EUROPEAN POLITICS FUNDAMENTALS — Chapter 8, Exercise 3
A Detailed Agreement Is Not a Guarantee
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QUESTION:
Using the real German traffic-light coalition's 177-page agreement
and its November 2024 collapse, explain why a highly detailed
written coalition agreement reduces, but does not eliminate, the
risk of a coalition falling apart mid-term.

SOLUTION:

A detailed coalition agreement — like the SPD-Greens-FDP's real
177-page "Daring to Make More Progress" document — reduces risk by
settling as many real policy questions as possible in advance, while
all three parties still have a strong incentive to compromise and
reach agreement on paper before actually taking office. Writing
specific commitments down gives each party something concrete to
point to, and makes it harder for a coalition partner to simply
ignore an agreed policy once in government.

But a written agreement, however detailed, cannot anticipate and
resolve every real disagreement that will arise once the coalition
is actually governing — especially disagreements over matters that
weren't fully foreseeable when the document was signed. The traffic
light coalition's real collapse was driven by MONTHS of budget
disputes between Chancellor Scholz and Finance Minister Christian
Lindner (FDP) — real, evolving disagreements over economic policy
that surfaced well after the original 2021 agreement was signed, and
which the document's own existing text had no specific answer for.

In other words, a coalition agreement can lock in commitments about
policies the parties already know they need to decide together at
the outset, but it can't lock in agreement about how the parties will
handle new, unanticipated conflicts that emerge over years of actual
governing — which is exactly the kind of disagreement that eventually
broke the traffic light coalition apart, less than three years after
177 pages of prior agreement.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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The strongest answers distinguish between disagreements the
agreement COULD reasonably have anticipated and settled in advance,
and disagreements that only emerged later through the real,
unpredictable business of governing — showing that a document's own
real limitation is its inability to foresee every future conflict,
not simply that the parties failed to honor what was written.