“I never thought I’d have to say something like that on a TV program.” So sighed Friedrich Merz, Germany’s prospective next Chancellor, in a post-election discussion last night. World events, he observed with some pain, had led to the dissolution of the old Atlanticist bonds on which post-war Germany had built its security, its worldview, and its identity. In the election Merz had just won, “the interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow”. It had thus become evident to him “that the Americans, at least that part of the Americans in this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”. There now existed no alternative other than “step by step achieving independence from the USA”.
Though the election was strikingly – astonishingly – inward looking, Merz’s words reveal how loudly the massive storm breaking beyond Germany’s borders can be heard in Berlin. This is the gloomy atmosphere in which the country’s new government will be formed.
For an election that seemed endlessly buffeted by surprises and tragedies, the end results surprised nobody. Merz’s conservative Union emerged as by far the largest party, with some 28.5 per cent of the vote. The country is inexorably drifting towards a coalition government in which the Union will be joined by the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) – the self-same configuration that governed under Angela Merkel for twelve of her sixteen years in power. The result sets up a frantic period of closed-doors negotiations between the two parties. Given that the fate of Ukraine is quickly approaching its most critical moment, it is in everyone’s interest – both within Germany and beyond – for these negotiations to take place quickly.
For the probable new Chancellor, however, the result brings relief than elation. Yes, his party came first, and he himself has achieved one of the great comebacks in the recent history of European politics. But the end result was considerably worse than any achieved by his old (and in some respects current) nemesis Merkel, to whose legacy he has gleefully taken an axe. And with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) gaining some 20 per cent of the vote (and utterly dominating the country’s Eastern half), Merz and his party have little reason to be complacent – still less triumphant.
The poisonous and rancorous political atmosphere the AfD has fashioned is one thing, but more consequential is the arithmetic that its success generates in the Bundestag.
The principal source of relief for Merz is that the arithmetic of the final result gives him a two-headed coalition, permitting him to avoid the frustrations and tedium of long, drawn-out negotiations between several parties. This will be as much a relief for Germany’s European partners as it will be for Merz himself. Though migration and Germany’s unloved “debt brake” will be the critical themes of these talks, the tempestuous outside world will impart a particular urgency to the forging of an agreement.
Merz’s comments last night on President Trump and his administration pointed to this urgency in dramatic fashion. His words were forceful – some might even say undiplomatic. To be sure, it remains unclear what Merz’s diagnosis of Germany’s and Europe’s security situation will mean in concrete policy practice. But they are nevertheless a nod towards a new phase of European defence and security integration. Merz’s resolve – however rhetorical at this stage – will be especially welcomed in Paris and Warsaw.
There are domestic implications too. At home, Merz’s comments were directed at the AfD, whose electoral success has naturally attracted much international media attention. For Merz in the medium term, the AfD’s striking result points to the oft-learned lesson for centrist conservatives that simply aping the policies of populists does not dilute their attraction. Merz is now the leader of Germany’s largest party. But the man who constructed his initial leadership pitch on the promise that he would halve the AfD’s vote-share must also reckon with the fact he has, in actuality, doubled it.
While the AfD will not come anywhere near power, its result will nevertheless have massive ramifications for the political direction of the country – and in particular for its relationship with the Trump administration, key figures within which have made no secret of their admiration for the nationalists. The poisonous and rancorous political atmosphere the AfD has fashioned is one thing, but more consequential is the arithmetic that its success generates in the Bundestag. In the immediate term, the party’s size sharply constricts the bandwidth of centrist governance (the Union and SPD will govern with a narrow majority, a precipitous fall from the days when such a governing arrangement was called a “Grand Coalition”). In the medium term, AfD politicians will further solidify themselves as a stronghold of the international nationalist-populist movement, guaranteeing a sizable and vocal opposition to any initiatives that portend further European integration, or which promise to antagonise Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.
For now, though, Merz’s Union and its Social Democratic junior partners will have no option but to treat the AfD as little more than a domestic nuisance. Merz has signalled Easter as his deadline for forging his coalition. This is promising: Europe hardly needs months of protracted coalition negotiations in Berlin right now. The prospective governing parties will be hoping for resolutions on migration policy and debt and – not least – an upward turn in Germany’s suffering economy. But one can also expect foreign policy to become more central in government than it was in the campaign. Merz himself has already gestured in this direction: faced with the collapse of the treasured old Atlanticist certainties with which he grew up, his “absolute priority”, as he put it last night, “is to create unity in Europe”.
