© REUTERS/Annegret Hilse

It’s been two decades since the Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, had its last major crisis. In December 1999, the shock of losing office in the previous year’s federal election was compounded by revelations about illegal donations during the long reign of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. This was the moment of Angela Merkel’s ascent to leadership. Twenty years later, as the Merkel era draws slowly to a close, we can begin to discern the new burdens she has bequeathed the CDU. The party is riven by factionalism, the leadership question unresolved, and its public support has fallen dramatically. Today it is not at all clear if Merkel’s successors will be able to overcome the crisis and renew the CDU’s role as the stable core of the German party system.

Merkel, the first female head of government in Germany’s history, planned to be the first German chancellor to stage-manage her own departure. But this difficult experiment in governance failed at the first hurdle. After just a year as party leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, her hand-picked successor, has now stepped down, exhausted. Short of authority within the party, Kramp-Karrenbauer was unable to reconcile its conflicts, offer new policy perspectives, or stem the rapid fall in the polls. As recently as the 2013 federal election, the CDU won 41.5 percent of the popular vote. Today, its poll ratings languish somewhere in the mid-20s. Recent state elections in Hamburg saw a mere 11 percent of voters opting for the CDU. For a party long used to dominating the German political scene, this is an alarming signal.

Few in the party would dispute that the CDU has moved distinctly leftward during Merkel’s two decades at the helm. On women, family, migration, defense, and energy, Merkel has abandoned long-held policy positions and dramatically reduced the influence of conservatives. On the right of the German political landscape, CDU influence has declined so sharply that a new right-wing party—the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD—has managed to enter state parliaments across the country, as well as the federal parliament, for the first time in the post-war era.

Merkel has succeeded in maintaining the party’s grip on power in Berlin since 2005, cementing her position as its leader. At the same time, however, Merkel’s unideological pragmatism has unleashed an identity crisis within the CDU, primarily afflicting her conservative critics. Merkel’s principal weakness does not lie in her political responses to new challenges, which have often gone against long-held party positions. Rather, the problem lies in her failure to aggressively address the tension between her policies and traditional ideas in the party and, more broadly, in society. Communication has never been her forte. Merkel may have successfully pushed through her policies, but she has rarely made the case for them. This has prompted, at least since the 2015 refugee crisis, intense resistance within the party, bubbling below the surface of her pragmatic governing style.   

Paradoxical Challenges

Merkel’s successor must now overcome these divisions. But the CDU’s strategic dilemma goes further than the loss of right-wing voters to the AfD. Further left, they are losing at least as many to the Green Party. So her successor, whoever it is, will face a paradoxical challenge, requiring a simultaneous answer to both problems. The next leader must appeal to voters on the right, while also shoring up support among erstwhile Merkel voters in the political center. Conservatives within the party must be kept within the tent, while preparations are made for the strong likelihood that only a coalition with the Greens will achieve a majority after the next federal elections.

Kramp-Karrenbauer, often known as AKK, failed to meet this paradoxical challenge. At the December 2018 party conference, she won a very narrow victory over Friedrich Merz, the representative of conservative forces in the party. Precisely because of her image as Merkel’s favored candidate, she sought to broaden her base among right-wing members. But while her signals failed to resonate with that wing, they managed to annoy her liberal followers. This hobbled her authority from the start.

Friedrich Merz and his supporters never really accepted defeat—neither at the hands of AKK in 2018, nor, much earlier, at the hands of Merkel. After losing a power struggle to Merkel in 2002, Merz left politics for a career in business. In the years since, he served as a projection screen for conservative forces within the CDU, helped by his polished rhetoric and slick public performances. His political persona and clear opposition to Merkel have made him the darling of the right wing, to whom he has appealed with promises to halve AfD support with an agenda of economic modernization and strong domestic security. Skeptics, however, regard him as yesterday’s man.

Rupture or Continuity?

Merz is the disruptive candidate: his victory would inevitably mean an open power struggle with Merkel and a clear break with the long era her leadership has defined. Although revered by supporters, Merz is deeply feared by liberals in the party, who ideally want to see a continuation of Merkelism, even in the absence of Merkel herself. By now, however, even critics of the chancellor dimly recognize that breaking with the politics of the last two decades is not a promising route to electoral success. Merkel retains too much popularity among voters, with substantial popular support for her legacy. This means Merz’s candidacy is ultimately unlikely to win over a majority of the party.

Enter a surprising second candidate for party leadership. Like Merz, Norbert Röttgen had seemed a figure from the past, a man with his political future squarely behind him. Röttgen had once been viewed as Merkel’s crown prince, but a dramatic loss in the 2013 North Rhine-Westphalia state elections made Merkel oust him from the succession. But unlike the conservative Merz, Röttgen offers a liberal alternative to the chancellor, presenting conviction politics with rhetorical and intellectual brilliance. Were he to win the leadership, the overall direction of German politics would not change, but he would seek to end the prevailing stasis in key policy areas, including climate change, European policy, and migration. His politics is marked by active political discourse: his main difference with Merkel is her reactive style of politics, where policies are not supported with convincing arguments.

Röttgen would be the perfect chancellor for a CDU-Green coalition at the federal level, and for this reason, he would be a serious opponent against the Greens. But this position also drives the strong opposition he faces from the party’s right wing. So like Merz, albeit for diametrically opposed reasons, he would find it difficult to reconcile the CDU’s bitter divisions. Moreover, Röttgen does not enjoy universal popularity on the party’s left wing, where he is widely regarded as distant and unapproachable. All in all, this suggests Röttgen’s leadership would be unlikely to bring about the intellectual renewal the party needs.

The Winner: Laschet

For this reason, Merkel’s ultimate successor will probably be Armin Laschet, currently state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia. Leading the CDU in the country’s most populous state may seem to preordain him for federal leadership, but Laschet’s political temperament means he falls short of being a shoo-in. He tends to be risk-averse, always looking to cover his back. His political career has already seen several bitter defeats. Like Kramp-Karrenbauer, his predecessor as heir apparent, he is regarded as a Merkel loyalist, but his leadership would likely see a number of changes in emphasis.

Laschet’s failure to present renewal with any real authority meant his chances against the more impactful Merz and Röttgen had seemed remote. But Laschet has recently managed to pull off an important coup, convincing Health Minister Jens Spahn to  endorse his leadership bid and abandon his own candidacy This was highly significant in the succession battle, since Spahn can help win over CDU conservatives who see Merz as either too brutal or too outmoded. During the refugee crisis, Spahn had made his name as one of Merkel’s strongest critics: for a time, he was one of her most open opponents, regularly taking public positions critical of Islam.

