Friedrich Merz had to wait a long time for the electoral victory he achieved on Sunday.
Twenty-five years ago, he was considered one of the leading candidates to head the conservative Christian Democratic Union after the end of Helmut Kohl’s era. Kohl, who served as chancellor for 16 years, reunified Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall but despite his historic role lost the general election of 1998.
But whatever political plans Merz had for himself and for Germany at the time, he had to change them with the appearance of Angela Merkel, a young politician from former East Germany who despite all odds took over the CDU and brought it back to power in 2005, again for 16 years.
Like many other potential leaders of the CDU, Merz was shoved aside by Merkel and later decided to leave politics and turn to the private sector until Merkel announced in 2018 that she would leave politics after the end of her fourth term as chancellor. Even then, Merz – who represents the more conservative wing of the CDU, which under Merkel moved to the Center (many of Merkel’s critics would even say to the Left) – twice lost party leadership elections to candidates who were Merkel’s loyalists.
Only after the CDU was defeated in the 2021 general election was Merz finally crowned as party leader and, almost two years later, at the beginning of 2024, as the candidate of the joint conservative Union faction (the CDU and its sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union, run as a bloc on the federal level) to the chancellorship.
An almost impossible mission
The 69-year-old Merz had an almost impossible mission in the recent election campaign: freeing the CDU from the too-long shadow of Angela Merkel. Despite her past popularity among the general population, Merkel is blamed today by many for most of the problems that brought Germany to an unprecedented social, economic, and political crisis since the end of WWII.
Mass immigration, daily violence, exploding criminality, a stagnating economy, rising prices, and failing infrastructure – all are connected to decisions taken or avoided by Merkel during her 16 years of governance.
In 2013, as a reaction to Merkel justifying some of her controversial decisions with the slogan, “There is no alternative,” a new right-wing party, “Alternative for Germany” (AfD), was founded by conservatives and liberals who wanted to show that there is an alternative to Merkel and her way.
Since then, many conservatives who did not feel at home anymore in Merkel’s CDU joined the new party or voted for it. In 2017, the AfD was elected to the Bundestag for the first time and became the third biggest caucus with 12.6% of the vote, mainly as a reaction to the “refugee crisis.”
In the 2021 election, the AfD lost part of its strength, earning 10.4% of the votes but showing that it was not a passing political phenomenon. Three and a half years of a center-left government almost doubled its force, receiving a historic 20% according to initial projections, which would make it the second largest caucus in the Bundestag.
Since the AfD is boycotted by the CDU and CSU for being still considered not only a political rival but an extreme Right party, no right-wing government can be formed in Germany. Merz tried to bring back to the conservative CDU/CSU Union as many AfD voters as he could, mainly by adopting a very strict line on stopping mass immigration and deporting en masse illegal immigrants and engaging himself to rebuild Germany as a global economic, political, and military power.
But despite all his messages of “make Germany great again,” Merz didn’t convince enough voters. According to the first exit polls, the Union registered the second lowest voting result in the bloc’s history since 1949 with 28.5% of the votes. Rejecting any political cooperation with the AfD will force him to walk in Merkel’s steps and form a coalition with at least one center-left party – the Social Democratic Party, which registered its worst electoral result since World War II, (16.5%), and/or the Greens (12%).
The AfD’s candidate for the chancellorship, Alice Weidel spoke about a “historic result“ for her party and declared that the AfD is willing to cooperate with the conservatives to form a government. Other AfD candidates even proposed supporting a minority government of the conservatives without joining it.
European far-right parties supporting minority governments have happened in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Germany never had a minority government following an election.
For Merz, depending on the support of the AfD will be far too risky.