© 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/Hannibal Hanschke

Here are three takeaways from the earthquake in German politics:

First, the next leader of Germany’s conservatives will be a man—and politically quite different from Chancellor Angela Merkel and her preferred successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who announced her resignation on Monday. Personally speaking, my money is on Jens Spahn, the current health minister, over the former CDU grandee Friedrich Merz and North Rhine-Westphalia State Premier Armin Laschet.

Second, the Christian Democrats’ new leader will face Herculean task. He will need to reconcile the different political wings and bridge the deep divide between East and West within the party. He also must find an effective way of countering the rise of the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Otherwise, Merkel’s CDU risks marginalization.

Third, please look at who has, at least for now, survived once again: Angela Merkel and her grand coalition. Both have weathered hard storms. Merkel is still looking cool and unruffled while her SPD coalition partners appear increasingly frazzled, but don’t count either out. Both the chancellor and her government could last until the end of their regular term in the fall of 2021.

Stability and Turmoil

Germany is a strange mixture of stability and turmoil these days. Despite numerous coalition crises, Merkel is well into her 15^th year in office at home and well respected, even admired abroad. A safe pair of hands if ever there was one, she is a safe haven from the rapid, profound changes that have upturned politics in most Western countries.

Germans largely share this view. Angela Merkel continues to be the country’s most popular politician—a truly astonishing feat after such a long time in office. At the same time, a quick survey showed, most Germans do not want her to change her mind about leaving the Chancellery and run for a fifth term in office. Even though they are risk averse, they are conscious of how stagnant the country has become under Merkel.

In late 2018, when she gave up the party leadership, Merkel also promised not to run for chancellor again. With her blessing, the CDU elected Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a centrist from the western state of Saarland, to lead the party. AKK, as she is known, also seemed likely to become Merkel’s successor in the chancellery.

Having Her Power and Eating It

But all too quickly, the fault lines of Merkel’s succession project became visible: you can’t have your power and eat it. Merkel was determined to hold on to control over her government as well as her legacy, and AKK wasn’t ruthless enough to challenge her. As a result, her authority over the party was weak. Of course, she made mistakes, too, both as party leader and later as defense minister. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s doomed proposal for an international security zone in Syria—made with no prior consultation even within the German government—is just one example.

Nevertheless, AKK might have continued and recovered if not for the political impasse in the small eastern state of Thuringia. Regional elections last autumn resulted in heavy losses for the state’s Christian Democrats, who were then faced with a devilish choice: vote for a government led by the formerly communist Left Party, join votes with the far-right AfD to elect a state premier, or accept that no coalition can be formed and call for new elections.

The face and leader of Thuringia’s AfD is the right-wing extremist Björn Höcke, a wily player who managed to lure the CDU deputies into jointly voting for a Liberal candidate. For the first time, a mainstream politician in Germany gained office due to votes from the AfD. Outrage ran high, and the new state premier resigned after only a day. But for AKK, who proved unable to enforce her ban on fraternizing with the AfD, the damage was done. It didn’t help that Merkel interfered from abroad, calling the vote “unforgivable.” The Thuringia CDU has fallen in the polls since the scandal , while the Left Party is gaining support.

Kramp-Karrenbauer threw in the towel on Monday. In her statement, she included a sharp dig at Merkel. “Separating the chancellery from the party chairmanship, the open question of who will be candidate for the chancellery, this weakens the CDU,” she said.

Not So Quick

Yet AKK did not call for a quick changeover of power. According to the timetable she presented, she plans to remain in office as party leader of the CDU until the next regular congress in December. At that gathering, the CDU would choose a new chair, who would also be nominated as top candidate for the next elections. Merkel and her coalition government could remain in place until the autumn of 2021, according to AKK’s plan.

Can the CDU’s leadership issues wait that long? Possibly not, but Merkel’s would-be successors also recognize the dangers of being nominated too far ahead of an election. On Monday, Spahn, Merz, and Laschet all showed a great deal of restraint in claiming the top job.

Whoever it will be, whenever it happens—the new CDU leader’s job is not going to be easy. After nearly two decades of Merkel’s centrist policy, the party is torn between continuing along her line or moving back to the right. There is no consensus, either, about how to deal with the AfD’s success particularly in eastern Germany. After Thuringia, the next regional elections in the East will take place in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, very possibly leading to similar political impasses.

But after this Monday, one thing at least is clear: whether it takes 18 months or less, for Angela Merkel and the stable state she has come to represent, the countdown has begun. Brace for change in Germany and Europe.

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© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

On Saturday morning, Chancellor Angela Merkel published her weekly video podcast. This one was about the importance of craftmanship in Germany, and how much it does for the vocational training of young people. Routine, happily boring routine, established over hundreds of Saturdays since Merkel first took office in 2005.

On Saturday night, the chancellor’s routine ended abruptly. Her junior partner in government, the Social Democratic Party, announced the result of its leadership vote: and—in a very unpleasant surprise for Merkel and arguably bad news for the SPD itself—the anti-establishment, anti-grand coalition faction won. As a result, the chancellor’s Saturday video messages may soon be history.

Instead of choosing Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a well-known and moderate politician who was strongly in favor of staying in government, SPD members voted for two virtual unknowns: Saskia Esken, a Bundestag backbencher, and Norbert Walter-Borjans, a former finance minister of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. These two got the vote because they promised to take the SPD out of the Merkel coalition unless government policy changed dramatically to the left.

„I don’t believe that the grand coalition is the right constellation in the long run,” Walter-Borjans explained in a television interview. “But we’re in there, and that’s the basis on which we have to say what needs to be done. And if there is a blockade mentality on the side of the coalition partner, then the decision has to be taken that this cannot continue.”

An Inexperienced Duo

Esken, 58, has been a member of the Bundestag since 2013, specializing in digital policy. Yet she has never held office in government or a top position in the party before. Walter-Borjans, 67, has no parliamentary experience, though he was finance minister in Germany’s most populous state for seven years, between 2010 and 2017. While he made a name for himself fighting tax fraud, he also gained a reputation as a reckless spender. Walter-Borjans ran deficits that were so high that the state’s constitutional court judged his budgets to be unconstitutional several times in a row.

Most of the party leadership as well as the SPD group in the Bundestag had been backing Scholz, so the winning duo may find it difficult to gain support in Berlin. Esken and Walter-Borjans are also hampered by the narrow margin by which they won the contest: of the 425,000 SPD members, only 55 percent took part in the run-off. Of those who did vote, 53 percent opted for Esken and Walter-Borjans. Scholz and his running mate Klara Geywitz won 45 percent of the vote.

Political observers think it was a kind of Brexit vote, motivated by an anti-establishment sentiment against what many SPD members see as a distant and unresponsive party elite in Berlin. Similar to the Brexit referendum, the margin for the winning side is small, which is likely to weaken the new leaders’ legitimacy and deepen divisions within the SPD even further.

It’s a disappointing result for all those who had hoped that holding grassroots elections would help unite and renew Germany’s oldest political party—a party that has seen its election results decline ever more rapidly since the early 2000s.

According to the most recent Forsa poll (taken before the leadership count was announced), the SPD stands at 14 percent of the vote, far less than Merkel’s conservatives (27 percent) or the Greens (22 percent). It is only just ahead of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (13 percent).

Conflicts Ahead

Walter-Borjans and Esken campaigned on a leftist agenda, calling for a huge boost in investment, more radical measures against climate change, and more generous subsidies for low pensions. They also want to introduce a wealth tax and raise the minimum wage to €12 per hour, a whopping 25-percent increase.

Many details remain open. The SPD will hold its annual party congress from December 6 to 8 to officially confirm Esken and Walter-Borjans in office. The two new leaders have announced that they will seek a vote about their agenda for the coalition. And while delegates are unlikely to back every measure that their two new leaders have proposed, some will certainly pass, leading to a massive conflict within Germany’s governing coalition.

Merkel’s conservatives, who are caught in a leadership struggle of their own, made it clear that they have no intention of giving in to any new demands from the SPD. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the embattled head of the Christian Democratic Union, pointed to the coalition agreement the SPD signed two years ago. “For the CDU, that’s the basis of the deal,” she said. “On this basis, we are willing to enact policy for Germany.”

A possible scenario is a truce over a Christmas and a blow-up early in the new year. If the SPD ministers walk out, Merkel could choose to continue with a minority government, a first in post-war German history—or call new elections.

A minority government would be unstable and unlikely to last to the end of the regular term in 2022, but it would provide Germany and Europe with an experienced leader—Angela Merkel—during the country’s EU presidency in the second half of 2020. More likely, however, are new elections, which could take place in March at the earliest. As the polls stand now, the result could be a coalition between conservatives and Greens, another first at the national level.

But Angela Merkel won’t be chancellor of that government.

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© REUTERS/Christian Mang

Gretchen, from Berlin, wanted “a clear CO2 price.” Her school-age daughter held tight to her poster, too shy to answer. Tim, from Florida, stood nearby in a Bernie Sanders t-shirt with a sign about the Green New Deal and said he was simply “here to support the climate strike.” On the other side of the Brandenburg Gate, Simon was handing out Fridays for Future flyers but admitted he “wasn’t expecting much.” An older woman nearby hoped that the German government would offer more than “superficial solutions.”

This was at 12:30 p.m. at the Brandenburg Gate, the center of the climate protests that drew about 100,000 people in Berlin and even more across Germany. If everything went to plan, Chancellor Angela Merkel would have been announcing Germany’s new “climate protection package” at the same time—but the leaders of her Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) had been up until the early morning hammering out the details.

Merkel, flanked by all of the grand coalition heavyweights, finally took the podium at Berlin’s Futurium two hours later. She acknowledged the scale of the climate crisis and said she was impressed with Greta Thunberg’s call to “unite behind the science.” SPD Finance Minister Olaf Scholz didn’t mince words either: “With the climate protection packet, we are taking this seriously… Fridays for Future has shaken us awake.”

Not Doing Its Bid

But are the announced measures enough to satisfy Gretchen and Simon, to keep Germany on track to do its part to uphold the Paris Agreement? It doesn’t look like it.

The key element of the package is a pricing system for emissions from the transport and building sectors. Through an emissions trading system, Germans will have to pay for each ton of carbon dioxide they emit. For example, heating companies and petrol stations will have to buy permits for the emissions they cause by selling heating oil and gasoline, thus raising prices for consumers and encouraging more sustainable behavior.

However, a ton of CO2 will cost only €10 in 2021 before increasing to €35 in 2025. That translates into an extra 3 cent tax on every liter of gasoline in 2021, but because the tax subsidies for long-distance commuters will also be increased by 5 cents per kilometer, gasoline will in some cases be cheaper in 2021 than it is today. Although governments always have to consider the social impact of climate policy, it is certainly a curious decision to subsidize driving to work rather than just returning money to low income groups—whether people bike, drive, or walk.

As a bevy of critics have already pointed out, the price on CO2 is dramatically lower than what scientists, behind whom Merkel wants to “unite,” are calling for. The German Environment Agency, which provides the government with scientific advice, has advocated a carbon price of €180 per ton. Two of Germany’s most esteemed climate think tanks, the Mercator Research Institute and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Research, urge a price of €35-70 in 2020 and €70-180 by 2030.

For reference, Sweden taxes carbon at about €110/ton; Switzerland is discussing a carbon price floor of over €100/ton. In the US, Exxon, Shell, and BP are lobbying for a $40/ton tax.

Merkel admitted the carbon price system was “a compromise, no doubt about it.” Compromise is the art of politics; chancellors don’t just read scientific papers and force them through as policy. The thing is, these numbers aren’t even in the same ballpark. Those the chancellor dismissed as “impatient young people” won’t think much of the measure.

Climate activists will also be disappointed with the move to reduce the so-called renewable reallocation charge or EEG-Umlage, which raises the price paid to producers of renewable energy. In this instance, the government has a stronger argument. With the price of carbon in the EU emissions trading system increasing—unlike the complementary German system announced today, the European version covers industry and electricity generation—European producers of high-carbon products like steel, cement, or chemicals are at a significant competitive disadvantage vis-á-vis foreign manufacturers. Until the European Union starts taxing carbon at the border, the price of electricity can only go so high before industry must move abroad or shut down. European Commission President-elect Ursula von der Leyen has already expressed her support for a carbon border adjustment tax.

Incentives, Regulations, Bans

The other measures are a mix of price incentives and outright regulation or bans. For example, the government will reduce the value-added tax on train tickets from 19 to seven percent. At the same time, the tax on domestic flights will be increased. It will also be forbidden to build new oil heating units after 2025, and the government will help pay for customers to switch to climate-friendly alternatives.

Merkel had the courage to admit that her government’s previous climate policy has failed: Germany will miss the climate targets for 2020 that a previous Merkel government set in 2007. To avoid this happening again, the “climate cabinet” will continue to meet in the future and there will be yearly monitoring of the country’s progress.

Carbon pricing, tax incentives, bans on especially unsustainable behavior—these are all sensible measures. And with so many world leaders still denying climate science, it’s hard to be too critical of a center-right government that acknowledges the problem and spends its political capital raising taxes, for example on flights and petrol.

Standing by the Schwarze Null

Yet one is left feeling that the deeds do not match the words about the threat facing future generations. Finance Minister Scholz said the package would cost €54 billion by 2023. No small sum, though Merkel reiterated that the government “stands by the schwarze Null”, Germany’s policy of avoiding budget deficits.

