interior minister, who pushed for him to stay.

But the SPD shattered the uneasy peace on Friday, when Andrea Nahles, the party’s chairwoman, said she wanted to renegotiate a deal that had outraged the public.

“Angela Merkel, Horst Seehofer and I were wrong,” Ms. Nahles wrote on her official

Twitter

account. “We have destroyed confidence instead of restoring it. That should be a reason to pause and reconsider the agreement.”

Weakening poll numbers and rising support for populist parties on the right and the left have left the coalition parties with a smaller and more-polarized pool of supporters, eroding their ability to strike compromises. The resulting tensions have in turn fed the perception of a government too busy tackling in-house disputes to govern, pollsters say.

Ms. Merkel said she wanted to resolve the dispute this weekend. “We have agreed to reassess the situation,” Ms. Merkel said. “We want to find a common, viable solution.”

Mr. Seehofer said new talks were now being considered. “I think a renewed consultation makes sense if a consensual solution is possible,” the interior minister said.

A spokesman for his party, the regional conservative CSU, said a meeting hadn’t been scheduled between the partners as a compromise didn’t appear to be in reach.

The fact that Hans-Georg Maassen, the former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution—equivalent to the intelligence arm of the FBI—was being promoted for his controversial comments, rising to deputy interior minister, has gone down badly with voters.

An Insa poll published Thursday showed only 9% of respondents supported the decision.

The deal caused particular consternation among the SPD rank-and-file and mid-ranking elected officials. As the backlash worsened throughout the week, Ms. Nahles eventually yielded, withdrawing her support for a compromise she had signed four days earlier.

Government and party officials this week said that the deal had been difficult to hammer out and that the coalition had come close to a split, suggesting a recalibrated compromise could take days to emerge, if at all.

Ms. Nahles’s move means that the government, instead of moving on, will now have to redirect its energy again into propping itself up.

The increasing frequency of the flare-ups between Ms. Merkel’s partners is raising questions about the future of a coalition few analysts now expect to run its four-year term.

The government, formed in March, already came dangerously close to collapsing in June when Mr. Seehofer clashed with Ms. Merkel over proposals to tighten immigration rules.

The constant bickering is testing the patience of German voters, according to opinion polls, and the SPD is suffering the most for it.

A Deutschlandtrend survey for public broadcaster ARD, released this week, showed support for the SPD falling to 17%, down from the 20.5% it scored at last September’s election—itself a postwar low—and one point behind the anti-immigration AfD.

But Ms. Merkel’s conservative alliance is suffering too, with its support falling to 28%, almost five points below its last election score and the lowest rating for the alliance in the survey’s 21-year history.

While the SPD allowed both its leadership and its grassroot members to vote on the coalition’s terms before entering it—hoping to silence the many in-house opponents—the strategy failed to impose order on its increasingly unruly troops.

Write to Andrea Thomas at andrea.thomas@wsj.com and Bertrand Benoit at bertrand.benoit@wsj.com



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