Following parliamentary elections on Sunday, Germany has entered an indeterminate period of coalition negotiations. The question of which parties form a government has significant stakes for U.S. interests.

Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) won 206 seats in the Bundestag to the 196 seats of Armin Laschet’s center-right Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union in Bavaria coalition. The next government needs at least 368 votes to command a majority, so either party will need coalition partners. This likely means one of three options; either an SPD coalition with the Greens and the classical liberal Free Democratic Party, a CDU-CSU coalition with the Greens and the FDP, or a continuation of the current CDU-CSU supercoalition. Fortunately, the extreme Left Party’s poor showing means that an SPD-Left-Green coalition, a nightmare for U.S. interests, is out of the question.