Friedrich Merz finds his chancellorship in crisis following his announcement of an arms embargo on Israel

Friedrich Merz as he tries desperately to stop the bleeding in his panic ARD interview yesterday.

I am trying to sell a house, which means posting is a littler harder than I’d like it to be right now, but the news even over the summer holidays is unrelenting. For the second time in as many months, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) is facing a widespread mutiny within his own party. The root cause is his own weakness and his inability to rein in his radicalised coalition partners, the Social Democrats (SPD).

The backstory here takes us to last month, when I explained why Friedrich Merz is the most incompetent Chancellor the Federal Republic has ever seen. The occasion for that post was the failed confirmation of judicial nominees for our Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Three positions have opened up on this august court, and it is the Social Democrats’ turn to nominate candidates for two of these vacancies. Apparently because the Social Democrats are planning a soft judicial putsch to seize control of the government, they put forward two lunatic leftoid women for these positions.

Merz just wants to be Chancellor, remember; he either doesn’t know or he doesn’t care what the Social Democrats are plotting. Merz and CDU leadership therefore threw their heedless support behind both of these nominees, yet Merz’s careless words on the floor of the Bundestag kicked off a massive revolt within his own ranks. It was specifically liberal views on abortion held by one of the judicial candidates in question, Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, that proved impossible for Christians in the Christian Democratic Union to swallow. Backbenchers defected in droves, the votes weren’t there, and the parliament decamped for the summer holiday having confirmed not a single justice and with the left in an unusual, unbalanced rage. Some in the SPD began speaking dark words about the future of the coalition, and this less than 100 days into its existence. For comparison, it took Olaf Scholz’s trainwreck clowncar traffic light coalition almost three years to get to this same point of internal discord and disorder.

The SPD, it was always clear, would extract a price from the Union for the failed confirmation of their candidates, and last Friday – when the Israeli security cabinet announced their plans to take over Gaza City (if not the whole Gaza Strip) as part of their broader strategy to stamp out Hamas – they had their opportunity. The German left are increasingly critical of Israel, while support remains high within the centre-right Union parties. The Social Democrats, it seems likely, leaned on Merz for a favour, in full or partial payment for his failure to clothe the dreadful schoolmarm Brosius-Gersdorf in the red robes. Hours after the Israeli cabinet made their plans known, Merz suddenly announced a partial arms embargo on Israel, affecting all military equipment “that may be utilised in the Gaza Strip.” It was a sudden turnabout for a Chancellor who had made support for Israel a talking point in his campaign and who in June weathered sharp cricitism for defending Israel’s attack on Iran as necessary “dirty work” undertaken on behalf of the entire West.

The reaction from within the Union parties, and particularly the Bavarian CSU, was immediate and unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Internal disputes within the CDU and the CSU are generally kept quiet; the party strives to present a uniform public facade. Not in this case. The backlash has been an order of magnitude greater than the rumblings of the Merkelian left-leaning Unioners in January, when Merz flirted with tearing down the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland.

Apparently, Merz had consulted basically nobody within his own party in advance of announcing the embargo. This particularly outraged the Bavarian CSU. Party chairman (and Bavarian Minister President) Markus Söder has said the Christian Social Union will not accept the embargo. His predecessor Horst Seehofer has called the decision “a mistake” and “a foreign policy error,” and CSU General Secretary Stephan Mayer has derided the embargo as “highly symbolic and emotionally-driven politics.” Things are hardly better in the CDU. Johannes Winkel of the CDU youth wing, crazy CDU warhawk Roderich Kiesewetter, CDU Minister President of Hesse Boris Rhein and even Merz’s own cabinet minister Karin Prien have condemned the decision (in Prien’s case, obliquely). As the avalanche poured down upon his Chancellor, a clearly shocked Union foreign policy spokesman Jürgen Hardt gave an interview in which he expressed surprise at the hostile headlines and the sharp criticism, which he said the government had not reckoned with. The subtext is clear: Merz, a political dolt the likes of which we have never experienced before in such high office, thought his concession to the SPD would go unnoticed in the sleepy summer news cycle.