However, since losing the leadership race in 2018, Spahn has largely abandoned his right-wing attacks on Merkel, instead concentrating on his ministerial responsibilities. In other words, having adequately demonstrated his credentials as a conservative alternative, he has now sought broader acceptance within the party. With little chance of winning in a field containing Laschet, Merz, and Röttgen, an alliance with Laschet is highly useful. If Laschet wins, his new ally will have established an excellent position in the party. At 39, Spahn is already the most power-conscious CDU politician of his generation. He can afford to wait a little longer.

For Laschet, Spahn should help to bring in key voices from the moderate conservative camp, which he needs if he is to win the leadership. But winning is one thing, actually ushering in a new era for the CDU is quite another. Ruling North Rhine-Westphalia may mark the upper limit of Laschet’s political capacities: although he is now favorite to succeed Merkel, he may not be up to the task of filling her shoes. Like Kramp-Karrenbauer before him, Laschet enjoys limited authority with conservatives in the party, while his influence among liberals is too weak to assuage CDU worries ahead of a tough fight with the Greens for the political center.

Danger for the System

Many indications thus suggest that the latest succession battle could result in another temporary solution. But this is something the party can ill afford. Jens Spahn may well be correct in suggesting the CDU faces the greatest crisis of its history. But unlike in earlier periods of weakness, the weakness of the CDU now also threatens to undermine the stability of the political system as a whole. In previous decades, when the CDU exhausted its political capital after long periods in power, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) stood ready to take control. But today’s SPD can no longer play the role of a second large catch-all party. It remains to be seen whether the Greens can take its place as an anchor of systemic stability. In this way, the CDU crisis extends directly into the political heart of Germany as currently constituted. Not since Konrad Adenauer has a CDU leader had to bear such momentous responsibility.

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© REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

As soon as an extremely relieved Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer had ascended the conference stage in Hamburg on December 7 and accepted the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), it was obvious what Germany’s right-wing political establishment made of her. Old men, their yearning for simpler times written in little veins across their pink cheeks, were elbowing each other aside to find a TV camera into which they could bluster and denounce the failure of nerve among the great Christian conservatives.
The attack lines were foreshadowed, and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), to which the CDU has been bleeding votes, was getting ready for a field day. In fact, AfD Bundestag member Gottfried Curio had already come up with an appropriate gag: “AKK,” he told the chamber just over a week earlier, could only be short for “absolut konstante Katastrophe” (“an absolutely constant catastrophe”).

Not another Angela Merkel! Not another aloof, careful, centrist prevaricating compromiser. Not another woman! By shying away from Friedrich Merz, the political embodiment of the alpha-male DAX boardroom, the party of Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl had missed the chance to carve out a clear new path (or at least re-carve a weed-ridden old path).

But there are more complex interpretations. Those struggling to spot the differences between Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and her predecessor might want to go on YouTube and watch one of AKK’s annual performances as “Cleaning Lady Gretel” in the carnival in Saarland, the state she governed for seven years.

They might find it more painful than funny (the forced mirth of western Germany’s Karneval might be the tradition that forever calcified the country’s comedy reputation). Still, watching the sight of a top conservative in an apron and broom delivering a solid half-hour of slapstick gags might also help one understand why a majority of CDU delegates picked her in Hamburg, and why many may even have thought of her as a more amenable leader than Merkel herself.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Winner

Kramp-Karrenbauer is more “approachable” than the chancellor, according to Eva Quadbeck, journalist and co-author of a rather well-timed biography published in October. “She’s the kind of woman you could have a chat with if you saw her in the supermarket,” she said.

More than this, this Catholic mother-of-three holds all the right values for the CDU: she expressed her opposition to gay marriage in 2015, and is against abolishing the infamous Paragraph 219a from Germany’s criminal code, which forbids advertising abortion. This has already been a source of tension with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the government coalition.

In fact, suggested Olaf Boehnke, political analyst at Rasmussen Global, Merkel and AKK may already have agreed to play out a “good-cop, bad-cop” routine. While Merkel concentrates on her international duties and maintains a relatively liberal course to keep her coalition together, Kramp-Karrenbauer, with no seat either in the cabinet or the Bundestag to actually affect government policy, will make all the right conservative noises on domestic issues to keep the party on her side while she awaits her turn.

Kramp-Karrenbauer’s record also suggests she has “more courage to take risks than Merkel,” Quadbeck argued. In 2012, the then newly-appointed Saarland state premier, impatient with infighting in the allied Free Democratic Party (FDP), dissolved her coalition and called an early election, even though polls had the CDU neck-and-neck with the SPD. “Merkel advised her against this, quite vehemently in fact,” Quadbeck said. “But she did it anyway, and won the election.”

To show the boss that this was no fluke, Kramp-Karrenbauer repeated the trick at the next Saarland election in March 2017, trouncing the SPD with a full 40 percent of the vote, a victory that was credited with bringing the campaign train of SPD chancellor-candidate Martin Schulz to a grinding halt. Merkel once again took note, before securing her own victory over the Social Democrats in September.

What Now?

If AKK can help pull the same results off in next autumn’s state elections in eastern Germany, even the CDU’s old-school traditionalists will surely revere her. The AfD is currently claiming close to a quarter of the electorate in Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia. According to Boehnke, that means that Kramp-Karrenbauer will have to prioritize the issues of migration and border controls and look significantly tougher than Merkel.

“She has to shape the profile of the CDU as the one party that is looking for regulation of migration,” said Boehnke. “From a CDU perspective, it’s about limiting the damage of [the refugee influx in] 2015, and trying to win back the supporters who left for the AfD.” For Europe, “that would mean taking all the immigrant quota issues off the agenda.”
“She pretty much backs what Merkel is already doing at a European level,” Boehnke added. “She is definitely a European by passion, but she has to favor the national interest over European interest.”

Kramp-Karrenbauer is already hardening her rhetoric on immigration. She said in November that she would like to see Germany’s rules on dual nationality re-examined—in other words, she would potentially force the grandchildren of immigrants to choose to own one passport only.

Nor is AKK above a bit of the kind of right-wing populism that Merkel has conspicuously avoided: on the campaign trail in November, Kramp-Karrenbauer criticized the fact that some kindergartens had taken to calling traditional children’s St. Martin’s Day processions simply “lantern processions” rather than using the Christian term. “That’s not tolerance, that’s self-diminishment!” she told a local CDU gathering in Berlin, and “no part of her speech got more applause,” DER SPIEGEL reported.

