Representatives of Mr Schulz’s centre-left SPD party and Mrs Merkel’s conservatives last week agreed a blueprint which, if ratified by party members, would allow negotiations to begin on resurrecting the coalition which governed Germany from 2013 to 2017.
However, there is significant opposition to what is being proposed. On Saturday, youth activists rallied the SPD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt into rejecting the so-called grand coalition and on Monday the SPD’s Berlin branch recommended its delegates vote against pursuing formal coalition talks.
SPD leader Martin Schulz was in Dortmund on Monday evening to appeal for backing from members in North Rhine-Westphalia, which will contribute more than a quarter of the votes to the congress.
As he entered the meeting, Mr Schulz said the SPD had “achieved a lot” in the exploratory talks. He acknowledged concern within his party but added: “I’m actually optimistic that we’ll get a majority for it.”
Many of the SPD’s grassroots supporters say the blueprint does not adequately reflect their aims, and believe the party should reinvent itself in opposition.
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If Mr Schulz fails to persuade them, the talks could collapse, casting a shadow over Mrs Merkel’s efforts to form a three-way coalition.
Mr Schulz defended the blueprint, telling Germany’s RND newspaper: “We pushed through a long list of points which will really improve people’s lives” and insisting “what we did push through justifies starting coalition negotiations”.
SPD parliamentary leader Andrea Nahles told Passauer Neue Presse newspaper the party had scored points on nursing care, pensions, education and labour market policy.
She said: “We should stop badmouthing the result.”
Elections held in September saw all three parties lose ground to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, with the SPD slumping to its its worst result since the foundation of the Federal Republic in 1949 – but opponents of the deal within the party fear it would suffer even bigger losses in the next national election if it renewed the coalition.
Jackson Janes, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, predicted that the SPD party congress would approve the start of coalition talks despite the resistance by the youth wing.
He said: “There’s too much at stake. Nearly everyone …at the top of the party is supporting this. The heavies are working this fairly strongly.”
Even if SPD delegates approve formal talks, there are no guarantees for Mrs Merkel – Mr Schulz has promised to put the terms of any deal to a vote by the 443,000 SPD members.
In trying to sell it, he can point to lower taxes for low-income households that traditionally formed the backbone of the party’s support base.
But any attempt to soften the conditions of the blueprint deal is likely to meet opposition from the Christian Social Union (CSU), the arch-conservative Bavarian sister party of Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU).
CSU leader Horst Seehofer, dismissing the demands of a “worked-up” SPD, said: “I can’t imagine that we will substantially change the agreement reached in exploratory talks.”