Germany's Merkel to meet Greens as she seeks coalition to lead
(AFP)
Updated: 2005-09-23 11:34

Angela Merkel's conservatives, who won Germany's general election but fell well short of a majority, were due to meet the Greens as talks continue to find a way out of the country's political crisis.

Neither Merkel's Christian Democrats nor the Social Democrats of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder won a governing majority in Sunday's election, sparking a race to form a coalition government.

The Greens, the partners in Schroeder's ruling coalition for the past seven years, have said they have slim hopes for a deal with the Christian Democrats, who are poles apart from them on many key issues.

The meeting was merely "to find out what we have in common", the Greens' co-president Claudia Roth said.

"I am extraordinarily skeptical about working with the Christian Union," she acknowledged this week, referring to the combined forces of the Christian Democratic Union and their sister party in the southern state of Bavaria.

The Greens have been mooted as a potential third partner in a coalition between Merkel's party and the pro-business Free Democrats.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, right, and Social Democratic Party Chairman Franz Muentefering, left, deliver statements after their talks with Christian Democratic Party Chairwoman Angela Merkel in Berlin Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005. [AP]

The proposed three-way pact has been dubbed a "Jamaica" coalition because the parties' respective green, black and yellow colours match those of the Caribbean nation's flag.

Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the Greens' most visible member, said he believed the three parties' policies were simply too far apart for such an arrangement to function.

"I just can't see how Jamaica could work," he told Friday's Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

The conservatives and the Free Democrats had planned to rule together but failed to draw enough votes.

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