Watershed for Germany

Germany has voted, the CDU has returned as the strongest force, and Friedrich Merz will most likely be the next chancellor. But the massive gains for the AfD, which doubled its vote to over 20%, mean that for the first time since the Federal Republic’s inception, there is a conservative–far right majority in the Bundestag. The AfD will exploit this new power to the utmost. The slogan of its honorary chairman Alexander Gauland, ‘we will hunt them down’, is likely to echo even louder in the next four years.

The AfD’s success is the legacy of the cacophonic ‘traffic light’ coalition and its abject failure after just three years. At his summer press conference in 2023, Olaf Scholz predicted that the ‘bad-mood party’ would not win a higher percentage of the vote than in 2021. Reality brutally refuted that claim, as it did a whole series of Scholz’s pronouncements, from new housing to ‘large-scale deportations’.

But the far-right surge was also due to the Union parties’ failure to limit the AfD’s popularity. Merz’s cooperation with the AfD in the Bundestag in January – a flagrant breach of word and taboo – bears much of the blame for the election campaign’s disastrously narrow focus on migration. By splitting the democratic centre, Merz turned the only area in which the AfD is seen to have any competence into the key issue of the 2025 election.

But even the irresponsibility of Merz’s ‘rollercoaster’ campaign, as the CSU leader Markus Söder put it, could not stop him winning. The SPD, the Greens and the liberal FDP had lost the election even before it even started.

Berlin, February 2025. Image: Stephan Sprinz / Source: Wikimedia Commons

The polling figures for the traffic-light parties remained unchanged throughout the short campaign, as if set in concrete. Loss of confidence was apparently too drastic for voters to summon up any enthusiasm for more of the same. The FDP, whose ‘opposition in government’ approach was largely responsible for the coalition’s calamitous performance, and the SPD, whose Chancellor failed to provide the necessary leadership, were punished particularly severely.

The collapse of the SPD, which polled at little more than 16%, means that the competition between two mainstream parties that makes a change of Chancellor possible no longer exists. Now that the SPD has become a fringe party under the non-leadership of Olaf Scholz, there seems to be only one party trusted by significant numbers of the population to lead the country.

Doubts about Merz

After almost twenty years of absence from politics, Friedrich Merz has accomplished a comeback unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic. But just as unique was his ability to confirm voters’ doubts. During the campaign Merz managed to turn large sections of the population against him. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice in Goethe’s poem, his far-right brooms ran out of control. There were concerns whether he would lead the country from the democratic centre. Even if his pledge not to govern with the AfD can be believed on this occasion, suspicions will remain.

Merz’s principle of ‘neither right or left, just straight ahead’ has played into the AfD’s hands. But if the ends justify the means, as he suggests, then people will ask why the policies of the rightwing majority are not being implemented. The far-right says it is ready to force through laws for which there would be no support in a CDU–CSU coalition with the SPD. The AfD will constantly dangle this offer. For municipalities in the east, and one day even for a federal state, it is likely to be increasingly attractive.

CDU voices in eastern Germany calling for a coalition with the AfD have long been growing louder. Who would wager that the CDU will not one day become a party of ‘semi-loyal democrats’ (Levitsky and Ziblatt), like the ÖVP in Austria, which early this year looked likely to form a coalition government with the far-right FPÖ, following the precedent set by Sebastian Kurz in 2017, only this time as junior partner?

Merz saw to it personally that a mood for change turned to doubt. What remains are deep divisions not just in society, but also between the democratic parties. This will make it difficult for Merz to form a coalition with the losers of the election. Sneers directed at the SPD and Greens during the campaign won’t have helped. At an event marking the official start of the Union’s election campaign, for example, he commented that ‘you wouldn’t believe how thoughtful they get when you wave a set of car keys in front of them and show them what could happen tomorrow: on foot or in a ministerial car?’ This is not what clever, strategic, forward-thinking action looks like.

