The Left’s leaders said they were acting not to help the coalition, but rather to protect pensioners from cuts.
Conservatives “have been playing power games at the expense of millions of pensioners across the country,” The Left’s parliamentary group leader Heidi Reichinnek said in a statement. “It is absolutely disgraceful that the conservative bloc does not even allow pensioners to have butter on their bread.”
The Left’s decision to abstain bails Merz out of an immediate political mess that casted doubt on the ability of his coalition — an ideologically divergent alliance between Merz’s conservatives and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — to pass key legislation just several months after taking office.
At the same time, The Left’s unsolicited help is an embarrassment of its own kind, creating the politically damaging impression that Merz’s coalition required the support of far-left foes his party views as too radical to work with.
Should The Left’s 64 lawmakers follow through on the vow to abstain in the Bundestag on Friday, it will bring down overall number of votes coalition lawmakers need to pass the pension legislation, providing indirect help.
In a kind of face-saving measure, conservative leaders continue to try to secure support of the young conservative rebels for the pension package. Yet, on Wednesday, it was still unclear whether the effort would bear fruit.