Friedrich Merz has been a very naughty boy. To the left wing of his party, his reluctant overtures to the AfD back in January make him a von Papen holding the door for jackbooted thugs to trample in. To the right, he is a doormat scuffed and frayed beyond the point of use by the grubby paws of Woke. The undecideds glance warily at the opinion polls, which show the CDU languishing around the 25% mark, slightly below the AfD. Only cowardice and sloth — the only qualifications for membership in the CDU’s parliamentary group — have restrained Merz’s critics, but the centre cannot hold for long.
Three missteps have brought Merz’s terror regime to a crisis. The first was the charmingly American scandal around the proposed appointment of Woke law professor Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf to the constitutional court in Karlsruhe, which Merz accidentally ran aground when an attempt to epically own the AfD in 2015 gawkerlib-style (a rhetorical mode which he certainly has never encountered in its original form, but simply absorbed through osmosis) blew up in his face. The second error was the decision taken early last month (without prior consultation with the CDU or CSU brass) to cease arms shipments to Israel — imposed on Merz by the SPD as its pound of flesh for the CDU’s misdeeds in l’affaire Brosius-Gersdorf. Though it may seem a strange red line, Merkelian Staatsräson is for the CDU’s activist core and for most of its MPs an issue of quasi-ontological importance. The third folly was the secret deal Merz cut with the Left Party in the wake of his botched confirmation vote in the Bundestag as chancellor, which furnished him the slim majority that saw him through the second ballot, and would have remained safely in the realm of conspiracy theory had not the Left’s leader blabbed about it in a recent interview with the state broadcaster. Cooperation with the Left is no less anathema to large swathes of the CDU than it is with the AfD, and it is significant that the oft-cited „official“ basis for the CDU to maintain the firewall, a resolution passed at the party’s 2018 conference, does not single the latter out but admonishes against „coalitions and similar forms of cooperation with both the Left Party and the AfD“. In all three instances, Merz managed to do what Merkel and the German left spent the last ten years fighting tooth and nail to prevent: to bring together inner-party majorities of convenience between the CDU’s conservatives and the party mainstream.
Merz has spent the summer fighting a desperate rearguard action against the spirits he has summoned, in which his only ally is bundesrepublican political culture’s bias towards stability and stasis. The optics of an all-too-hasty decapitation weigh heavy on Christian Democrat consciousnesses — the Liz Truss lettuce video was to centre-right politicians across Europe what Gaddafi’s execution video was to Putin. In this context, Merz’s much-feted pronouncement at the Lower Saxon CDU’s state party conference in August that the welfare state „in its current form“ could no longer be financed should be interpreted as a desperate last throw of the dice to shore up his position. Yet so long as the basic constellation of forces remains unchanged, there is no reason to take Merz at his word; he does not have the votes for a program of reform without crossing the aisle and working with the AfD (an option completely unacceptable to the majority of his party), which in any case is not a party of fiscal rectitude but welfare chauvinism whose support would require concessions. He cannot credibly threaten the SPD with new elections so long as the parliamentary arithmetic under the firewall ensures the social democrats’ participation in any future coalition arrangement. Yet he cannot break the firewall without setting the entire political establishment but for a few Eastern CDU stragglers against him. He has made too many enemies, and his days as chancellor are numbered.