These aren’t necessarily just populist gestures. Indeed, all of Kramp-Karrenbauer’s public statements suggest that, as chancellor, she would steer Germany back onto the pre-Merkel paths that those old CDU conservatives prefer. According to Quadbeck, AKK is “very much in the tradition of Helmut Kohl and his west-orientated world view, while Merkel had adopted a much more multilateral world.”

Ultimately, all this is about securing the future of the CDU, which is currently polling nationally at just under 30 percent. As Boehnke put it: “If Kramp-Karrenbauer can guide the CDU back to 36 percent, she’ll be good to go for the chancellery.”

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© REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

She knew to keep it short. When Angela Merkel stepped up to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who had just been elected as Merkel’s successor at the helm of Germany’s biggest political party, she briefly grasped Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer by the shoulder and by the hands. A quick nod, an even quicker smile, and then Merkel turned away.

AKK, as she is known in Germany, was Merkel’s choice for the party and eventually the chancellery, too. She has all the experience, the values, and the commitment to democracy and Europe that Merkel could wish for in a successor. But from now on, as both know perfectly well, nothing could be more damaging for the new head of the Christian Democratic Union than to be seen as too close to the chancellor.

Over the coming months, the two women will need to perform an intricate dance of support and distance, continuity and change. If they succeed, Merkel may be able to leave the chancellery with as much applause as she just received for her last speech as head of the CDU at the Hamburg party conference.

Kramp-Karrenbauer, in turn, can take over a functioning coalition in time to bolster her public image for the next federal elections due 2021. The exact date that the hand-over would happen is anybody’s guess, but about a year before election day would be reasonable.

Political chaos, of course, is another very real possibility. Merkel and AKK could mess it up—the one by playing up her remaining power (though that would seem a bit out of character), the other by proving herself unable to rally the party. Both could be pushed out of their respective offices, resulting in early elections and possibly even a part of the CDU splitting off.

AKK, however, is a politician with enormous experience at the regional and even national level. At 56, she has spent nearly 20 years in government in her home state of Saarland, a region of just under a million inhabitants. As prime minister of this most western of German states, she was re-elected twice. Kramp-Karrenbauer is clear and outspoken. She also has a reputation for being not only more openly emotional and accessible than Merkel, but also more decisive.

“You always stand on your predecessor’s shoulders,” a very self-confident Kramp-Karrenbauer said after her election in a television interview. “What is good, we shall continue, and where something needs to be changed, we will change it.“

Not Just Mini-Merkel

At Merkel’s initiative, AKK was elected secretary-general of the CDU in February 2018, a very useful learning period for the job she holds now. Over the past several months, she has also been able to demonstrate where her beliefs differ from Merkel’s: Kramp-Karrenbauer is far more socially conservative, opposing same-sex marriage, and favoring the reintroduction of conscription or an equivalent social service.

Back in 2015, Kramp-Karrenbauer had supported Merkel’s decision to keep Germany’s borders open to refugees. She hasn’t gone back on that, but she now dwells much more on the need to re-establish law and order in Germany. This is a theme that plays well within a party that is still divided over the refugee issue and desperate to regain ground from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

The refugee issue is a good example to show how ambivalent relations between Merkel and AKK are bound to become. Kramp-Karrenbauer needs to infuse the CDU with new ideas and new confidence but she cannot afford to disown Merkel or her policies in government. There, the scope for change is particularly small as the CDU is bound to a very detailed coalition agreement. Its partners in government, the volatile Bavarian CSU and the desperately weak Social Democrats, are unlikely to want to do AKK any favors.

It used to be that the CDU was quite happy supporting its chancellor in power. That was its role from the very beginning under Konrad Adenauer in 1949, and it made the CDU quite a different organization from the Greens or the Social Democrats that have a more ideological outlook.

But after 18 years of Merkel as head of the party—and with her in the chancellery for the last 13 years, which reduced the party’s role even more—Germany’s Christian Democrats are desperate for change. Over the past six weeks, with lively debates between the main contenders for the party’s leadership, the CDU has discovered a new taste for inner-party democracy.

Hurdles on the Horizon

What’s worse is the enormous time pressure that the new party leadership is facing. Next year brings a series of important elections, from the European Parliament in May to regional elections in Bremen (also in May), to regional elections in the East German states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in the fall. In East Germany, the CDU will struggle not to be outdone by the AfD. If it fails, Merkel—and with her Kramp-Karrenbauer—are sure to be handed part of the blame.

It doesn’t help either that Kramp-Karrenbauer only won the election to the party chairmanship so very narrowly. In the second round, 517 party delegates voted for her, while 482 supported Friedrich Merz, a former opposition leader and long-time Merkel rival who is revered by many in the party for his free market convictions and gifted rhetoric.

Merz’s supporters were bitterly disappointed by the result. Some started spreading rumors that Merz had been treated unfairly by the pro-Merkel, pro-AKK camp that had organized the party congress in Hamburg. One poisonous story said that his microphone had been toned down for his final presentation to the delegates to make him appear weak.

AKK tried to build bridges by nominating Paul Ziemiak, the conservative leader of the CDU’s youth organization and a Merz supporter, as the party’s new secretary general. Still, many delegates remain skeptical. Even though he was running as the only candidate, Ziemiak received just 63 percent of the vote.

Despite such little blemishes, and despite the dangers ahead, both AKK and Merkel won an important battle in Hamburg. The prizes for the two of them are power and a good place in history. But the picture is bigger than that. On December 7, Germany’s biggest political party reaffirmed its commitment to being open, democratic, and pro-European.

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© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Long before she entered politics, married, and acquired her tongue-twisting, double-barrel surname, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer’s dream was to be a teacher. Plan B: midwife.

She may need all the skills of those two jobs, and much more besides, if on Friday she becomes the eighth leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Everything has come at once for the woman known to all as AKK. And not just for her: ordinary Germans are struggling to understand the 56 year-old who seems to have emerged from nowhere as Angela Merkel’s heir apparent.

And yet her apparent overnight success masks a long climb up the ladder of power. That began with her 1984 election as councilor in her small town home of Püttlingen in Saarland, a tiny southwest German state, on the French border.

Along the way she has bettered CDU grandees, party colleagues, and, when she became the Saarland interior minister in 2000, promoted by state governor Peter Müller, she faced down local police and state prosecutors who openly questioned her authority. Those questions vanished, at the very latest, when she succeeded Müller as governor of Germany’s smallest state.

Taking Nothing For Granted

Eventually she heads to Hamburg leading in opinion polls, with 48 per cent of CDU supporters behind her, AKK is taking nothing for granted.

