Greens and liberals say they are willing to enter formal coalition talks with Scholz’s Social Democratic party

Olaf Scholz has come a step closer to succeeding Angela Merkel as German chancellor after the Greens and liberals announced their readiness to enter formal coalition talks with his Social Democratic party (SPD).

Scholz, who is also the serving finance minister, welcomed the agreement, triggered by an invitation from the Greens to the Free Democrats (FDP) for the three parties to start talks on Thursday. It makes the prospect of a centre-left government replacing the centre-right-led one which has been in power for 16 years more likely than at any time since the 26 September election.

The country faces ‘Dutch-style’ political era with main parties neck and neck before Sunday’s poll

Germany is braced to enter a new “Dutch-style” political era after federal elections on Sunday, as a knife-edge vote points to months of complicated coalition wrangling.

Outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel joined the campaign trail at a rally in the western city of Aachen on Friday night in an attempt to help her designated successor from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Armin Laschet, close the gap on the centre-left Social Democratic party (SPD).

Christian Democrat continuity candidate Armin Laschet is struggling to live up to his brief

Angela Merkel’s shoe size is 38, she revealed to a rain-sodden, momentarily confused audience at an election rally on the Baltic coast on Tuesday night. That is relatively small – 5.5 in UK sizes – which means her shoes should not be too hard to fill. “That’s manageable,” Merkel said.

As the German chancellor chuckled mischievously, she gestured towards the man on her left, a 33-year-old tax auditor who is running to inherit the north-eastern constituency she has held since it was created in 1990. But her comment also applied to the man on her right, Armin Laschet, who is meant to lead the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) into the post-Merkel era as her designated continuity candidate at Sunday’s national election.

Environmental party given highest one-off sum in its history by Dutch tech entrepreneur

Germany’s Greens have so far received more large donations ahead of this September’s federal elections than the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel, after a Dutch tech entrepreneur gave the environmental party the highest one-off sum of cash in its history.

Steven Schuurman, co-founder of software company Elastic, whose net worth is listed by Forbes magazine as 2bn US dollars (£1.45bn), on Tuesday transferred to the German Greens (Die Grünen) a donation of 1.25m euros (£1m).

A savvy electoral campaign against two lacklustre opponents has put the SPD leader ahead in the polls to succeed Angela Merkel

Of all the political posters and billboards that line the streets of German towns and cities this late summer, the ones most likely to stop commuters in their tracks are those bathed in traffic-light red.

Using a stark colour scheme usually exclusive to the Marxist-Leninist parties on the fringe of the German left, the posters are surprising in more ways than one: in the centre of the picture sits a bald, suited man who looks less like a leftwing rabble-rouser promising you radical change than a middle manager at a regional building society scrutinising your loan application.

Encounter unlikely to have banished CDU nerves after snap poll suggests SPD’s Olaf Scholz retains lead

The three politicians battling it out for the top job in German politics have clashed in a TV debate during which the leader of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats failed to regain lost momentum and ceded the role of continuity candidate to his centre-left rival.

Polls published before the first of three televised debates suggested the race to lead Germany into the post-Merkel era was more wide open than ever, with Olaf Scholz’s SPD in a narrow lead over Armin Laschet’s CDU and Annalena Baerbock’s Green party following closely in third place.

Analysis: Armin Laschet’s campaign to succeed Angela Merkel is copying her strategy of skirting around hard political choices

Angela Merkel’s method of winning elections has earned its own phrase among German political scientists: “asymmetric demobilisation”, the art of running a campaign that skirts around hot-button issues in order to present voters with a choice between personalities rather than policies.

Three and a half months before Germany goes to the polls, Merkel’s aspiring successor Armin Laschet seems to have taken her strategy to heart. With a campaign that has so far failed to tackle the country’s hard choices on carbon emissions, digitisation, eurozone integration and military spending, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its candidate for chancellor may get away with it too.