At this point, it’s no longer useful to ask who is criticising Merz, but who is still on his side. Even the Union Bundestag faction leader Jens Spahn, whose job it is to whip votes for the Chancellor, seems to have serious misgivings; a few hours ago he posted an awkward and strangely verbose video to Instagram in which he ultimately concluded that Merz’s embargo is “defensible.” That is damning with faint praise if ever I have seen it.

There is no way to reduce all the facets of this farce to a single blog post; every passing hour, it achieves new dimensions. Yesterday, for example, the CDU/CSU “foreign affairs working group” convened an emergency meeting, at which leadership planned to smooth ruffled feathers and bring everyone back into line. Just as our rattled MPs were logging into Zoom (or whatever software one logs into as a member of the Bundestag whose holiday is being spoiled by the latest Merzian upscrewery), Merz appeared for an emergency interview on our state broadcaster, ARD, to defend himself. His interview deepened the anger of Union politicians on the call, who wanted to know why Merz was once again making major statements without consulting anybody. At the same time, it emerged that one of the disgruntled MPs had shared the meeting link with a BILD reporter, and leadership responded by forbidding everyone on the call from even speaking, except to ask “questions of clarification.” The undercover BILD reporter of course gleefully committed all of this to print last evening.

All of this is to say that Merz is in serious trouble – probably as much trouble as a Chancellor can be in, short of a hostile no-confidence vote. What’s more, the only solution here is well beyond his political capabilities. What he needs to do, is put the SPD in their place in some very public way. They are not actually as strong as Merz makes them out to be. He must simply call their bluff, because if the polls are any indication, new elections would hurt them and the Union both. He can’t do that, though; he’s a weak man, and like many weak men, his attempts to placate and avoid conflict merely inspire rebellion and outrage from all sides.

Merz may yet survive this particular crisis, but there will be another one, and another after that, and still another after that, until one finally takes him down. His long parade of concessions to the SPD, beginning with his debt ceiling reform contrary to his central campaign promises in April, has totally demoralised his party. Perhaps without all of that, the Union might have swallowed the Israel arms embargo with some quiet grumbling, but Merz has no political capital left and it is hard to see how he navigates any thorny issue from here on out. With every mildly controversial vote, every debate, every internal fight, he’ll find himself isolated and at risk of being ripped in two by the SPD to his left and his own party to his right. Merz has finally achieved the ultimate centrism, towards which Angela Merkel could merely aspire. He is stranded in a political no-man’s land and taking fire from all sides.

There is a broader lesson here too: The rightward shift and the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland have finally pushed Germany to the brink of ungovernability. These changes have left a feckless, careerist Union in their wake, as directionless as over; a decimated rabid left, shorn of all moderating forces; and an AfD entrenched in their role as political opposition, with abundant reasons of their own to let the Union twist on the rope from which they have hung themselves. If the government does collapse next month or next year, we’ll only get new elections and we’ll end up in precisely this same place we are right now, with a new Union Chancellor to be ground to dust by forces beyond his comprehension. Meanwhile, the moderate, sensible, centrist solution – some kind of cooperation between the Union and the AfD to remove the left from power at the federal level – every day recedes further from view.

The CDU and the CSU have defined German politics from the inception of the Federal Republic, but they may not be with us in their present form for very much longer. As they inch closer to collapse, Germany approaches a fundamental reordering – an event of greater moment even than reunification. The leftist red-green parties are already planning for the world after the Union, with their schemes to push the constitutional court to the left, ban the AfD and seize the state for themselves. It’s possible of course that things go the other way, and that the remnants of a beaten and tattered Union ultimately become junior partners to an AfD-led government. Whatever happens, the imprudent moral narcissists of the West German establishment will have only themselves to blame. They had many chances to take the softer and the easier path.