“MANY PEOPLE…have the vague feeling that something is no longer right with our country and the situation in the world.” Writing in his final “MerzMail” dispatch before Germany’s election on Sunday Friedrich Merz, who is all but certain to take over as the tenth chancellor of the federal republic after the vote, offers not the bland optimism of the leader in waiting but the unvarnished truths of the plain speaker. “Unlike so many federal elections”, Mr Merz writes, this year’s is “marked by great uncertainty and upheaval”. Surveys of the national mood concur. Just 18% of Germans believe the country is on the right path. Rarely has such a pall of anxiety hung over an election campaign in Europe’s biggest economy.
The reasons are not hard to see. The foundations of the post-war republic’s prosperity are eroding. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine exposed not just Germany’s dependence on Russian gas but the vapidity of its hope that deepening trade links would safeguard peace. Donald Trump is smashing up assumptions about America’s place in Europe’s security architecture that perhaps held faster in Germany than anywhere else in the western half of the old continent.
There is a growing sense that the domestic order is crumbling too. Irregular migration, while falling and far from the peaks of 2015-16, has been running at unsustainable levels for years. A series of horrific attacks by asylum-seekers, some of them evading deportation, has laid bare authorities’ failings; in the latest, on February 21st, a young Syrian refugee seriously injured a Spanish tourist in a knife attack at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. On the economic front, while many countries have seen incumbents toppled by electorates tired of the spiralling cost of living, in Germany this has been accompanied by a deeper sense of malaise over the country’s manufacturing-first business model. Industrial giants like Bosch and ThyssenKrupp are slashing jobs, and surveys suggest that more lay-offs lie ahead. Real GDP has barely budged for six years. No one knows what to do about the car industry. “Nothing works in this country any more,” is an increasingly familiar (if exaggerated) refrain, especially on railway platforms after the latest delay is announced.
It is this unease that has propelled the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to previously unimaginable levels. It may occupy close to one-quarter of the seats in the next Bundestag, and if the election outcome forces Mr Merz’s Christian Democratic alliance into an unwieldy three-way coalition encompassing the other two big parties, the AfD will be left as the only significant opposition. The “firewall” that other parties have placed around the AfD, which bars any form of co-operation at federal or state level, has ensured that Germany remains in a rapidly dwindling set of European countries in which the hard right has no role in government. But it has also removed any incentive for the AfD to moderate. Along with Austria’s Freedom Party, it is one of the most radical of the populist-right parties straining politics across Europe.
Mr Merz warns that failure to tackle Germany’s most pressing problems, which he regards as the stagnant economy and irregular migration, could see the AfD win the next election in 2029. If that is hyperbole, it is not atypical for Mr Merz, who can have a tendency to talk first and think later. Both Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrat (SPD) incumbent, and Angela Merkel, Mr Scholz’s party-political opposite but temperamental equivalent, offered German voters the comforting promise that the country required little more than managerial incrementalism. (It was Mr Scholz’s misfortune that this recipe became indisputably obsolete during his term.) Mr Merz, by contrast, presents himself as something of an agent of rupture—rhetorically, at least. “The business model of this country is gone,” he recently told The Economist: a phrase it is impossible to imagine passing the lips of either of his two predecessors.
Yet for all that, with one ill-advised exception—a decision to push through a non-binding motion on illegal migration with votes from the AfD—Mr Merz’s campaign has been broadly marked by caution, even unseriousness. His remedy for fixing Germany’s economic ailments begins with tackling red tape and reducing the welfare rolls: worthy but hardly radical or adequate goals. His Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU) manifesto is stuffed with unfunded tax cuts. Germany’s economy has many pockets of enduring success, and even growth. But its structural problems, from demography to growing commercial rivalry with China, will require much more serious surgery.
On foreign policy, Mr Merz at least has the right instincts. Where Mr Scholz appears not to have noticed that the world has changed with Mr Trump’s election, Mr Merz has hinted at a willingness to discuss previously taboo subjects, including extending France’s nuclear umbrella. He detects an appetite among Germany’s European partners for a stronger German voice, and knows defence spending will need a huge boost, though he struggles to explain how to pay for it. But the true test will come after the election—and possibly before Mr Merz has taken office, which could take several months—as Mr Trump’s Ukraine policy takes shape.
Once installed as chancellor, Mr Merz says his priority will be quickly to demonstrate to Germans that politicians can get stuff done. First, though, he will have to negotiate a coalition. If the numbers allow it, Mr Merz will probably seek to work with the SPD. It looks as though Germany’s main centre-left and centre-right parties will together win significantly less than half of the votes for the first time in modern history. Perhaps in part for that reason, it need not be the muddy consensus-seeking machine that defined German policymaking for most of the past 20 years. A three-party coalition would be a far more troubling prospect.
Germans learned that lesson from Mr Scholz’s “traffic-light” coalition, the least popular government in living memory. But they do not have much time for Mr Merz, either; his success rests largely on the unpopularity of his opponents. Having hoped to chalk up 35% of the vote just a month ago, the CDU and its Bavarian sister party will now be lucky to scrape 30%, a score lower than in any federal election bar the one in 2021. Germany’s presumed next chancellor will take office against a backdrop of a grumpy electorate, a flatlining economy and a world that is rapidly being upended in ways that do not work to Europe’s advantage. It is an unenviable task. ■
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