The political centre cracks in Germany

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After his party’s not wholly convincing election victory last Sunday, Friedrich Merz is set to become Germany’s sixth Christian Democratic chancellor since the Federal Republic’s birth in 1949.

A remarkable political stability has characterised Germany during most of the post-second world era. Merz will be only the 10th chancellor of the past 76 years.

But the election result showed that the moderate consensus politics that underpinned German stability for so long is coming under severe pressure. I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

From “no experiments” to crisis-fighting

Konrad Adenauer, the Christian Democrat who was West Germany’s first post-second world war chancellor, won a crushing election victory in 1957 using the slogan “keine Experimente” — no experiments.

Likewise, caution was often the hallmark of Angela Merkel, the CDU chancellor from 2005 to 2021. (Not always, however. Consider her abrupt abandonment of nuclear power in 2011, or her admission of large numbers of refugees and migrants in 2015 — two decisions with unsettling consequences for the German economy and politics.)

The chancellorship will be a test of the character and leadership skills of Merz. Aged 69, he has a reputation for a certain impulsiveness. In the course of his long career, some of which he has spent outside politics, he has never even served as a government minister. (Here is a profile of Merz in the FT from November.)

Holger Schmieding, writing for the Omfif think-tank, sets out what is at stake:

“If Merz plays his hand well, he can do it. And he better succeed. This may be Germany’s last chance to prevent the pro-Russian and anti-European Union extremists from taking over.”

Corinne Deloy of the Brussels-based Robert Schuman Foundation makes a similar point, in a more understated way:

“Merz has a considerable task ahead of him at a time when the political and economic system on which the country has operated for decades is now obsolete.”

Decline of the CDU and SPD

Merz’s first mission is to wrap up a coalition agreement with the Social Democrats by Easter, in the second half of April.

As my FT colleague Anne-Sylvaine Chassany observes, such an arrangement used to be known as a “grand coalition”, but can hardly be called that now.

The SPD finished in third place, behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), and slumped to its worst result (16.4 per cent of the vote) since the return to democracy after 1945. Here is a good analysis of the SPD’s woes by Bartosz Rydliński for Social Europe.

As for the CDU, its victory appears in a less flattering light when we recall that its own result (28.5 per cent) was its second worst since 1949 — and only a few percentage points higher than its nadir of 24.1 per cent in 2021.

Together, the CDU and SPD didn’t come close to winning even half the total vote last Sunday.

Unhappy voters

The election result is best explained in terms of the troubled mood of German voters, detailed in this report by Isabell Hoffmann and Catherine De Vries for the Bertelsmann Stiftung.

They contend that, on the eve of the election, Germans were “pessimistic, unhappy with their democracy . . . three in four [felt] the country is headed in the wrong direction.”

They continue:

“Where, before the 2017 and 2021 elections, fully 80 per cent of Germans saw themselves as being in the political centre, this has dropped to 72 per cent. That is still well above the EU average of 53 per cent.

“But the 40 per cent increase in the number of Germans identifying as outright either on the left or right has made it harder to govern and is driving established parties to seek to match the appeal of radical challengers.”

Grand coalitions, not so grand achievements

So, a CDU-SPD coalition — the fifth of the postwar era — will presumably govern Germany. But I pose this question: how “grand” were the grand coalitions of past times?

The first, which governed from 1966 to 1969, was led by CDU chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger. It was grand in the sense that the two parties controlled roughly 90 per cent of the Bundestag’s seats.

However, this dominance drowned out dissenting voices to such an extent that it spurred the rise of a radical leftist, student-led protest movement known as the “Außerparlamentarische Opposition” — the extra-parliamentary opposition.

Similarly, three of Merkel’s four governments were grand coalitions (2005-2009, 2013-2018 and 2018-2021). But the third had the effect of turning the AfD — a smaller, less popular party than it is now — into the official opposition in the Bundestag. This conferred far more respectability on the AfD than it deserved.

Wolfgang Münchau, writing for the UnHerd site, adds:

“Merkel governed with this political constellation — the grand coalition — three times. But there was nothing grand about it; it was a coalition of failure.

“It failed to address the causes of deindustrialisation and it failed to meet Nato defence spending targets. Instead, it cosied up to Vladimir Putin and approved the Baltic Sea gas pipelines from Russia.

“It failed to resolve the Eurozone’s economic crisis and supported the immigration policies which ultimately gave rise to the AfD.”

An Italian precedent

Once again, the AfD will be the official opposition — but this time the dangers loom larger for Merz than for Merkel in 2018.

A parallel can be drawn with Mario Draghi’s 2021-2022 premiership in Italy. He presided over what was called a “national unity” government, but one party stayed outside — Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right Brothers of Italy.

This party reaped the reward of appearing different from the crowd when it won Italy’s September 2022 elections.

I’m not predicting that the AfD will emulate that feat in the next Bundestag elections, due by 2029. Among other things, we should keep in mind that Meloni’s party forms part of a broad rightwing electoral and governing coalition. By contrast, no German party (yet) wants to jump into bed with the AfD in that manner.

But the fact remains that the AfD, as the official opposition, will be in pole position to benefit at the next election if Merz forms a CDU-SPD coalition that struggles and public impatience starts to rise.

Weimar redux?

The election also saw a surge in support for the radical leftist Die Linke party, which took almost 9 per cent of the vote. Together with the 20.8 per cent seized by the AfD, this has prompted some commentators to draw comparisons with the ill-fated Weimar Republic of 1919 to 1933.

In its weekly Berlin Briefing, the Deutsche Welle broadcaster said:

“ . . . there is a precedent in history when both the far left and the far right saw a rise in voter support. The Weimar Republic . . . saw Hitler’s Nazi party rise to power, but also large support for the German communist party.”

Writing for the Washington-based American-German Institute, Stephen Szabo draws attention to the central problem — the fragmentation of the party system, which has disrupted Germany’s centrist political model:

“ . . . another strength . . . has become a weakness, namely the consensus-oriented nature of the German political system and the coalition politics that the electoral system has produced …

“The system . . . has morphed into what has become a Weimar-like party system of seven parties, including at least two or three that are either anti-system or bordering on anti-system parties.”

Not all is lost

These are undoubtedly important arguments, but they need to be put in perspective.

First, two of the seven parties (the liberal Free Democrats and the anti-establishment Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) didn’t win Bundestag seats.

Second, Die Linke is not like the slavishly pro-Moscow communist party of the Weimar Republic. Although its roots lie in the ruling party of the former East German communist dictatorship, it has undergone a significant transformation since 2021 — about 60 per cent of its members have joined since then.

It is, arguably, more like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party — granted, that’s not necessarily a reassuring thought.

Finally, German centrism still has its strong points. In a development little noticed outside Germany, the mainstream parties approved a bill in December to amend the constitution and strengthen the independence of the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the nation’s constitutional court.

The aim is to protect the judicial system against attacks from extremist political forces.

In summary, the international climate is threatening, the economy needs urgent attention and the domestic political scene is restless — but not all is lost, either for Merz or for Germany.

More on this topic

Germany’s election: what happened and what might come next — a commentary by Florian Stoeckel for the London School of Economics’ Europe blog

Tony’s picks of the week

Just as Panama’s leaders are battling Donald Trump’s threats over the Panama Canal, a bitter environmental feud has reopened over the future of the country’s biggest mining project, the FT’s Michael Stott and Leslie Hook report

Trump, Russia and the future of Ukraine — a discussion among Stephen Sestanovich, Thomas Graham and Charles Kupchan organised by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations