Friedrich Merz once promised to cut AfD support in half. He has doubled it instead.

Many years ago – in 2018, to be precise – a man named Friedrich Merz was in the running to succeed Merkel as chairman of the CDU.

Merz said many interesting things back then. On 14 November 2018, for example, he gave an interview to BILD, in which he denounced Alternative für Deutschland as a party “that does not distance itself from the right” and said that “this makes them unsuitable for any coalition.” Merz pledged to win back all the CDU voters who had defected to the AfD over the years. “In the short term,” he said, “it will probably be impossible to get rid of the AfD,” but if he were chosen to succeed Merkel, he pledged that he could “cut their support in half.”

The very next day he tweeted the exact same thing – promising to lead the CDU back to 40% in the polls and to “halve the AfD.”

At a regional CDU conference around this time, Merz yet again promised to “cut the AfD in half,” adding that “this really is possible.” If I looked harder, I could probably find even more examples of Merz repeating this exact same promise. He made it such a core component of his campaign for the party chairmanship that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed in retrospect: “The whole idea of Merz as party chairman was based on the notion that he would win back votes that Angela Merkel had lost.”

While Merz was making all of these lofty promises, the AfD were polling around 13%, at least according to Forsa:

Half of 13 is 6.5, and so we can say that in 2018, Merz was promising to make the AfD a 6.5% party. Alas, Merz was not elected chairman of the CDU in 2018, so nobody quite got around to halving the AfD. The office went first to the absurdly named if otherwise forgettable Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. The AfD indeed took a hit on Kramp-Karrenbauer’s watch, but that had everything to do with Covid and nothing to do with this particular pinched woman. Next to the chairmanship came the plump and ineffectual Armin Laschet, who likewise failed to make the AfD a 6.5% party, although the man did have a hand in halving support for his own party, which is something I guess.

Anyway, since late 2021 Merz has been the CDU chairman, and I have noticed a funny thing about his statements in this period. For some reason Merz has altogether ceased pledging to cut AfD support in half. All of those words from 2018 – they are just totally forgotten now. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the more German voters learn about Merz, the further Merz slips from his goal of driving the AfD into that promised irrelevance.

Today, Germany achieved a significant milestone in this regard. After six weeks in which Merz has trashed every last campaign promise he made while also promising to make everything vastly more expensive in hopes of slightly altering the composition of atmospheric gases, the AfD polled not at half of their 2018 numbers, but at double them.

The latest Forsa poll (conducted for RTL and ntv) has Alternative für Deutschland at a cool 26%. That is their best result in history, and it makes them the strongest party in the Federal Republic. This is the second such poll that places AfD in first place, following an Ipsos survey from 9 April that pegged them at 25%.

Merz has indeed done something to AfD support involving the operand of 2. It’s just not exactly what he imagined.

Now all of that rhetoric we one once heard from the cartel parties – about the importance of dealing with the AfD on the issues and of making convincing appeals to the “democratically inclined” among AfD voters – has become yesteryear’s pablum. Nobody cares about that anymore. Because they can’t beat AfD on the issues and AfD voters are never coming back, they’re going to try to ban the AfD now instead. A lot of these people truly believe that Germans shouldn’t be allowed to cast their votes beyond the narrow confines of the political cartel that runs the Federal Republic, so they’ll try to try to remove the opposition from the board entirely, via legal trickery.

It’s coming, and I’ll write more about that tomorrow.