The new party leader will not be chosen by voters but 1,001 regional party delegates in a secret ballot. No one knows for sure how they will vote and, after an eight-stop tour of the country, AKK knows many are impressed with Friedrich Merz. The 63 year-old is the CDU’s prodigal son, a former deputy leader who clashed with Merkel and left but has returned from the wilderness to succeed her. He is a strong speaker, and doesn’t lack in confidence, while the tiny Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer can struggle to be noticed.

But unlike her main rival she has 18 years of uninterrupted government experience under her belt.

Many analysts have dubbed her Angela Merkel 2.0, given both are women and prefer compromise and ego-free politics. Like Merkel, Kramp-Karrenbauer owes her rise to hard work, being underestimated, and a love of calculated risk. But, from her record, AKK loves risk even more than the outgoing CDU leader.

Risk-Taker

In January 2012, a year after taking over as Saar state premier, she swapped coalition partners in office then called—and won—a snap election. Merkel was annoyed by AKK’s risk-taking but impressed with the results. Last February, Merkel lured her to Berlin as CDU secretary general.

Neither woman mentioned the obvious gravitas of the decision, confidantes say: becoming secretary general—as Merkel did many years before her—is AKK’s best chance to lead the CDU.

If she wins on Friday, analysts may soon spot similarities between the Saarland politician and another CDU leader: the late Helmut Kohl, from neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate. Like him, AKK has a sharp political mind and a knack for wrapping hard political polemic in mild regional German vowels.

That has allowed her both defend and attack the hot button political issue in this leadership race: Merkel’s refugee crisis response of 2015-16, that saw over one million enter Germany.

During the regional road show she backed the Merkel approach at the time, not to close German borders. Yet she has promised regional delegates that criminal asylum seekers should be deported at speed and “never allowed set foot again on European soil”—even if they come from war-torn Syria. Somehow she has managed to do so without being denounced as a populist hardliner.

Similarly, though pitching herself as the centrist continuity candidate, she has made a play for CDU conservatives—attacking liberal abortion laws and standing by remarks likening same-sex marriage to pedophilia and polygamy.

More Emotional, Less Deliberate

For journalist Kristina Dunz, author of the first AKK biography, the politician is a value conservative with a left-wing social policy heart, whose differences to Angela Merkel are more interesting than the similarities.

“She doesn’t wobble in her positions, even when criticized,” said Dunz. “She is more emotional … and not as slow and deliberate as Merkel. She is also more belligerent.”

AKK knows no one would believe her if she distanced herself too much from the woman who promoted her. She promises to keep the chancellor’s conciliatory approach to leadership—finding compromises that make everyone look good—but promises a more dynamic political style.

What will this look like in practice? An end, she vows, to the  “leaden” Merkel era of sitting out decisions or imposing “without alternative” decisions from above.

Instead her CDU will turn grassroots concerns into government policy, she says. As well as more dynamism vertically, she wants a horizontal transformation to re-invigorate the CDU’s various wings—from conservative to centrist—and revive the party’s profile as a catch-all, center-right Volkspartei .

That is the best way to beat back the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and pull back lost CDU voters, she says.

No Moment to Rest

If elected CDU leader on Friday, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer will have no moment to rest. She has to give back hope to the party—struggling on 28 percent in polls and down five points from the 2017 election disaster result.

Beyond revitalizing the party, and preparing it for two difficult state elections next year, she has to accommodate herself with Angela Merkel, who plans to stay on as chancellor until 2021.

Finally, the new CDU leader has to revive a grand coalition lumbering under its own leaden reputation. Its coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), are down to just 17 points in opinion polls and skidding from one identity crisis to the next. After taking six months to get into office, it is far from a given that this government will last the distance. If not, AKK—already thrust into the CDU leadership with little warning—could find herself running for the chancellery sooner than expected.

And, almost without planning it, the Saarland politician could soon find herself at the helm of the EU’s largest and most powerful member state—and effectively heading the bloc itself—in uncertain of times.

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© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Here’s the legend: in 1979, twelve young conservatives were on a boys-only jolly a few thousand feet above the Andes mountains. Aboard a night flight from Caracas to Santiago de Chile, the ambitious merrymakers, all members of the Junge Union, the even-more-conservative youth organization of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), were up past bedtime and drinking too much whisky.

As naughty boys like to do, they made a pact: members of the club would not compete against each other for a political position and would never publicly call on another to resign. Whether it was a drunken joke or not, the loyalty of the Andes Pact endured, and the male, white, West German, mainly Catholic members met regularly to reaffirm their political brotherhood—and occasionally increase their numbers. A former CDU parliamentary leader named Friedrich Merz was inducted in 2005.

The Andes Pact, whose existence was first reported by DER SPIEGEL in 2003, has wielded considerable power in Germany: its members became cabinet ministers, state premiers, even presidents—but not a single one ever became chancellor. One by one, each man’s pretensions to the highest office were thwarted by the wily brilliance of a certain Protestant woman from East Germany.

That’s the legend, anyway. It’s as good an explanation as any for why a 63-year-old millionaire consultant who retired from politics nine years ago re-surfaced within minutes of Angela Merkel’s announcement at the end of October that she was stepping down as CDU leader in December. The whisky-drinking boys from the Latin American airplane want what’s theirs, and Merz is their chosen man.

The other explanation is more Shakespearean, or “Old Testament,” if you believe Michael Koss, political scientist at Munich University: “A tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye,” he says darkly. For Merz, it seems, has a grievance against Merkel.

The Merkel-Merz Rivalry

In 2002, with an election looming, Merz fell victim to an ingenious chess move that CDU chairwoman Merkel hashed out with Edmund Stoiber, then leader of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). In exchange for the chancellor candidacy in the election, the aging Bavarian statesman promised Merkel the leadership of the CDU/CSU’s parliamentary group, the office that Merz had held for two and a half years.

Stoiber was duly swept from history by rambunctious Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, while Merz was relegated to the backbenches without ceremony. Merkel, meanwhile, consolidated her power and united the roles of CDU party leader and CDU/CSU parliamentary leader. Three years later, she won the first of four general elections, and seven years later Merz gave up his seat in parliament. His last notable contribution was a simplified “beermat” tax reform proposal, a classic populist, neo-liberal move (a tag he rejects), which never happened. Apparently all this stuck in Merz’s craw. Now he’s back, Merkel’s Banquo, the ghost of a wronged man suddenly materialized to torment a weary monarch.

“He is really a man on a mission,” says Kai Arzheimer, political scientist at Mainz University. “He always had a grudge against Merkel because he didn’t agree with the whole policy of moving towards the political center, whether it was refugee policy, the minimum wage, or the abolition of nuclear power—all these policies he didn’t like.”