At a time when investors are paying the German government for the privilege of lending it money, and the country appears to be headed for a recession, it is astonishing that Merkel’s government is unwilling to consider borrowing money to address what the chancellor calls a “challenge to humanity.” While no one expected the coalition to announce it was immediately giving up the cherished schwarze Null, there might have been a hint that it is time to change direction, to change Merkel’s legacy and put successors in a better place to cut emissions once the low-hanging fruit is all gone.

Instead, after 12 years of failing to hit climate targets, the government spent months working on a CO2 price that the directors of Environmental Action Germany and Greenpeace call, respectively, “laughable” and “miles behind the Paris Agreement obligations.”

Merkel will, then, go down in history as the climate chancellor. In every book written before 2010.

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© REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

Are today’s right-wing populists in Germany using the same language as Adolf Hitler? An interesting journalistic experiment with Björn Höcke, leader of the most radical faction within the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), certainly suggests so.

Höcke, 47, was a history teacher before entering politics and turning into the AfD’s far-right star. He is an intelligent, well-educated man who knows what he is doing when he speaks about the “thousand-year Germany” and calls the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a “memorial of shame.”

More moderate AfD leaders—who have since left the party—have tried in vain to get Höcke expelled from the AfD for his revisionist, racist views and his closeness to neo-Nazi groupings. Instead, it is the party that has become more radical, particularly in eastern Germany, where it is most successful.

In regional elections on September 1, the AfD received 27.5 percent of the vote in Saxony and 23.5 percent in Brandenburg. Another strong showing is expected when Thuringia goes to the polls on October 27. Under Höcke’s leadership, the state’s AfD can expect up to 25 percent of the vote—a result that would certainly accelerate the radicalization of the party as a whole.

An Unusual Interview

Against this backdrop, Germany’s ZDF television received a lot of attention with an unusual interview with Höcke. To prepare for it, the reporter took two quotes from Höcke’s book Nie zweimal in denselben Fluss (“Never twice in the same river”) and showed them to AfD deputies in the Bundestag. These were then asked on camera to judge whether the quote originated with Höcke or with Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

“A few corrections and small reforms won’t be enough, but the German absoluteness will guarantee that we will tackle the matter thoroughly and fundamentally,” the first quote said. “Once the turning point has come, we Germans will not stop half-way, and then the mounds of debris of modernity will be eliminated.”

Most of Höcke’s fellow AfD members started laughing when asked about the origins of the quote. Not one of them could answer. “No, I am not going to commit myself,” said Jens Maier, a leading far-right figure from Dresden. “But if I did, I would rather say from Mein Kampf but not from Mr. Höcke.”

Höcke’s second quote did not fare any better. “The longing of the Germans for a historical figure, who will once again heal the wounds of the people, overcome the strife, and put things in order is deeply rooted in our soul.”

So was it Hitler or Höcke? “I don’t know,” answered one AfD deputy. “I can’t answer that,” a second one said. The third interviewee took a bit longer. “I won’t be able to answer that question, because I did not read Mein Kampf, and whether it’s from Höcke, I don’t know.”

Interestingly, not one of the AfD politicians took offense at being asked to compare a 20^th century dictator responsible for murdering millions of Jews and starting World War II with their fellow party member. Nor did any of them think to warn Höcke about the ZDF journalist’s line of enquiry.

“Too Poetic Sometimes”?

When confronted with these answers, Höcke was clearly surprised. As the reporter showed him his fellow party members on a tablet, he gave a cautious smile. A pity that they didn’t read his book, he said. “I think it’s good that we have politicians again, who have the courage to express themselves in an original way and use a language that sometimes is too poetic,” Höcke added. “This must be possible.”

The interview with Höcke continues for several minutes more. The reporter points to occasions when Höcke has used Nazi terminology like “Lebensraum” or “degenerate,” while Höcke denies there is even such a thing as Nazi speak.

Finally, Höcke’s press spokesman intervenes. He explains that Höcke was not expecting any such questions and has answered in an “overemotional” way. He then asks the reporter to repeat the interview. The ZDF journalist refuses, however, and publishes the original version despite Höcke’s threats of “massive consequences.”

A Political Paradox

So what are the lessons from this interview? The first one is an insight into how far the AfD, a party founded as a conservative, euroskeptic movement, has moved toward the far-right. Höcke’s Facebook account shows his supporters firmly behind him (“Great guy, did everything right”). Not a murmur, either, from the national leadership of the party in Berlin.

