The humiliation of Friedrich Merz

The spectacle in the Bundestag this week sent shockwaves through Germany’s political establishment. For the first time in modern German history, a chancellor candidate – Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Friedrich Merz – failed to get elected by parliament. In the first round of voting, he received just 310 out of 621 votes – six votes short of the necessary majority. A total of 18 members of his own coalition brazenly refused to support him.

A second round of voting was then called and Merz managed to scrape through with 325 votes. But this was a stinging embarrassment for both Merz himself and the new coalition government more broadly. ‘Never before has there been a political car crash on such a scale’, wrote Berthold Kohler, editor of the conservative FAZ.

In hindsight, Merz’s failure shouldn’t have been such a surprise. From the beginning, the new government was always going to be in for a rough ride. For a start, it is made up of two parties that both received phenomenally bad results in February’s federal elections. The CDU suffered its second-worst result since its founding. Meanwhile, the CDU’s coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), received its worst result ever.

Worse still, the coalition was losing even more support in the polls in the weeks running up to the chancellor vote. At times, the governing parties barely managed 40 per cent between them. Hermann Binkert, head of the INSA polling institute, described this as a ‘loss of approval like never before in the period between a federal election and the formation of a new government’.

Many commentators are now questioning whether Merz and his coalition will ever truly recover from this humiliation. The fiasco certainly confirms that Germany is in a deep political crisis, which isn’t going anywhere. It also undermines the smug assertions of Europe’s anti-populist establishment, which has been claiming, against all evidence to the contrary, that German politics is less prone to populist upheavals than those of other Western democracies.

Only a few weeks ago, British journalist John Kampfner, author of Why the Germans Do it Better, hailed the new coalition government as setting Germany on a promising new course. ‘Germany is a land I have long praised for the deliberative, serious nature of its politics, for its durable constitution and its mature process of building and testing coalitions’, he wrote in the Guardian. He even quoted SPD leader Lars Klingbeil as saying: ‘What differentiates this country from others is that we are ready, as parties of the democratic centre, to find solutions and not to leave the ground for populist extremism to blossom.’

Such delusions now need to be buried once and for all. In reality, Klingbeil, the new government’s vice-chancellor, stands just as exposed as Merz does. The botched chancellor vote suggests that neither leader is capable of maintaining basic discipline within their own parties, let alone forming a stable, successful government. The strategy of the new coalition – to unite two establishment parties in order to block the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) from ever forming a government of any kind – looks to many like an insult to voters who are tired of the status quo.

Merz in particular has betrayed voters’ trust on several levels. First, with his abrupt reversal on the debt-brake rule. Within weeks of the election, he pushed through an enormous programme of funding and reforms. None of these policies was mentioned during the election. Nor did he seek the approval of the newly elected parliament. He then proceeded to make far too many concessions to the SPD to get a coalition deal, despite the public’s anger at its policies.

In truth, the new coalition was never going to represent anything more than an emergency alliance between two parties with little ideological common ground. In many cases, the CDU and SPD even have directly contradictory policy positions. The SPD, for example, has been advocating for continual expansion of the welfare state, while the CDU explicitly campaigned on promises to curtail it.

On the all-important issue of immigration, the parties also appear to be opposed. As recently as January, SPD-affiliated groups were organising protests against Merz after he attempted to introduce legislation to restrict illegal migration. One prominent SPD politician even accused Merz of opening the ‘gates of hell’ by criticising mass migration. Somewhat predictably, immediately after the election, Merz retreated from his promise to take stronger action on migration, claiming that ‘no one had promised to close the borders’.

No government can survive in the long term while flagrantly disregarding the express will of voters. February’s election demonstrated a clear public mandate for policy changes, with the AfD coming in second place. The majority of German voters supported the conservative or populist right. Yet what they will get is a confused mix of policy that largely mirrors that of the old coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the Free Democrats, led by Olaf Scholz. The Merz coalition has not only brought the deeply unpopular SPD back into government, it will also maintain the status quo on contentious issues like immigration, as well as Net Zero, even as this continues to drive energy prices to exorbitant levels and forces German industry abroad.

Of course, no one can predict the coalition’s precise trajectory. It may temporarily cohere around minimal shared interests out of fear of further strengthening the AfD, which, even after being officially classified as a ‘right-wing extremist’ party, remains neck-and-neck with the CDU in the polls. But it should be clear that governing by the lowest common denominator is not a winning move for anyone – not least German voters, none of whom are getting what they actually voted for.

This is a coalition government whose only guiding principle is contempt for the electorate. The disintegration of the German establishment cannot come soon enough.

Sabine Beppler-Spahl is spiked’s Germany correspondent.