That’s also why, despite being out of politics for nearly a decade, Merz has remained a touchstone for the aging nostalgics in the CDU membership, according to Arzheimer. “I think he’s especially popular with middle-aged men in the party, who have this feeling that they have been sidelined for the last 15 years,” he said. “I wouldn’t call it a conspiracy, but there have always been calls for bringing him back.”

The day of destiny is December 7, at the CDU’s party conference in Hamburg, when 1,001 delegates get to elect the next leader. It’s been a long time since these officials have had such a fateful choice to make, because, given that the CDU remains Germany’s biggest and most successful party, whoever they choose could well take her place in the chancellery after the next election.

Merz’s strongest rival is Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Merkel’s natural heir both in temperament and politics, which only makes the CDU’s choice even more crucial. The German conservatives’ future’ will either be the Merkel way (sober centrism, a careful husbanding of options, leavened with social liberalism) or it will be what Merz himself, true to the Andes Pact, has been styling as a return to the CDU’s “trademark values”: law and order, traditional families, and protecting businesses. Despite his protestations that he would serve Merkel loyally, it seems unlikely that the CDU under his leadership will be able to maintain its already tense relationship with the Social Democrats for very long.

A View to the Right

Although Merz has made overtures to the Greens, praising the party that has surged in the polls and leaving open the possibility of forging a coalition, all signs suggest that Merz’s campaign is, as Koss put it, “about AfD voters only. More specifically, he will make sure to be (or at the very least seem to be) more tough on migration.” In fact, despite his studied insistence that his aim is to keep the CDU as “the party of the center,” Merz recently adopted one of the far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) favorite tactics: make a statement that undermines a basic pillar of the German state, then row back on it after the inevitable uproar has died down.

That happened in late November, when Merz suggested that the article of the German constitution that guarantees asylum to refugees needed to be re-considered. The AfD accused him of plundering their policies, other CDU figures distanced themselves, and the Social Democrats branded Merz as “Trump light.” Naturally Merz took the remark back the next day, saying that all he meant was that the issue of migration had to be “resolved at the European level.” In other words, German law needed to be in harmony with the rest of the EU.

Merz has made no secret of the fact that he wants to win back CDU voters who have drifted to the AfD in the past five years, and despite insisting that his battles with Merkel have not left any scars, he is not above criticizing the party the CDU has become under her leadership. In an interview with the Deutschlandfunk radio station, he accused his party of having accepted the AfD’s election successes of the past few years “with a shrug.” (That irritated Kramp-Karrenbauer, who called Merz’s remarks “a slap in the face” for all CDU campaigners who had countered the AfD’s “hate speech.”)

But a leaked AfD strategy paper on Merz showed that the far-right aren’t really that worried about him. In fact, and somewhat paradoxically, all the characteristics that make him so attractive to old CDU party members also make him a liability in the fevered minds of the populists. His pro-Europeanism (he was once an MEP and recently criticized the German government for failing to respond to French President Emmanuel Macron’s calls for more European integration), his ties to big business (he is an executive at BlackRock, the biggest asset management company in the world) and his highly successful career as a finance lawyer (he would be the first German chancellor to own a private jet) mean that he can easily be dismissed as another elitist. The attack lines might be different, but Merz will present no less of a target for the AfD than Merkel.

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© REUTERS/Boris Roessler/Pool

Over the coming weeks, German chancellor Angela Merkel will need to reinvent herself. Against her sober, cautious nature, she will have to reach out to the public to explain her vision of Germany’s future. She will have to draw the big picture and appeal to people’s emotions as well as their common sense. In other words: she needs to re-establish trust in her leadership to rally the public around her faltering chancellorship.

Does she have it in her? Doubts are in order. A leopard does not change its spots, and Merkel doesn’t believe in visions. Also, she has never been an orator who is able—or even aspires—to play on an audience’s emotions. After 13 years in office, she is immensely experienced but also quite tired. Ambition has been replaced by duty, and while a sense of duty is a powerful motive, it is not a good driver for a personality makeover.

Yet nothing less than Merkel’s leadership is at stake. On October 14, a regional election will take place in the state of Bavaria; two weeks later, the state of Hesse follows. Her conservative bloc is expected to suffer losses, and part of the blame is certain to be laid at her door.

At the same time, the election in Bavaria, in particular, offers some hope of a new start for Merkel. There, it is not her own party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is standing, but its more right-wing “sister party,” the Christian Social Union (CSU).

The CSU has governed Bavaria with an absolute majority for nearly all of the past 60 years, but this time, polls say, it will only be getting between 33 and 35 percent of the votes. Of course, the blame game has already started, and one culprit has already been identified: Horst Seehofer, head of the CSU and interior minister in the federal government in Berlin.

Troublemaker Seehofer

Twice over the past four months, Seehofer nearly brought down Merkel’s coalition—out of personal resentment against the chancellor, because he was opposed to her open-door policy for refugees from the beginning, and because he thought that a hard stance in Berlin would benefit the CSU at the polls.

Like in the Greek myths, however, the doom that Seehofer had been trying to avoid is coming down on him all the harder. Bavarians did not appreciate Seehofer’s brinkmanship, and the Catholic wing of his CSU did not approve of the way he instrumentalized the refugee issue. Short of a miracle, Seehofer will have to step down as party leader of the CSU on Sunday. That means that Merkel may also be able to get rid of him as interior minister.

With new personnel and some clear words about her overall strategy and goals, Merkel could try to re-launch her government. It may be her last chance to do so—even within her own party, her authority is crumbling.

At the end of September, her CDU/CSU Bundestag caucus went against her wishes and voted in a surprise candidate as group leader. Ralph Brinkhaus, a finance expert virtually unknown outside the corridors of the Bundestag, replaced Volker Kauder who had been Merkel’s very close aide and confidant for nearly 20 years.

Ever since, Merkel’s critics are growing bolder. One of them is Norbert Röttgen, head of the foreign affairs committee in the Bundestag, whom Merkel fired as environment minister back in 2012. In a well-publicized interview, Röttgen spoke about a systemic crisis in Germany that would worsen if Merkel did not change her approach. He also proposed putting a limit on the chancellor’s term of office—not exactly a subtle hint.

The End of Merkel?

Merkel has repeatedly confirmed that she wishes to remain chancellor for a full fourth term until 2021, and she has also made it clear that she believes the party chairmanship and the chancellery go hand in hand. This makes the CDU’s party congress in early December crunch time for Merkel, as delegates will vote on their leadership. Should they decide not to renew Merkel’s mandate as CDU chairwoman, it is hard to see how she could remain chancellor.

So far, it appears unlikely that Merkel will be replaced. Two Christian Democratic politicians have announced their candidature for the party chairmanship, but both are nobodies who aren’t considered to stand any chance at all.