It is particularly important at this point to think ahead, if not in terms of the ends, then at least the beginnings a possible coalition. The relationship between the two parties is already heavily strained. Precisely because of the disaster of his own making, the incoming chancellor must take significant steps to rebuild trust. Germany now needs nothing so much as a strong, capable government as antidote to the attraction of the new fascism. Recent events have made clear just how tightly Europe, and especially Germany, are caught in the fascists’ grip, both internationally and domestically.

Yalta without the security

Eighty years after the Yalta Conference, we are witnessing a new fragmentation of Europe. But there is one crucial difference: when Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met in Crimea in February 1945 to discuss the imminent end of the Second World War, the United States was acting as the guarantor of democratic Europe. Yalta symbolizes the US decision to defend democracy in Europe against Stalinism, and to deploy large numbers of troops to do so.

But the ‘peace talks’ now beginning in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, symbolize the opposite. ‘Yankee go home’, the old cry of the far left (and still of the far right), is now coming true. The MAGA movement no longer wants the USA to be a force in Europe. Trump marks the end of the Transatlantic partnership.

The irony of history is that just as Germany finally decouples from the totalitarian regimes of Russia and China (at least partially), Trump’s America is decoupling from democratic Europe. Although this shift started with Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, Europe has been completely wrongfooted by the sheer brutality of Trump’s move. No NATO membership for Ukraine, significant territorial concessions to Russia without Ukraine having any say in the negotiations, and Europe denied a place at the table. Trump, the ‘dealmaker’, is giving Vladimir Putin everything he wants.

Trump’s thinking is obvious: what do I care about Ukraine as long as I get my peace and the Europeans bear the cost. ‘There’s a new sheriff in town’, boasted vice president JD Vance in his notorious speech in Munich. But for Europe the opposite is the case: Trump represents the sheriff’s departure – the renunciation of global governance and the rise of ‘America First’, which actually means ‘America alone’.

Under these circumstances, an alliance of convenience is probably the best Europe can hope for. But in his Munich speech, Vance also openly endorsed the AfD. What in the case of Elon Musk could have been seen the private opinion of Trump’s ‘first buddy’ has become the official line of the US government. This not only boosts the AfD but the far-right throughout Europe. In the twentieth century, the USA defended liberal democracy in Europe against National Socialists and Stalinists; in the twenty-first century, Trump’s US is aligning itself with Europe’s illiberal anti-democrats.

Germany, and Europe as a whole, is at another watershed. For the second time in three years, we are witnessing the end of post-war illusions. The first, more common on the left, was that after 1991, Russia, like the USSR before it, wanted peace. That illusion was shattered on 24 February 2022. The second, more common among conservatives, was even more powerful: that the USA would always be our democratic ally, partner and even friend. The collapse of that illusion is having an even more dramatic impact on our self-understanding, and it dates from Donald Trump’s enthronement on 20 January 2025.

This ends what since 1945 was assumed to be the essential core of the West: the dependability of the Transatlantic partnership and, should the need arise, America’s military defence of Europe. Trump has done away with that sense of security. With it ends the inwardness that has dominated Federal German politics for three-quarters of a century, which was only possible because of America’s protective shield.

Alongside the task of climate change mitigation, Europe’s ability to assert itself will be the greatest challenge of the next few years. For Germany, the strongest economic power in Europe, foreign policy is now the top priority. But if the primacy of foreign policy is to become a reality, what Germany needs is exactly what the traffic-light coalition was so sorely lacking: the ability to act concertedly – both outwardly, in its strategic response both to Putin’s Russia and Trump’s USA, as well as internally, to curb the AfD.

With the US administration having tried to directly influence German politics, we must now accept that the outside world has a major impact on what happens at home. The old separation between foreign and domestic politics no longer exists. That is the new nature of the challenge.

For decades, crisis has been seen as the lifeblood of Europe. But crisis is famously a double-edged sword. It can catalyse recovery but can also herald the end. For Germany, the next four years will be crucial. If the new government fails to regain trust, the country will face the same deadlock afflicting Austria, the Netherlands and France. When the powers of the democratic centre do nothing but fight and cannibalize each other, the extremists take over. Germany’s next chancellor cannot afford another strategic failure like the one during the election campaign. Our democratic future is at stake.

This article was first published in German here.