Yet—and here’s the second lesson—what plays well in eastern Germany may not work for the western part of the country. Here, polls show the AfD stagnating at around 12 percent, only half of what it scores in the east. And even among those 12 percent, the share of Höcke supporters is far smaller.

The result is a political paradox: with its astonishing success in the east, the AfD may be risking its ambitions at the national level. Easterners may be more radical, but western Germans have the numbers.

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© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Klaus Wowereit, Berlin’s partying ex-mayor, was once asked what kind of champagne he preferred. His reply: “The free kind.”

In the spring of 2018, with that in mind, I made a wager with a member of Angela Merkel’s government that her fourth administration would not run its full term. The government member, out of a sense of loyalty, insisted it would last until 2021. In the spirit of fun, we agreed a bottle of champagne for whoever was proved right. As Germany’s federal government limps into its second summer break, my inner Klaus Wowereit is already licking his lips.

On August 1, 2019, Merkel will have been chancellor for 5,000 days. The question hanging over political Berlin this summer is: how many more? The German leader has pledged to honor her promise to voters and complete her fourth term. That would see her pull equal with her mentor, Helmut Kohl.

But just two years after his death, Germany’s unity chancellor would no longer recognize the political landscape his former protégée inhabits in Berlin. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is losing support. Its Social Democrat (SPD) grand coalition partner is now as weak in polls as the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is strong. As another sweltering summer looms, furious young Germans have forced climate change onto the political—and their voting parents’—agenda. That has buoyed the Green Party in some polls into first place among Germany’s political parties.

While Germany concedes it will miss its climate goals for 2020, its energy transition—going nuclear power-free in the following year—is still not certain. Meanwhile the climate in German cities is heating up thanks to a spiraling housing crisis. Digitalization is no longer a buzzword for German political speeches, but an existential threat to the country’s economic backbone, the automotive industry. Directly and indirectly, this industry is said to employ every seventh German, but so far, the industry’s e-mobility efforts pale compared to the time, money, and energy expended in covering its tracks on the diesel emissions fraud.

Europe’s Center Holds, For Now

The European elections saw the political mainstream hold its nerve—and lead—over the continent’s nationalist, populist challengers. But post-poll squabbling over the EU top jobs in Brussels and Frankfurt raises questions about how much energy will remain for real reform.

A year before Germany takes over the rotating presidency of the EU, Paris has lost patience with its most important ally and is looking for more pro-active partners. Meanwhile, the German chancellor has rebuffed repeated attempts by her colleagues to convince her to swap Berlin for Brussels, and bring some stability to the bloc both internally and externally as the relationships with both Russia and the United States become increasingly tense. After almost 14 years living a punishing schedule, she knows her physical limits. And, after a trembling spell in public in June, so, too, does everyone else.

So far the succession blueprint she put in place last December is not going to plan. Seven months after handing over the CDU chair to her preferred candidate, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, their unprecedented job-share has hit some bumps.

AKK, as she’s known here, has slipped—in just six months—from second most-popular politician in Germany to 11th place. Meanwhile the CDU has slid by up to nine points from its 2017 election result that already marked a historic low. Kramp-Karrenbauer was tetchy in her reaction to a blue-haired YouTuber who tore strips off CDU policy. She now admits she faces a busy summer recalibrating party policy, in particular on the climate front. She also has to decide whether having two power centers—her CDU headquarters and Merkel’s chancellery—are helping or hindering her efforts to lead.

But the question the two women leaders insist they will agree in a conciliatory fashion may be answered for them. Whenever the CDU leader or the chancellor look over their shoulder, they see Berlin’s equivalent to Banquo, the ghost in Macbeth: Friedrich Merz, a Merkel ally-turned-nemesis. He lost out on the CDU top job last December but remains the favorite of the CDU’s influential conservative camp. His regular media and public appearances, purring his loyalty to AKK, have the air of someone biding his time.

Transitioning Out of the Merkel Era

As political Berlin departs for a summer of discontent, the ripe whiff of stagnation is hanging over the German capital. On the domestic front, the coalition has delivered on many promises: lower healthcare premiums; €5 billion for kindergartens; an immigration law; worker-friendly labor reforms. But you know things are bad when coalition officials, at their summer garden parties, berate their guests that “the government isn’t as bad as its reputation,” and party spin-doctors insist that “nobody wants elections.”

There’s some truth in the latter statement. The CDU is unsure if its new leader is its ideal election candidate, while the SPD fears a wipeout. The Greens are struggling to build capacity commensurate to its new popularity, while the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the Left party are both stuck in the polls at just below their 2017 election results. Only the far-right AfD is keen, already anticipating poll triumphs in three autumn elections in eastern Germany.

