Why is Germany such a mess?
It seems long ago already, but politically speaking, it was really only yesterday that the last, deeply unpopular German government collapsed on November 6 of last year.
Based on a fractious coalition and led by the hapless Olaf Scholz, it was a flop from almost the beginning to the bitter end. But what finally imploded Scholz’s cabinet was its finance minister’s refusal to hollow out Germany’s – back then – severe restrictions on public debt, specifically to throw even more money at Ukraine.
Exactly half a year after this fiasco, the next and current German government produced another one, even before it had really started: On 6 May, its designated leader Friedrich Merz from the mainstream conservatives (CDU) failed to get parliament to elect him as chancellor. This may look like a formality because, after complicated and humiliating maneuvering, Merz managed to find enough votes on a second try.
Yet rest assured, no one in Germany thinks this was a minor glitch. For one thing, unlike a coalition breakdown, this was an entirely unprecedented failure: no post-World War II German chancellor has ever failed to be confirmed in the first round. That’s why, on the day of the disaster, some parliamentarians even spoke of a fundamental “crisis of the state.”
No wonder really, because would-be-chancellors only ask parliament for this vote when they believe they have a majority of deputies securely on their side. So did Merz, too. And that is why his initial dud was so much worse than just a sad historic first: The only way he could fail was by quiet but deliberate mutiny from below and, clearly, arrogant negligence on his side.
His coalition is made up of his own conservatives and the Social Democrats (SPD). If every member of parliament from these two parties had supported him in the first round, a second one would not have been needed. Clearly, then, it was deputies from his own party or its coalition allies who refused to comply. We will never know who exactly because the vote was anonymous, but we do know that there were at least 18 rebels. A major conservative commentator was right: This blow below the belt from Merz’s own ranks will hurt for a long time.
This is an awful way to begin a chancellorship. And not only because from now on, right from the get-go, the “partners” – yes, those are scare quotes – now divvying up power and positions in Berlin will always have to wonder which one of them – SPD or CDU (or even both)? – is harboring snakes in the grass. And when might they strike again? Welcome to the all-new coalition: as backstabbing as the last one but faster off the mark.
More fundamentally, if you can’t keep your troops together on confirming you as the boss, how do you expect to get your budgets and laws through? But things are even more foreboding in this case. For Merz could only even have a shot at high office because Germany is in such a comprehensive mess: demography, the economy, infrastructure, the party system, foreign policy, technology, and, last but not least, the public mood. You name it – nothing, really nothing, is okay.
It is against this dark background that a major German economist serving on the government’s own council of experts is already asking the inevitable question: How can this new coalition government fulfill Merz’s key promise to finally address this national misery, if it is so obviously bereft of unity? And, we may add, of discipline and foresight, too, because it takes astonishing sloppiness to prepare a chancellor vote so badly. Another economist notes that the debacle has also sent a “devastating signal” to the rest of the world. Indeed. And good luck for Merz when trying to tell Trump off for his team’s meddling in German politics: Whether Trump will say it or not, it is certain that he has already slotted Merz as a “loser.”
And the American bruiser-in-chief has a point. Not only because of the embarrassing lack of professionalism that came to light in mismanaging this crucial vote, but also because Merz’s CDU and their SPD coalition partners under Lars Klingbeil richly deserved their come-uppance. Between the last elections and cobbling together their coalition, they engineered a crassly foul maneuver: Clearly against the spirit if not the letter of the constitution, they used the old parliament – de facto already voted out by Germany’s citizens – for perhaps the single greatest flipflop in German postwar history.
Remember those strict limits for public debt over which the preceding coalition collapsed? Merz ran his electoral campaign promising that he would not abandon this so-called “debt brake.” As a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, he was in an excellent position to make that claim and get voters to believe it. And yet, it was his first action – even before entering office – to break that promise.
And not in a small, corner-cutting way. Merz did not cut corners but razed the edifice to the ground. Having run and won (barely) as a fiscal hawk, he rapidly made a screeching U-turn to – in CNN’s words – “massively expand borrowing and super-charge military spending.” To the tune of a cool trillion or so over the next decade. Many voters and members of his own party were not only bewildered but aghast. We cannot know for sure, but I and many other Germans are probably right guessing that this massive breach of faith motivated at least some of the rebels during the chancellor vote.
What we do know for sure is that Merz’s personal ratings have crashed even before he almost failed to become chancellor. Never popular to begin with, he has reached a nadir: On the eve of the parliamentary vote, 56% of Germans were against Merz becoming chancellor, only 38% welcomed that prospect.
And Merz is not the only one who has emerged dented from this affair: For complicated procedural reasons, Merz needed the cooperation of the Die Linke party under its shooting star Heidi Reichinnek to get his second chance. For Die Linke, providing this help was probably a very bad move. Reichinnek is to Germany what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is to the US: a social-media savvy lifestyle leftist with hubristic rhetoric (anyone for abolishing capitalism, all of it, right now and with tattoos, please?) and deeply tactical behavior in the real world. By helping out the unpopular arch-capitalist Merz, she may have overdone it even for some of her most devoted TikTok fans.
But it’s not all bad news. At least not for everyone. The AfD – under pressure from Germany’s domestic intelligence service and the possible threat of a complete ban – is likely to profit. It may have missed a superb chance of embarrassing Merz by actually voting for him. But there is another effect: The collaboration of the oh-so-terribly radical Reichinnek and her party, has already made some German observers ask a simple, plausible question: If both Die Linke and the AfD used to be treated as beyond the pale – or, in German parlance, “firewalled” – and yet Merz had no problem relying on Die Linke to get into office (no less!), then, clearly, that whole “firewall” thing is not all it’s cracked up to be. And if that is so, then the firewall against the AfD may well also crumble one day. In fact, as a matter of consistency and fairness, it should, whether you like the AfD or not.
Berlin has a history of walls falling!
What an odd way of becoming the new leader of Germany’s political mainstream: Limping through the entry gate, badly bruised and humiliated as no chancellor before, while once again de facto strengthening the country’s largest and most threatening insurgent party. Merz’s predecessor Scholz started with much undeserved advance praise and ended abysmally. Merz has managed to start abysmally already.
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