‘Whoever has visions should see a doctor.’ Dubiously credited to the former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, this bon mot has become a stock phrase of Berlin political jargon, an unofficial motto for Germany’s sober political culture of pragmatism and restraint. When Friedrich Merz ran for election last year, he tried to reassure voters that he was a doctor of a kind. He had only to open up his ill-fitting blue polyester jacket to reveal a thousand pockets heavy with sensible centrist miracle cures for every kind of populist hallucination and far-right hysteria.
In a country such as Germany whose citizenry are not known for their incredulity towards alternative medicine, Merz’s political naturopathy found willing buyers. Yet, a year on from becoming Chancellor, Merz’s snake oil has ended up proving too bitter for his coalition partner, Schmidt’s old SPD, to swallow. CDU grandees are now weighing up whether the time has come for a more drastic course of action.
Everything points towards fresh elections
Last week, the influential daily newspaper Bild published a damning report on the deteriorating mood within the chancellory. Merz has found himself isolated from his own party, his own staff, and his own better judgement. The CDU is on the brink of revolt. The recent coalition showdown over rising fuel prices once again saw the SPD, led from the rear by its increasingly intransigent left-wing, refuse to give ground. Merz was forced to back down – as he is prone to do – for the sake of coalition harmony.
The Chancellor is reportedly given to adopting the position of whoever he has most recently spoken to. This has consumed his aides in a Sisyphean struggle to prevent him rewriting the agonising compromises hammered out both within his party and the coalition on the fly. Merz has even lost his own back room – the chancellor’s trusted office manager, Jacob Schrot, was sacrificed to appease the grumbling gods of the backbenches in January. Next on the chopping block is ostensibly his chief of staff and longtime consigliere Thorsten Frei, but Merz has so alienated his last remaining allies in the party that he cannot fire him for lack of a replacement.
Getting rid of a chancellor is easier said than done in Germany. The constitution precludes the Bundestag from passing a confidence motion without a successor lined up. This so-called ‘constructive motion of confidence’ has only been used once, in 1982, when Helmut Kohl replaced Helmut Schmidt. This requirement can be avoided if the chancellor either submits the motion himself (as Olaf Scholz did just over a year ago) or tenders his resignation, in which case the German president names a caretaker (ideally the outgoing chancellor) until the Bundestag can settle on a replacement.
The parliamentary arithmetic renders the former option nigh impossible, since the left-wing opposition parties and the right-wing AfD not only have little common ground but categorically refuse to cooperate. The coalition’s majority is already razor-thin, and with Merz emotionally committed to the ‘firewall’ against the AfD, it is hard to imagine where he will find the parliamentary votes to pass any legislation should he lead his party into a minority government.
Everything points towards fresh elections, but this would require Merz to voluntarily step aside. And if there is one position from which this slipperiest of political eels has never once budged, it is that he should be allowed to see out his full term as chancellor in peace.
New elections alone will not break the deadlock, since CDU dissenters have no alternative to cooperating with the SPD (or another party further to the left) so long as the firewall continues to rage. Some influential centre-right commentators – like Ulf Poschardt, editor of the Axel Springer flagship Welt – have begrudgingly come around to the view that the extreme version of the firewall, which precludes the centrist parties from passing any legislation with the votes of the AfD, is unworkable.
The CDU had arguably already breached the firewall in a symbolic parliamentary resolution on migration in the heat of last year’s election. More recently, the Greens did the same in the European Parliament’s vote to ratify the bloc’s Mercosur trade deal.
Germany’s industrialists, who look on with growing dismay at the coalition’s paralysis as the country’s economic performance stagnates and new crises pile up, have quietly begun thinking the unthinkable. In an interview with the centre-left daily Tagesspiegel on Saturday, former Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser criticised the firewall and called on Merz to form a minority government before the AfD becomes too big to contain. Kaeser was once an environmentalist, who gave glowing speeches at Green party conferences and used his Twitter account to inveigh against the AfD in the usual historically loaded terms. That he should turn a new leaf suggests it is not only CO2 raising the temperature at the commanding heights of German industry.
Yet no front-bench CDU figure has so far publicly committed to dousing the firewall. To do so would be nothing short of traumatic for a party whose heart beats to two disjointed rhythms: a pragmatic, pro-business superego and a Merkeloid identity which, shorn of ideas, has made the struggle against right-wing populism its raison d’être. The German state’s lavish expenses on political parties insulates them from the material wants that elsewhere create a symbiosis between politics and economic interest groups. Yet in doing so it has created the most unresponsive political class in all of Western Europe. Dropping Merz will not heal the CDU’s maladies: sometimes the only cure is to grin and bear it and hope the pain goes away.
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