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The writer directs the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution
It has been a disorienting week for Germans. The 80th anniversary of the second world war’s end has generated a new wave of sombre, introspective books by the grandchildren of those who lived through it. Friedrich Merz became Germany’s chancellor but only after failing to secure the necessary majority in the opening round of the parliamentary confirmation vote — for the first time in postwar history.
On Tuesday morning, an ebullient Merz, who was already booked to visit Paris and Warsaw in the afternoon, found himself short 18 of his centrist CDU-SPD coalition’s total of 328 votes, six less than the 316 needed to win. Faced with a triumphant far-right AfD demanding new elections, the opposition Greens and the Left party — who Merz had disparaged as “lefty nutcases” during the campaign — gritted their teeth and consented to a second round of voting that same afternoon. This time, Merz made it across the line with 325 votes.
It was an admirably deft turnaround of what might have become a full-blown political disaster. And as the ballots were secret, what really happened on Tuesday morning may never become known. But there are three plausible explanations, none of them reassuring.
This is the fourth CDU-SPD grand coalition in two decades, but the joint vote share of the two parties has dropped from 69.4 per cent in 2005 to 45 per cent today. The coalition is a cold-eyed marriage of convenience intended primarily to keep the AfD — which came in second in the election and now polls neck-and-neck with the conservatives — at bay. Some in the CDU base are deeply upset at Merz’s loosening of the constitutional debt brake in order to finance a massive defence and infrastructure spending package. Many in the SPD are angry at Merz for an entirely performative migration restriction bill forced through the Bundestag with help from the AfD.
But of course, with such a narrow majority, was it not the single most important responsibility of the parliamentary whips to assure themselves that none among their flock had been tempted to wander astray? And had their leaders — especially the would-be chancellor — not triple-checked the vote count? The episode was an unwelcome reminder that Merz has a history of combining sonorous overconfidence with an aversion to sweating the details. It’s a habit that cost him the party leadership or the candidature for the chancellorship four times in the past 25 years.
Yet the most troubling speculation points to deep divisions within the conservative camp. On the one side are the traditionalists who deplore the extreme right but seek to hone a crisper conservatism after 16 years of liberal centrism under Angela Merkel, which arguably created the vacuum on the right now occupied by the AfD. On the other is a small but determined cadre of disrupters, who hope to use the AfD to radically transform the party.
Were some of the latter perhaps out to deal a glancing blow to the chancellor’s kneecaps? Some in the CDU believe that one of the transformers-in-chief is Jens Spahn, who recently argued that the AfD should be treated like a normal party. He is also the CDU’s new party whip.
Other western conservative parties — the Tories, the ever-mutating and dwindling French traditional right, the US Republican party — provide a dire warning of what can happen when the transformers try to ride the tiger of the far right. They get their faces eaten by the tiger, because voters prefer the original. Merz himself has pledged to uphold the firewall against the AfD. In this, at least, he has the support of a large majority of the electorate, many of whom are examining the lives of their grandparents under Nazism with a newly sharpened sensibility.
Unfortunately for Merz the committed transatlanticist, senior members of the Trump administration are on the side of the transformers. Last week, they were chastising Germany for designating AfD — a party that regularly trivialises the Holocaust and denies German guilt — as rightwing extremist. “Tyranny in disguise!” exclaimed US secretary of state Marco Rubio. Vice-president JD Vance chimed in: “The Berlin Wall . . . has been rebuilt . . . by the German establishment.”
“We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead,” said Winston Churchill on VE Day in 1945. Hopefully Germany’s new conservative chancellor, his dignity somewhat dented, shares that sentiment.