And if, as expected, the CDU and SPD are hammered by voters in Saxony and Brandenburg on September 1, and later in Thuringia, the future of Berlin’s ruling coalition is looking anything but grand.

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Angela Merkel’s government is stumbling toward its end. Her junior coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), is in turmoil after party leader Andrea Nahles threw in the towel on June 2. Merkel’s own conservative bloc is suffering from the inexperience and gaffes of her chosen successor, the new CDU leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.

So watch out for early elections in the European Union’s most populous country this fall—which could possibly bring the first Green chancellor in German history to power. For the first time ever, one opinion poll showed the Greens overtaking not only the SPD, but Merkel’s CDU/CSU, too. The Green party is on a roll, boosted by an enormous surge of public concern over climate change and other environmental issues. But their meteoric rise is also the consequence of the weakness of those presently in power.

A forsa Trendbarometer poll published on June 1 saw the Greens at a staggering 27 percent of the vote, three times what the party got at the last federal election in 2017. The CDU/CSU would come a close second at 26 percent (minus 7 percent) and the SPD a distant third at 12 percent (minus 8.5 percent). “This is the latest culmination of a development that has been in the make for years: a loss of trust in the conservatives and in particular in the SPD, which is in danger of drifting into complete insignificance,” the head of the polling institute, Manfred Güllner, explained. (An Insa poll, published June 3, had the Greens at 25 percent, one point behind the CDU/CSU at 26 percent, with the SPD registering 14 percent.)

SPD in Disarray

For sure, the SPD—a party with a proud tradition reaching back more than 150 years—is in full disarray. Under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the last SPD politician to hold that office, it lost much of its soul when it grudgingly endorsed Schröder’s labor market and social benefits reforms. Since then, the SPD has been worn down as junior partner in three of Merkel’s four coalition governments.

When Nahles, 48, took over the chair of the SPD in September 2017, she was hailed as the last hope of a party that was sinking ever faster. It was also replacing its leaders at alarming speed (often enough with Nahles’ help—she was instrumental in getting rid of Franz Müntefering in 2009 and of Sigmar Gabriel in 2017).

Nahles has a brilliant analytical mind and huge experience both within the party and in government, yet her sharp rhetoric was often jarring even to SPD supporters. So when the European elections on May 26 went so terribly wrong for the SPD, Nahles got all the blame. Exhausted by the mobbing, she resigned as party and Bundestag group leader and announced her retirement from politics. “Thank you and take care,” she told journalists when leaving the SPD headquarters for the last time.

An interim party leadership consisting of three regional SPD politicians is now charged with mapping the way forward. This will include a discussion at the end of June over whether to continue the “grand coalition”, or GroKo (“Grosse Koalition”) under Merkel, that much of the SPD grass roots hate anyway.

Keeping Up Appearances

Merkel played it cool, at least initially. She did not believe that a change of leadership in the SPD was a signal of instability, the chancellor declared publicly. The SPD’s personnel decisions, she added, should not keep the government from doing its work. Yet even Merkel must have known how false those words sounded, given the sorry mess that her own party, the Christian Democrats, is in, too.

Back in December 2018, Merkel stepped down as CDU party leader, making way for Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. But AKK’s (as she is known) honeymoon was short. Merkel, enjoying rising personal popularity scores, showed absolutely no willingness to cede the chancellery to Kramp-Karrenbauer early. Nor did she exert herself in the European election campaign. Meanwhile, AKK made her own mistakes, trying to please the different groups within her party and mishandling social media.

Ironically, it’s the SPD’s tragedy that for now is stabilizing the CDU. The party’s establishment is keenly aware of how many mandates its stands to lose—and how easy it is to be drawn into the same kind of downward spiral that the SPD is experiencing. Not only the forsa poll suggests that voters who Merkel was able to attract by being more liberal than her party are now switching their support to the Greens.

But even if the CDU has every interest to avoid early elections, the coalition is not likely to outlast this year. “I believe it will last until the fall. But until Christmas—nobody can say,“ said Armin Laschet, the powerful state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia and one of the leading CDU contenders for Merkel’s succession.

Moment of Truth

The moment of truth is likely to come with regional elections scheduled in three eastern German states this fall. Here, disappointment with the governing parties has not benefitted the Greens as much as in the west; instead, the clear winner is the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

To make matters worse, the east German AfD groupings tend to be particularly radical, revisionist, and xenophobic, which will push the entire party even further to the right. Every vote for the AfD will weaken Merkel, whom the AfD depicts as Germany’s worst public enemy because of her policy on refugees in 2015/16.

