Friedrich Merz won’t give Germany the change it needs

Germany’s political pundits are almost uniformly predicting a victory for the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) in this Sunday’s snap federal elections. There was a particularly telling incident at the Munich Security Conference last week, when CDU leader Friedrich Merz was prematurely introduced as Germany’s chancellor. This slip-up was quickly corrected, but the assumption is that Merz’s success is assured.

After all, the CDU is leading the polls and there is a clear mood for change. The current government is certainly unpopular, with its two remaining coalition partners, the Social Democrats and the Greens, each polling around 14 per cent and competing for third place behind the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD). Nevertheless, Merz’s party is unlikely to sail to victory with great ease. The CDU’s 30 per cent support in the polls suggests more of a modest advantage than a decisive mandate. It will, inevitably, have to form a coalition government.

Clearly, the CDU has been unable to capitalise on the current government’s weakness. Some critics have attributed this to Merz’s leadership and his lack of charisma. Personal approval ratings seem to reinforce this, as Merz emerges as merely the least-unpopular among an uninspiring field of candidates. Current chancellor Olaf Scholz faces dismal support, with 67 per cent viewing him as unsuitable for the role. Merz’s ratings tell a similar story, with 56 per cent believing he would be a bad chancellor.

Singling out Merz himself for blame, however, would be to overlook some of the CDU’s deeper challenges. The party’s troubles predate his leadership, which only began in January 2022. Merz stepped into the role after the CDU incurred its worst-ever performance in a postwar General Election, securing just 24 per cent of the vote. He was selected specifically to rebuild the party after it had been hollowed out during Angela Merkel’s long, stifling era as chancellor.

Given this abysmally low starting point, some argue his modest progress deserves recognition. When Merz took over the party leadership, he was even considered a rebel and an outsider. He had been absent from active politics for years, after losing a power struggle with Merkel in the early 2000s. During this time, he made a career at asset manager BlackRock and wrote bestsellers, such as Mehr Kapitalismus wagen (Dare More Capitalism). Among older voters, he is still known as ‘the beer-mat man’, from when he memorably sketched a comprehensive tax reform and bureaucracy-reduction plan on a beer mat in the early 2000s.

Merz’s background has made him the ideal adversary for Germany’s left-green elites, which long cast him as the archetype of ruthless capitalism. Scholz was particularly pleased when Merz became leader of the opposition, seemingly betting that his rival would self-destruct through his polarising rhetoric. Critics dismissed him as ‘a man of the Nineties’ – an intended slight at his supposedly outdated worldview.

From the outset, Merz has been strangely tame as CDU leader – even if he did cause a stir earlier this month with his proposals for stricter immigration laws. Back in May 2024, a commentator in the conservative FAZ newspaper complained about the ‘pale CDU’ and the ‘despondency’ of its policies. The author cited Merz’s public embrace of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, despite the fact that her flagship policy, the EU Green Deal, is viewed with deep scepticism by many voters.

The fact is, the CDU is far too entrenched in establishment thinking to make a real break with the past. There is still a significant faction within the party that supports a future coalition with the Greens, for example. Although polls suggest that a clear majority of over 70 per cent of Germans oppose such a coalition, Merz has never ruled out the possibility.

This willingness to compromise with the Greens has also characterised the CDU’s stance on climate and energy. Its election manifesto this year, entitled ‘Change for Germany’, promises to stick to the Paris Agreement and Net Zero targets. While it talks about nuclear energy as an option, it makes no concrete proposals – other than to examine whether the most recently closed nuclear plants could be revived ‘with reasonable technical and financial effort’.

Meanwhile, he is keen to distance himself from the AfD. He has tirelessly repeated his pledge to never formally cooperate with the right-wing party, despite it looking likely to win a fifth of voters in the coming election. Merz’s aim, he says, is to strengthen the political centre.

While political parties can work or not work with whoever they like, the upshot of all this will be, most likely, a CDU coalition with the extremely unpopular SPD or Greens, in order to obtain a governing majority. No matter what noises of dissent he may have made about migration, his party will probably have to adapt to the preferences of the red-green mainstream. That is despite the fact that a majority of voters clearly wish to move away from this old consensus.

As political scientist Werner Patzelt recently put it: ‘The “centre parties” claim the moral right to govern alone and declare that any vote for “the fringes” will remain ineffective after election day. As a voter, you can applaud the established parties and change the balance of power between them a little – but you cannot really change politics.’

This situation is deeply undemocratic. Change is part of democracy. If voters cannot force change at the ballot box, then something is rotten in the state of Germany.

Sabine Beppler-Spahl is spiked’s Germany correspondent.