More credible competitors are still hesitant about entering the race. For Merkel, the most dangerous is Jens Spahn, who serves as health minister in her coalition. Spahn, who (unusually) recently visited US national security advisor John Bolton in Washington, is very popular with the more conservative part of the party base and he has always made clear that he wants to become chancellor one day.

How will this play out? Most probably, Merkel can still pull it together, if she puts her mind to it. But the congress of the Junge Union, the youth organization of CDU and CSU, last weekend offered a taste of a different future. Merkel received good applause for a good speech. But Spahn, calling out for “a patriotism in keeping with our time,” was feted with standing ovations.

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© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

At the height of the German government’s latest coalition struggle, infratest dimap, a well-respected polling institute based in Berlin, dropped a bombshell. For the first time ever, the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a party turning ever more xenophobic, nationalist, and revisionist, has overtaken the Social Democrats (SPD) in a nation-wide poll. With 18 percent of the votes, it now appears to be second only to Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU/CSU block.

“The SPD overtaken, now we’re targeting the CDU,” one of the AfD’s leaders, Alice Weidel, gloated on Facebook.

The SPD is being hit particularly hard. According to infratest dimap, it is now down to 17 percent. But all three coalition parties in Merkel’s government are being hammered for the power games they’ve been indulging in over the past several months. The latest example is the squabble over Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the domestic intelligence service; the controversy has badly tarnished the government’s reputation.

It’s a convoluted story, but let’s try to keep it short: it started when Maassen, a critic of Merkel’s open-door policy for refugees in 2015, appeared disloyal to the chancellor in a newspaper interview he gave in early September. His boss, interior minister Horst Seehofer, who fiercely dislikes Merkel and her liberal policies, protected and possibly even encouraged him.

Beware the Bavarian Election

Merkel should have gotten rid of Maassen, but she didn’t dare to: his patron Seehofer is head of the CSU, Merkel’s Bavarian sister party, which is under huge pressure ahead of a regional election in Bavaria on October 14. Seehofer could very well have decided to break up the Berlin coalition.

So instead, Merkel’s junior partner, the SPD stepped in and demanded Maassen’s head for being too soft on the right-wing extremists. However, in a first coalition crisis meeting in mid-September, SPD party leader Andrea Nahles committed a major strategic error: she agreed to have Maassen promoted to state secretary in the interior ministry, just to get rid of him as head of the domestic intelligence service.

What ensued was a huge outcry not only from SPD members but from Germans across the political spectrum—many of them earning far less in total than the pay hike of €2500 a month that Maassen would have received with his promotion.

Nahles backtracked, apologized publicly for her lack of judgment, and asked Merkel and Seehofer to reconsider the Maassen decision. On September 23, the leaders of the three parties met again and decided that Maassen would be transferred to the interior minister as a special advisor without any promotion or pay raise.

Even more remarkably, Merkel also said sorry for getting it wrong. “We thought too little of what people rightly think when they hear about a promotion,” the chancellor said, adding uncharacteristically, “I very much regret that this could happen.” Only Seehofer—the man behind two major crises in only six months that this coalition has been in government—saw no reason to say sorry.

Neither apology nor lack thereof is likely to make any of the three parties regain the trust of the public in a hurry. If elections were to take place this Sunday, Merkel’s conservative block would only be getting 28 percent of the vote—their worst result ever.

Still, the CDU/CSU remains Germany’s largest political force, giving it first chance at the chancellery even if coalition building is becoming ever more complicated. For the SPD, it’s a very different story. According to infratest dimap, Germany’s oldest political party with a proud history of more than 150 years has slipped to third place only just before the Greens.

Exactly 20 years ago, the Social Democrats got Gerhard Schröder elected as chancellor with more than 40 percent of the vote. Now, the chance of ever regaining the chancellery seems remote. The SPD is torn between an urgent wish to leave a coalition government that has caused it so much pain, and an enormous fear of what new elections might mean for the party.

In this decline, the SPD is following the same downward trend that social democratic parties across Europe have witnessed, from France’s Parti Socialiste under Francois Hollande and Italy’s Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party to Greece, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. Everywhere, Social Democrats have failed to offer answers to the fears caused by globalization and migration, increasing inequality, rising rents, and low pensions.

Anti-Establishment Message

Parties like the AfD don’t have an answer either (except to keep migrants out), but given the weakness of Merkel’s government, they don’t have to provide solutions. Every single hour that Merkel, Seehofer, and Nahles spent on the Maassen affair helped to reinforce their anti-establishment message.

At the same time, AfD politicians have become very skillful at creating just the right amount of public outrage over their xenophobic and revisionist statements. They are radical enough to keep politicians, the media, and the electorate talking about their message, but not so much that it would rattle their own political base.

Of course, the other party leaders aren’t blind or deaf to the AfD’s success. After the Maassen affair was finally resolved, Angela Merkel pledged to do everything possible to get her government to concentrate on substantive issues. Lars Klingbeil, secretary general of the SPD, even called for a completely new working mode in the coalition.

Good intentions, however, won’t replace the trust that has been lost. Two out of three Germans, another polling institute reported, do not believe that the leaders of Merkel’s coalition will ever work together again in good faith.

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© REUTERS/Axel Schmidt

Drinks and relief were flowing freely last Thursday evening in a beer garden in central Berlin, just across the river from the chancellery. Many of those enjoying a cool beer were German parliamentarians and their staff.

They had sneaked out of the Bundestag while waiting for the last vote on the federal budget—one of the final hurdles between them and their summer holidays. It was a welcome return to business, given that many feared their holiday plans might be in serious jeopardy.

A dramatic dispute over migration among Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU center-right conservative bloc had pushed the chancellor’s fourth-term grand coalition to the brink of collapse. In the end they deferred the row and narrowly dodged a snap election, meaning the summer holidays were back on. But many of the politicians and journalists departing Berlin for the Baltic coast, Bavaria, or further afield are doing so with a sense of dissatisfaction. Even by sedate Berlin standards, the new government is less twinkle- than treacle-toed.

It’s been a year since Germany’s federal election campaign began. Voters punished the CDU/CSU and their coalition partners, the center-left Social Democrats, at the polls, leaving the chancellor scrambling to form a government. After her first attempt to build a coalition with the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens fell apart, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the traumatized SPD to pull themselves together and go back into government. With huge reservations, and six months after election day, they did. Yet now, with barely 100 days in office, the current government has been all but paralyzed by the migration row.

And so President Steinmeier again warned the departing government ministers: stop the political games and get back to work, sooner rather than later. “People expect answers,” he told public broadcaster ZDF in a summer interview. “They want their daily problems to be solved.”

