Dead Chancellor Walking

Merz is finished. There’s no good way to get rid of him.

Now, finally, everyone can see the truth of Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Since late 2024, I’ve had to read a lot of nonsense about this man. People have hailed Merz as our centre-right saviour who would put right three years of failed Green energy policy. Merz’s allies tried to sell him as a skilled foreign policy operator and foremost European Trump whisperer who would persuade the Americans to maintain their support for Ukraine in the war against Russia. Some of my own readers insisted that Merz was a nefarious Blackrock functionary who would get up to all manner of deviousness once he had the run of the chancellery.

None of that was remotely true. Merz has always been what I said he was from the beginning – an incompetent politician, a stubborn and clueless man with no plan, no strategy and no real ambition for anything beyond being Chancellor. He continues the steady devolution I have seen in German politics throughout my adult life, a devolution according to which every successive head of state plumbs new depths of idiocy, proving that everything can always get worse. Merz makes Angela Merkel seem a political genius by comparison and he has spared even Olaf Scholz’s clowncar government the curse of being the biggest shitshow in the history of the Federal Republic.

Friedrich Merz has the worst approval ratings any pollster has ever detected; only 14% of Germans believe that he is the right man for the job. His authority within his own party has decayed so thoroughly that even obtaining the resignation of a disliked deputy General Secretary proved to be nearly impossible for him and the occasion for new public embarrassment. Twenty Union MPs have already rebelled against the tax reforms proposed by Merz and his coalition partners, the Social Democrats. Further mutinies brewing in committee will likely derail the entire November budget vote. As if that were not enough, just today the powerful leader of the Parlamentskreis Mittelstand (the “Parliamentary Group for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises”) all but demanded that Merz fire his Labour Minister, the Social Democrat Bärbel Bas – a move that would spell the end of the coalition.

Merz can’t appear in public without detractors spawning from some parallel universe to boo and heckle him off the street. No Union politician presently running for office wants to be seen anywhere near him, but the Merz curse is powerful even when you keep the man out of sight and hundreds of kilometers away. If present polls are to be trusted, the CDU will see their worst-ever result in any election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern this Sunday. There exists a strong possibility that the Union won’t even make it over the 5% hurdle for representation in the Landtag. The Sachsen-Anhalt debacle was bad enough; Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is shaping up to be even worse.

Even those not mired in campaigns have learned to avoid their cursed Chancellor. On the evening of 6 September, Merz invited CDU state premiers to the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus in Berlin to present a united front as the party faced its impending electoral disaster in Sachsen-Anhalt. All but one serving Minister President snubbed him, leaving Merz to pace and fret about the multifarious conspiracies swirling beneath him in his party.

Merz for his part has done nothing but confirm the general impression that he is an incorrigible idiot. After the catastrophic Sachsen-Anhalt vote, he gave a shell-shocked press conference in which mumbled nonsense about how he plans to improve his emotional communication and pointlessly railed against his own deputy parliamentary group leader. Two days later, he set aside prepared remarks in the Bundestag to deliver a deranged rant against Alternative für Deutschland, in which he bizarrely taunted the party for achieving only 44% of the vote and accused its members of supporting “ethnic cleansing” under the rubric of remigration.

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So personally finished, so politically dead is Merz, that great swathes of his party are presently telling every journalist who will listen about their desperate plans to topple him and replace him with another, more perfect Chancellor. Many expect that Merz’s chancellorship has mere days or weeks of life left in it, and that if a more competent successor can take the reins, the bleeding of the Union can be stopped.

The latest poll has the AfD at an all-time high of 30%, against a historically weak Union polling at 20%.

Apparently, it is above all the state leaders of the CDU who are convinced Merz has to go. This would be because his disastrous performance is harming their own local prospects, and it is at the state level above all where the pain of AfD ascendance is felt most acutely.

There is, however, no easy way to get rid of a German Chancellor. Merz has never expressed interest in resigning, and neither he nor anyone in his office has suggested he might bring a confidence vote to the floor of the Bundestag. Merz thinks he’s doing a fantastic job, he has no idea what a fuckup he is, and he has no plans to give up. This leaves as the only other possibility a constructive vote of no-confidence supported by the CDU against Merz. This, too, is pretty much inconceivable. The present plan is thus for the state premiers of the CDU to approach the Chancellor and convince him to give up, perhaps by credibly threatening a constructive no-confidence vote to oust him. At that point, Merz would have little choice but to pass the baton to one of their own number.

And here we encounter the second major problem, namely that of who should replace our dead Chancellor walking. There needs to be one obvious successor on whom everybody can agree, because the last thing the Union wants is to give Merz’s catastrophic chancellorship a sequel in the form of a catastrophic power struggle. Journalists like to say the obvious replacement is Hendrik Wüst, the dismal left-leaning Minister President of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Yet Wüst is a centrist Merkelian, well to the left of much of the CDU Bundestag faction, and his candidacy already faces quiet, implicit opposition from his conservative rival, the CSU Minister President of Bavaria Markus Söder. Yet equally powerful reasons speak against Söder as Merz’s successor, for there has never been a Chancellor from the CSU and many Christian Democrats would oppose toppling one of their own in favour of a replacement from their smaller, Bavarian sister party. A contrary, outside possibility aired here and there is the right-leaning Boris Rhein, the Minister President of Hessen, but I’m not sure how much of that is wishful thinking.

It’s highly unlikely a new Chancellor could turn anything around. Merz has been uniquely terrible at his job, but the CDU and the CSU have problems that go well beyond one man’s personal incompetence. The firewall against the AfD compels the CDU to make leftist politics with leftist parties, which places the Union in a political no-man’s land. Everyone who really favours the left will sooner or later just vote for the Social Democrats, the Greens or Die Linke; everyone opposed to the left will increasingly vote for the AfD.

Even a cactus could handle the political communication better than Merz, but communication is vastly overestimated among political elites, who find it convenient to chalk up every failure to poor messaging. A replacement could conceivably show more interest in and skill for the nuts and bolts of politics – the backroom horsetrading, threatening and head-cracking – but there are hard limits here because the firewall itself is the greatest source of Union weakness. The CDU can’t force terms on Greens or Social Democrats because they can’t credibly threaten to walk away and form a government with the right-populists instead.

For a long time now, Merz’s government has been propped up by the sheer lack of alternatives, and there is a good chance Merz himself benefits from this same force. Politically, Merz is dead, and we will now see how long Germany can stumble forwards with a zombie Chancellor who can marshal no support, pass no legislation, and achieve nothing else politically beyond the demise of his own party.