Germany has been diligently attempting to move forward with coalition negotiations, but the participating parties are struggling to make headway. On Nov. 16, they missed a self-imposed deadline, and the four parties — Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU), the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the environmentalist Greens — resumed negotiations on Nov. 17. The process of forming the next German government is complicated, due to the extremely fragmented parliament that the country's Sept. 24 general elections yielded. The center-right CDU/CSU conservative bloc succeeded in receiving the most votes, but it didn't earn enough to govern alone. The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which earned second place, refused to form a grand coalition because it was displeased with its role in the previous government, so the conservatives turned to the centrist FDP and the Greens for a coalition.