The Real Debate

He’s not the only one impatient at the pace—and priorities—in Berlin. A survey for public broadcaster ARD last week showed that migration, despite all the attention and emotion surrounding the topic, is not among Germans’ most pressing issues. Some 79 percent of those polled say they are concerned there aren’t enough nursing care staff to tend to Germany’s fast-aging population. Some 73 percent want more energy invested in education and schools. And 70 percent are concerned about a failure to address the lack of affordable accommodation in urban areas.

Tweeting those numbers last week, SPD general secretary Lars Klingbeil added: “And now let’s talk about a few other issues in the country, eh?”

These problems are not new. (The demographic time bomb in particular has been coming at us for years. Today, one in five Germans is over 65). But after their worst results last year since 1949, Berlin’s governing coalition parties know their survival next time out depends on delivering palpable improvement on these burning social issues.

With around 36,000 jobs unfilled in the nursing care field, many elderly homes around Germany have imposed a moratorium on new residents. To reverse that trend, a new €570 million plan is offering tax-free bonuses of up to €5,000 for care workers who return to the job—and €3,000 for new recruits.

Despite the huge demand for their services, the rules of supply and demand do not seem to have any effect on their pay. Studies show German care workers (mostly women) are poorly organized and subject to individual pay deals often agreed outside union collective bargaining. The result is that their profession is hugely unattractive, with hourly earnings of €10-14 an hour. That is well below the €17/hour German average—and this for shift-work with significant physical and mental demands.

Given how quickly Germany is aging, Berlin’s plans to add more care workers seem modest: the government promises to fill 13,000 extra jobs by 2019, just a third of the existing gap.

Addressing the lack of affordable housing will be no easier. Berlin has reintroduced a tax credit for home builders and buyers and, in addition, has promised to make €1.5 billion extra available to build social housing. But far more intervention, and greater coordination with the regions, will be required to reverse the trend of 2017, when the number of social housing units actually built shrank by six percent.

In 2017, a federal government report noted how a 50 percent boost in social housing spending in 2017 compared to the previous year “brought no corresponding rise in the building of social apartments,” even though rising rents are putting the squeeze on Germany’s low- and middle-income earners. Experts say that’s because government cash injections are often swallowed up by growing land and construction prices and low interest rates.

Many fear Berlin’s new tax subsidy for house buyers/builders, to a value of up to €12,000 per year, could also miss the mark, driving up prices rather than bringing into the property market some of the 55 percent of Germans who rent. And as Der Spiegel reported, the scheme will end up benefiting wealthier Germans who can afford to buy far more than low-income families who cannot. What’s more, the decentralized nature of Germany’s government leaves Angela Merkel with few levers to influence the pressing housing issue beyond tax subsidies and cash injections.

Education, the third priority for German voters, is another turf war. Post-war rules ensured that education was a matter for the 16 state capitals rather than the federal government. But for more than a decade, Berlin put state capitals under pressure to meet new budget deficit rules, ie cut school spending significantly. In a bid to reverse this, state governments have agreed to relax post-war rules to accept almost €11 billion in federal investment funds.

Plans are underway to renovate moldy schools and kindergartens, increase the number of all-day schools, and boost funds for improved digital infrastructure in education as well.

But the clock is ticking. The SPD has vowed to review the progress in a year’s time to date on the government’s program for the country. After squandering the year since the election, Germany’s grand coalition politicians should enjoy their holidays and come back well-rested. Come autumn, they’ll need to hit the ground running.

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© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

After her third late-night crisis meeting in four days, Chancellor  Angela Merkel looked understandably worse for wear on Monday when she announced an eleventh-hour deal with her rebellious Bavarian sister party to tighten migration policy and save her government.

The agreement emerged from a last-ditch attempt to prevent Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU) from implementing its own controls on their border with Austria against Merkel’s wishes. That threat had sparked an almighty row between Berlin and Munich that risked the rupture of the CSU’s seven-decade alliance with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

“After a tough struggle and some difficult days, we’ve found a really good compromise,” said Merkel. The deal salvages her chancellorship and fourth-term coalition, and will see her interior minister Horst Seehofer, the CSU leader, stay on in Berlin after he threatened to resign on Sunday evening.

“We agreed after very intense negotiations,” he said after the meeting. “This is a clear agreement to prevent illegal immigration in the future on the German-Austrian border.”

They agreed on so-called transit centers at three major crossings along the German-Austrian border, where asylum-seekers will be directed into closed camps; those who have been previously registered in other EU countries will be returned, as long as Berlin has an agreement with those countries (more on that here).

This week’s dramatic escalation caught some by surprise, but the dispute had been simmering since the 2015-16 “refugee crisis,” when Merkel–fearing a humanitarian disaster–declined to close German borders to more than one million asylum seekers on their way on the “Balkan route.” The CSU, based in Bavaria, the state where most asylum seekers were arriving, demanded a tougher stance. But it eventually fell in line behind Merkel. After both parties were trounced in last September’s federal election, the CSU fears a repeat drubbing in October’s state election in Bavaria and is scrambling to position itself as tough on migration.

Not Over Yet

But there are more challenges to Merkel’s government-saving compromise: It now has to be approved by the third party in her coalition, the Social Democrats (SPD).  Three years ago the center-left SPD rejected a similar proposal as “arrest zones.” On Tuesday, Katarina Barley, the federal justice minister who is from the SPD and will be involved in drafting legislation for the facilities, said she had more questions than answers. In particular: what happens to people who avoid the three border crossings and choose another entry point to Bavaria along the 819 kilometer green frontier?

The transit camps, whatever form they take, are not part of their coalition agreement and are highly unpopular with SPD left-wingers. On the other hand, after disastrous elections last year for Germany’s big parties, a tortuous six-month interregnum, and now the near government collapse, there is little appetite in Berlin for more turmoil—and far less for a snap election.

After weathering the refugee crisis on the frontlines in 2015, the CSU hopes its voters will forgive it for originally backing Merkel as hundreds of thousands entered the country through Bavaria.

Though asylum applications have dropped off significantly (68,000 so far this year compared to 746,000 in all of 2016), the CSU is confident that, by extracting a law-and-order pound of flesh from Merkel, it can win back voters from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

Following Orders

Seehofer stays on as interior minister and CSU leader, but at the mercy of the real strong man in Bavaria: state premier Markus Söder, another key figure in this government crisis. Seehofer now faces the difficult task of trying to restore some sort of working relationship with the CDU and Angela Merkel (after reportedly saying, in the throes of the dispute, that he “can’t work with this woman” anymore); but he must also follow orders from Söder in Munich if the approaching election requires further muscle-flexing.

