More than 20 years ago unlikely conservative-conservationist meetings were held in a Bonn Italian restaurant, now a ruling coalition seems possible

On the evening of 1 June 1995 an unlikely group gathered for an informal dinner at an Italian restaurant in Bonn, then the seat of the German parliament. On one side of the table at Sassella were delegates of the Green party, on the other side the establishment they had gone into politics to oppose: suited and gelled young members of the Christian Democratic Union, the party led by the staunchly pro-nuclear Helmut Kohl.

In German political circles, the informal gathering at Sassella became synonymous with supping with the devil: one Green participant likened the brick-walled basement where the party’s anti-nuclear activists, LGBT campaigners and pacifists debated the common ground between conservatism and conservationism to an “enchanted cellar”.

But 22 years later these meetings – known as the “pizza connection” despite the Lombardian chefs at the restaurant serving only pasta – could provide the template for a new era in German politics if the Greens going to into coalition with Angela Merkel’s CDU after the 24 September election expected to give her another term as chancellor.

All three of Merkel’s governments since 2005 have been coalitions: two “grand coalitions” with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and one with the pro-business FDP.

The SPD is unenthusiastic about continuing as Merkel’s junior partner for another term: many of its members believe that only four years in opposition can rejuvenate the German centre-left’s appeal. A revival in the FDP’s fortunes after it failed to enter parliament in 2013 has put a return to the “black-yellow” CDU-FDP deal on the cards, but with the two parties currently amassing less than 50% of the vote between them in recent polls, they would need a third coalition partner.

In a pre-election interview with left-leaning newspaper Taz, Merkel pointedly opened the door to a CDU-FDP-Green “Jamaica” coalition, saying: “I imagine that the humane shaping of globalisation could be very exciting for the Green party too.”

Sources with access to the chancellor’s inner circle insist that she would personally prefer to govern with the Greens rather than the FDP alone. Peter Altmaier, one pizza-connection protagonist, is now Merkel’s chief of staff and widely regarded as her most trusted adviser.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Altmaier, Merkel’s chief of staff, met Green party MPs in an Italian restaurant in Bonn in the 1990s. Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP

Two from the other side of the table, Cem Özdemir and Katrin Göring-Eckardt, make up the Greens’ leadership duo this year. In a TV debate on Monday, Özdemir said that under Merkel, the CDU “has offloaded a lot of ballast, and moved toward the middle of society”.

Altmaier may also see a strategic advantage in a three-way coalition. The Jamaica option could cut the brash FDP leader, Christian Lindner, down to size, and offer stability in a new political landscape likely to see six parties crowding into Germany’s lower house.

“Altmaier gets on much better with the Greens than with the FDP,” said one close acquaintance. “The Free Democrats can be terrible smart alecs. The Greens, on the other hand, many of them have that smell of folksiness that conservatives can relate to.”

Opposition from the conservative wing of the Christian Democrats is also likely to be less vocal than outside observers may assume. The most prominent figure on the right wing of Merkel’s party, 37-year-old Jens Spahn, has himself injected the Green-CDU links with new life, meeting four times each year over the course of the last parliamentary term with Green politician Omid Nouripour to talk about issues including social justice, economic growth, agricultural policy and refugees.

“More than anything else, these meetings were about locating each other’s pain barriers,” said Nouripour. “I wouldn’t say we have come any closer over the last four years, but we have a better sense of how fundamental some issues are to our political identities. And sometimes it was just exciting to see how divided the Christian Democrats are internally.”



Even the CDU’s old guard may accept a collaboration with the Greens. Wolfgang Schäuble, the Christian Democrats’ veteran finance minister and fiscal hawk, was the unlikely architect behind the first rapprochement in the 90s. “As head of the party group, it was he who opened the door to talks,” said Oswald Metzger, who took part in the meetings at Sassella as a Green MP and later jumped ship to the CDU. “For him it was a taboo, but a taboo there to be broken.”

Quick guide How does the German election system work? Show Hide The first vote Germany’s recently amended electoral system, combining direct and proportional representation, is fiendishly complicated. Its 61.5 million voters get two votes on a single ballot paper: the first for a local representative, the second for a party. Roughly half the Bundestag’s seats are guaranteed to go to the 299 representatives of the country’s electoral districts, each chosen by their constituents with their Erststimme, or first vote, in a straight first-past-the-post contest. The second vote The rest are allocated according to the national vote share won by every party that clears a 5% threshold in the second vote, or Zweitstimme – which is also used to determine the overall number of seats each party winds up with: if a party scores 25% of the national vote, it must get 25% of the seats. Sometimes parties return more Erststimme representatives than they are entitled to, according to the Zweitstimme. So to compensate, the other parties get extra seats – which means the Bundestag, theoretically made up of 598 representatives, could expand to as many as 800 (it currently has 631). Who elects the chancellor? Once a governing coalition has been formed, which can take up to a month, Germany’s president (a largely ceremonial role) nominates the chancellor – usually the leader of the largest party – who is confirmed by parliament in a secret ballot.

When Metzger wrote an article calling for a CDU-Green coalition in January 2003, he even got a letter from Kohl himself, saying that he had read the piece “with great interest and much approval”.

And yet, there are fears on both sides that the right moment for a conservative-green coalition could have passed just as the social taboos have finally fallen away.

If a CDU-Green coalition would represent the pinnacle of Merkel-era pragmatism, it could pose an existential challenge not just to a party that has long served the world as a paradigm of ecological politics, but also an entire German political system in which voters have become disillusioned with an overcrowded centre.

“The Greens are facing difficult times ahead,” said Metzger. “Not because they have become too centrist, but because many of their core voters are now growing old enough to realise that Green policies can also hurt them.”



While the Green party now forms regional governments in 10 of Germany’s 16 states, the party has failed to profit from the VW diesel scandal and has slumped to 6.5% in some national polls.

In spite of 20 years of informal talks, the two parties’ common ground on policy remains limited. In Merkel, a former environment minister, the Greens would have a stronger ally on their mission to phase out coal power than with the Social Democrats. But the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, also have traditional links with the large car companies and promise to protect the motor industry’s position as a world leader. The Greens want the state to force it to switch to electric cars more rapidly.

After the 2015 refugee crisis, Merkel’s party is now rushing to toughen up asylum laws and move more quickly to deport those whose claims have failed. The Greens, meanwhile, want to invest in integration measures, loosen the same dual citizenship rules the CDU wants to tighten and allow asylum seekers to spend more time abroad without losing their claim status.

For the environmental party’s leadership, the prospect of returning to government after 12 years in opposition may be too tempting to resist. But convincing their party base will pose a challenge. Merkel may have won unexpected admirers on the left, but the pro-business FDP remains anathema to Green voters.

And if the Greens decided to ask their members to vote on whether to form a Jamaica coalition, 20 years of chats over bowls of pasta may count for very little. “Of course people in the Green party are keeping an open mind about going into government with the conservatives,” suggested Werner Graf, who chairs the left-leaning Berlin branch of the Greens. “But there’s hardly anyone who actively wants it.”