In the elections in Saxony on September 1, the AfD is expected to come close to the ruling CDU; on the same day, the SPD will probably lose Brandenburg, one of its few remaining regional strongholds. The elections in Thuringia will follow six weeks later, but by then, the damage for Merkel’s coalition will probably have been done. The SPD, giving in to grass roots pressure, will probably pull out.

“No, they won’t stay,” said Wolfgang Merkel (no relation), a Berlin political scientist and long-time SPD associate. “At that stage it will be rational to say that we cannot stop the downswing while in government. We will have to try to find a new drive in an opposition role.”

The Greens Are Coming

Merkel could try to carry on, either in a new coalition with the Greens and the liberal FDP, or as head of a minority government. Neither is likely given the fact that the Greens will do everything to push for early elections to cash in on their extraordinary surge.

The result would likely be a historic first for Germany: a coalition between the conservatives and the Greens at the federal level (if the conservatives come in first), or the first Green chancellor ever (if the Greens win the pole position).

Robert Habeck, the party’s charismatic and charming poster boy, would be the obvious choice, but Annalena Baerbock, his co-leader at the head of the party, is credited with a cooler intellect and better people skills. So far, the Greens themselves have carefully avoided discussing who would be their candidate for the chancellery.

”Stop that chancellor nonsense,” Habeck keeps saying. It’s a sound strategy—don’t jinx it, and avoid raising hackles for as long as possible. However, given the quickly worsening state of Merkel’s coalition, the Greens may soon have to address that issue.

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SPD party leader Andrea Nahles resigned on Sunday after a disastrous week in which the Social Democrats won only 16 percent of the vote in the European elections (11.5 percent less than in 2014) and lost to the CDU in the city state of Bremen, a traditional party stronghold it has governed for over 70 years.

In the aftermath, a bitter debate erupted within the party over how to respond—and whether it was worth staying in government with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU if voters weren’t recognizing or satisfied with their work. Nahles, the person in the SPD leadership most supportive of the present “grand coalition,” or GroKo, initially went on the offensive, moving up the election for leader of the parliamentary group from September until Tuesday.

But by the weekend, it was to clear that Nashles simply didn’t have the support of her colleagues. The woman who spent 30 years working her way up the party ladder stepped down in a matter of days, having hung on to the job just a few months longer than her predecessor Martin Schulz.

How did it happen? The dust is still settling, but other Social Democrats have spoken openly about the infighting that went on behind closed doors. Members of a party promising “justice and solidarity” should “never, never, never again treat each other like we did in the past few weeks,” wrote Kevin Kühnert, the influential head of the party’s youth wing. Michael Roth, the minister of state for Europe, tweeted that some of his colleagues “should be ashamed of themselves.”

Even Nahles’ opponents had warm words for her. Merkel praised her “fine character,” FDP head Christian Lindner her “honesty and competence.” SPD supporters, meanwhile, drew attention to her concrete achievements, such as pushing through a national minimum wage against CDU opposition when she was labor minister in the previous coalition.

One Leaves, Three Enter

Evidently, though, these achievements did nothing to stop Germans from voting for the SPD’s competitors. The fact that the chancellor was introduced to graduating Harvard students last Thursday as the person who “introduced the minimum wage” says everything about the perils of being a junior partner in government. Citizens don’t always know who to blame—or who to credit.

The SPD does not yet have a replacement lined up; the party leadership will temporarily be held by three politicians: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern premier, Manuela Schwesig, Rhineland-Palatinate premier, Malu Dreyer, and the boss of the SPD in Hessen, Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel. As the most prominent Social Democrat on the federal level, Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz will certainly be in the mix for the top job, although on Sunday night appearing on talk show Anne Will, he said he wasn’t interested.

But that’s a personnel decision, not a decision about the future of the party or the coalition governing Germany as such. The SPD remains in an exceptionally difficult position: Can it afford to leave the government and risk triggering fresh elections at a time when it is well behind both the CDU and the surging Greens in the polls? Or, from another perspective: With the party stumbling from crisis to crisis and haemorrhaging support, can it afford not to?

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It’s a trigger word for many Germans. “Tempolimit”, or “speed limit,” can cause even quite reasonable people to see red. This, after all, is the land of the free, at least when it comes to speeding down the motorway. “Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger!” or “Freedom to drive for free citizens.” is the rallying cry for those who would defend that right.