Germany’s asylum agreement looks like a victory for the CSU over the chancellor. The fuzzy “transit center” euphemism marks a radical departure from Merkel’s liberal “we can manage this” approach to the refugee crisis in 2015.

Facing a darkening public mood on asylum as attacks committed by refugees have garnered high media attention–particularly after a high-profile murder-rape committed by a young Iraqi asylum seeker–Merkel yielded to her coalition partner to keep the peace. She saved her coalition and maintained her hand on the tiller.

But she is a diminished figure. Her party rallied to support her during the CSU’s attacks, but her authority is no longer absolute. It seems only a matter of time before an ambitious challenger overtakes her or, pre-empting such a move, she stands down in Berlin.

On the other hand German voters, while uncertain about Merkel’s record on migration, are unsure of whether there is any realistic alternative–or one that would be any more reliable. A poll last week showed that even in Bavaria, she was more popular than local strongman Markus Söder. In her own party there are many figures who feel best-suited to inherit the Merkel mantle, but none where the public agree.

Even during a crisis like this in Germany, it still seems to hold true that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.

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© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

It hasn’t been easy to follow German politics over the past two weeks. Angela Merkel’s CDU and its more conservative, Bavarian sister party, the CSU, have been holding “crisis meetings” nearly every day. Late Monday night, however, an agreement was reached that will stabilize the situation, at least temporarily, and prevent the collapse of the German government.

Here’s a shortish version: The ostensible core dispute was about how to handle “secondary migrants,” migrants who have already applied for asylum in another EU member-state, but who then make their way to Germany. (For context, fewer than 20,000 of these people have entered Germany so far this year; and from January to May 2018, 78,000 people applied for asylum in Germany, compared with 745,000 in the full year of 2016.) According to EU rules, the “Dublin regulation,” the first member-state an asylum-seeker enters is generally responsible for evaluating his or her asylum claim.

The CSU has always taken a harder line on refugees. Horst Seehofer, the party boss and, since April 2018, interior minister, wanted to turn away the secondary migrants at Germany’s border, rather than to try and often fail to return them once they were already in Germany, as is currently the case. Merkel rejected his plans, for fear that unilateral German action would push other member-states to tighten their borders too—the Schengen dominoes, as it were, would fall one by one. In mid-June she asked for more time to find a European solution. The CSU begrudgingly gave her two weeks, until the EU summit.

So Merkel went to an all-night European Council meeting on Thursday, and brought a “European solution” home to Berlin. The EU was to set up “controlled centers” inside the EU—it’s not clear where—to evaluate asylum-seekers claims; member-states would then take in migrants deserving of protection on a voluntary basis. The EU would “explore the concept” of closed camps in North Africa and the Balkans, and stump up more money for Libya and Turkey to deal with refugees themselves. Most relevantly for the spat with Seehofer, Merkel secured a number of bilateral deals with other member-states, including Spain and Greece, who agreed to take back secondary migrants from Germany, largely in return for financial support.

Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Was that enough to satisfy Seehofer? Were Merkel’s bilateral agreements wirkungsgleich (equivalent in effect) to Seehofer’s plans to simply turn away secondary migrants at the border? When the CSU leader threatened to resign on Sunday, it didn’t look like it. But another crisis meeting late Monday night brought about a fragile compromise between the two conservative sister parties, and Seehofer has decided to stay in office.

There are three points to the CDU-CSU deal. First, a new “border regime” on the German-Austrian border will prevent the arrival of refugees for whom “other member-states are responsible.” Second, there will be “transit centers” at the Germany border, where secondary migrants will be held, processed as if they never really entered Germany, and quickly deported to their member-state of arrival thanks to bilateral deals. Third, secondary migrants coming from member-states with whom Germany has no bilateral deal, such as Italy, will be turned away at the German-Austrian border under the terms of an agreement with Austria. Crucially, that deal has yet to be agreed upon.

A debate has exploded in Germany about the merits of the conservatives’ compromise. This is surely not the last time the CSU will challenge Merkel in order to score political points ahead of Bavarian state elections in October.

And will the plan work? Secondary migrants, some of whom risked their lives to cross the Mediterranean in a rickety smuggler’s boat, may not be deterred by spot checks on foreign-looking people at the German-Austrian border. They could cross another border into Germany, or sneak in through the forest, or allow themselves to be taken to a transit center only to disappear somewhere into the country. Transit centers are not prisons. If they were, Merkel’s coalition partner SPD wouldn’t accept them. As it is, Merkel’s grand coalition partner may have trouble accepting this tougher line on migration. Watch this space.

Consequences for the EU

What’s already clear is that the CDU-CSU compromise has consequences for the EU. Germany has no deal to return secondary migrations to Italy, the largest source of such migration. It is unlikely to get one, as Italy’s xenophobic interior minister, the far-right Lega leader Matteo Salvini, wants to stop migrants from entering Italy in the first place, not take more of them from Germany.

Nor is Austria eager to welcome the refugees Germany can’t return to Italy. The right-wing government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has already issued a statement: “Should this agreement become the German government’s position, we see that as prompting us to take action to prevent negative consequences for Austria and its population. The Austrian government is therefore prepared to take measures for the protection of our southern border in particular.” Said plainly, that means Vienna is ready to turn back migrants on its borders to Italy and Slovenia—who, again, aren’t eager to be “waiting rooms” for migrants who want to move north.

It is a pernicious myth that Merkel believes in a Europe of uncontrolled migration, where refugees fleeing terror and economic migrants alike are free to go where they please. Nor did she “open Germany’s borders” in 2015. That September, with hundreds of thousands of people walking to Germany from Hungary, the decision she made was to keep the borders open, because Merkel believed in free movement within Europe and Germany’s humanitarian responsibility.

Since then, Merkel’s governments have cut deals abroad to reduce migration and tightened conditions for asylum-seekers in Germany. “Wir schaffen das” always meant “we can handle this”, not “we can do it!” It was less a progressive rallying cry than a determined appeal for calm and focus, and by and large, it worked.

Now, Merkel’s deals with both EU leaders and the CSU depend on voluntary support from member-states that don’t want to give it. Efforts to reform the Dublin regulation or distribute migrants across the EU are going nowhere. At the same time, the EU’s ramshackle migration infrastructure looks shakier than ever, despite irregular migration numbers falling.

Europe’s deals with third countries also raise troubling questions about how long people must stay in a camp, and under what conditions. And the talk of opening up legal immigration avenues for economic migrants is mostly just talk.

Merkel’s vague compromise with Seehofer is another step toward harder European borders, internal and external. That’s the trend in Europe these days.

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