Of course there are speed limits on many German roads and even on some motorways, but on 60 percent of autobahns, there are none. That makes Germany an exception among industrial nations. While it’s rare for most cars to actually reach their full speed potential, there is a fast lane where many drivers will try to push it to the max. As a result, motorists can find driving on a German autobahn a singularly terrifying or exhilarating experience, depending on what makes them tick.

The latest outbreak of Tempolimit fever was triggered by leaks from a working group on carbon emissions in transport, which account for 12 percent of the country’s total. The committee came up with a range of proposals, from a quota for e-cars to a hike in fuel taxes. But it was the inclusion of the speed limit that really raised hackles. The proposal was immediately pounced upon by politicians, interest groups, and the concerned citizenry. Talk shows and current affairs programs were devoted to it, as were countless column inches and gigabytes of online commentary.

How Fast Can You Go?

The most vociferous of those up in arms and to the barricades to defend the status quo was Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer, the man who had commissioned the working group. He exclaimed that talk of a speed limit was “contrary to all common sense.” Scheuer, it should be noted, is a member of the conservative Christian Social Union, which is a party based in Bavaria, home to BMW and many fine kilometers of autobahn. He was soon joined by Christian Lindner, the leader of the liberal Free Democrats, who tweeted that a Tempolimit would be just a symbol and an uncreative means to tackle climate change. “We need innovation, not re-education,” he said.

On the other side of the debate, the Green and the non-profit Deutsche Umwelthilfe—which has lobbied for a limit, estimating that it could cut an estimated 5 million tons of CO2 per year—welcomed the news of the speed limit proposal. Transport, the Umwelthilfe stated, was the only area in which emissions of greenhouse gases have continued to increase since 1990.

The police saw the potential for making roads safer. “We could save lives and prevent serious injuries,” Michael Mertens, deputy head of the police officers’ trade union, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. “Here in this country, some people drive completely legally at 200 or even 250 kilometers per hour,” he said. “Let’s be clear: this is madness. At this speed, nobody can control their car in stressful situations.”

An Issue of Freedom

Predictably, the car industry was quick to step in and pour cold water on the suggestion of a speed limit. Bernhard Mattes, the head of the powerful German Automotive Industry Association (VDA), cited the heated debate as an example of hysterical populism. Of course it makes sense that the car industry, a vital part of the German economy, would want to defend the “need for speed.”

Many Germans like fast cars, and the most powerful cars are usually pretty expensive. In 2017, according to Transport Ministry figures, 29 percent of cars registered in Germany had a maximum speed of more than 200 kilometers per hour. It’s also a useful marketing tool for selling abroad, as drivers can at least aspire to those full-throttle experiences when sitting behind the wheel of a car “made in Germany.”

But the debate also touches on a lot of other issues. In a highly regulated society, driving as fast as you can is seen as one of the last remaining free spaces. And many argue that it is even intrinsic to German identity, comparing it to the right to bear arms in the US—which would make a speed limit the equivalent of gun control. And while there actually is a slight majority in favor of a speed limit, the minority is committed and highly vocal. A recent poll showed that 51 percent of Germans are in favor of a limit of 130 km, while 47 percent were firmly against.

Fear of Populism

It is this sizeable minority that worries the political class. The leader of the Christian Democrats, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, quickly dismissed the talk of a Tempolimit as a “phantom debate.” Chancellor Merkel’s spokesman said there were more intelligent ways to reduce CO2 emissions.

Behind such statements is the very real fear that the far-right Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) could use the issue to increase their support base. After all, the AfD has already jumped on the bandwagon over the imposition of a ban on older diesel cars in several cities in a bid to tackle air pollution. The party was out in force at a recent protest in Stuttgart, where hundreds of people, many wearing yellow vests, gathered holding banners saying “Pro-diesel” and “Diesel drivers mobilize.” The protestors are furious that the diesel car ban has hit the resale value of their cars, which means they can’t afford to buy a new one.

The bans come on the heels of the Dieselgate emissions scandal over auto companies hiding illegal pollution levels from regulators, and the reaction shows just how fraught issues surrounding mobility and cars can become.

Yet the fact remains that Germany does need to tackle issues like air pollution in cities and find ways to meet its climate targets. Without the speed limit, the working group will have to come up with some real alternatives when it releases its report in March. Yet if those include something like higher taxes on fuel, then that could also provoke protests. After all, in France it was just such a hike that triggered the gilets jaunes movement.

So while the Tempolimit is parked for now, it’s an issue that will undoubtedly come vrooming back onto the political agenda in the not too distant future. 

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