German political crisis deepens as protests against the CDU continue and suddenly no major party wants to govern with anybody else

Leftist protesters at the “Aufstand der Anständigen” in Berlin on Sunday

What is happening in Germany right now is crazy. Our entire political system appears to be melting down. I have never seen anything like this, it almost defies explanation.

Last week, the CDU and the CSU – the centre-right sister parties of the Federal Republic – voted twice with Alternative für Deutschland in the Bundestag. It was an effort to signal that the Union would take a hard line against migration and that they would even violate the strict terms of our firewall, our cordon sanitaire against the AfD, if necessary. Now Germany is teetering on the edge of ungovernability. It is like the singular retarded principle that no outcomes can be achieved with AfD votes was the lynchpin that held everything together, and now that it is in question nobody can think straight, run a sensible messaging campaign or develop any minimally credible plan.

In fact, it is worse than that. All parties, save for the AfD, are presently doing everything in their power to exclude all possible post-election paths to a government. The only hard rule seems to be that if this or that coalition partner might provide a way to govern, if this or that scenario might promise a path through the impossible thicket, somebody will appear on television in the next five minutes and promise not to do precisely that thing.

Before we can explore the depths of this strange insanity, I want to address one recurring objection. This is that our politicians are presently just putting on a big show, that this is all theatrics for gullible voters and that they will go back on all their statements, promises and resolutions right after the sheeple have finished casting their ballots. I fear it is not that simple. There are costs to making promises you can’t keep, and even the most insincere statements influence possibilities and shape the strategic landscape. Before the Union parties voted with AfD last week, everyone understood this. All the major parties of the “democratic centre” carefully, and at every opportunity, kept the doors open to each other with an eye towards forming a workable government after 23 February. They did that even when it cost them support, as for example when the CDU began to bleed voters in late November as a cost of their flirtations with the Greens. Public messaging is as much about setting expectations within a party as it is about convincing voters outside of it. You need to keep the rank-and-file apprised of what is to come.

At the centre of this drama is the CDU and Friedrich Merz’s sudden about-face on migration policy since Aschaffenburg. He has outlined a hard five-point plan to limit migration, which includes stepped up deportations and push-backs of asylees at the German national borders. He has said that he will implement this plan regardless of whatever coalition partners the CDU finds. He will even use his executive power as Chancellor to force it through if necessary.

All of that sounds great, but it has opened a very simple problem: With whom will the CDU rule?

1. “With the Social Democrats! Polls show a plurality of Germans want another Merkel-era ‘grand coalition’ of CDU and SPD! I don’t know why you’re even writing this post eugyppius.”

If only it were that easy.

To begin with, it is unclear whether the CDU and SPD will even have a workable majority by themselves. The latest polling is not auspicious.

Then we must admit that Merz’s five-point migration plan is totally unacceptable to SPD leadership. Aziz Bozkurt, chairman of the SPD “Migration and Diversity Working Group,” said last week that “If the CDU wants to be able to form a coalition [with the SPD], it must withdraw Merz’s grandiose announcement that there will be no coalition without his five-point migration plan.”

Since Merz stepped over the cordon sanitaire last week, things have only gotten worse. SPD and Green activists are presently protesting against the CDU across Germany. In Hamburg the disorder is so great that the CDU have had to cancel multiple campaign events. The SPD are papering the Federal Republic with placards like this one:

That says “Middle, not Merz,” stating unequivocally that the party no longer believes CDU Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz belongs to the “democratic centre” – the politically acceptable space where one finds viable coalition partners. The SPD rolled out the slogan during their protest at the CDU party congress yesterday; they have even registered the domain mitte-statt-merz.de. Their supporters are all over Twitter denouncing the “Merz CDU.” Wolfgang Schmidt, Head of the Chancellery and a close confidante of SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz, today appeared on a podcast and called Merz “der Führer.” Yes, you read that right: A leading SPD politician has compared the CDU Chancellor candidate to Adolf Hitler. That is an awkward thing to say if your party has plans to vote this particular “Führer” into the chancellorship anytime soon.

For a CDU/SPD coalition, both parties will have to walk back almost everything they have said these past two weeks. Merz and his CDU will have to bury the greater part of their anti-migration programme, and SPD will have to agree that Merz is not Hitler reincarnate and that in fact he belongs to the democratic centre despite their Merz-statt-Mitte slogans. That can happen, but both parties are presently working overtime to make any such happening as hard, discrediting and awkward for all involved as they can. If they weren’t busy closing the doors to all other options, this might make some sense. The SPD have demonstrated a quiet hostility to the CDU throughout this campaign, and there has never been much enthusiasm within the CDU for forming yet another grand coalition with the SPD.

2. “The CDU will govern with the Greens! It’s what they’ve always wanted! It’s Friedrich Merz’s fantasy, to govern with the Greens!”

Indeed this was Merz’s original plan, but it is now all but buried. First of all, there is very little chance that the Greens will win enough seats in the Bundestag to give the Union parties a majority by themselves. The math is against it.

Also too, the Greens are just as bitterly opposed to Merz’s five-point migration plan as the SPD, and the CSU under Markus Söder in particular wants nothing to do with the Green Party – or, as Söder says, “with these Greens,” holding out a faint hope perhaps that they might at some point find some better Greens in the cellar somewhere. Green Chancellor candidate Robert Habeck is completely toxic to the average Bavarian CSU voter, and the CDU after a period of indecision seems to support Söder’s line. At their party congress, they issued an “Immediate Action Plan” that takes aim at many signature Green policies, including Habeck’s hated energy ordinances. It is hard to believe the Greens will swallow this.

The Greens have been just as quick to raise the barriers against the Union on their side. Habeck has said that Friedrich Merz must apologise for violating the cordon sanitaire. The Greens will not enter any coalition in which the CDU can hold the possibility of AfD votes over their heads as blackmail. Merz “must take this back, he must return to the start. We cannot make a broken promise the basis of new agreements.” The chances that Merz apologises for what he did last week are basically zero.

Fazit: A Green/CDU government is even more unlikely than an SPD/CDU government. It would require Merz to dump the greater part of his campaign promises, accept all the damage he has taken for his anti-migration gambit with little or no payoff, while also alienating a great many of his constituents. If the CDU wanted a coalition with the Greens to happen, they wouldn’t be sabotaging the possibility so eagerly. Habeck’s ultimatum suggests that the Greens themselves have recognised they will be shut out and that playing to their anti-CDU base is now their best move.

3. “Perhaps the CDU can govern with the Greens and the SPD? That solves the math at least.”

This would be the dreaded “Kenya coalition” that I predicted at the start of the campaign. I am always happy to see my predictions pan out, but I seriously doubt that I will be proven right about this in the end. All the separate barriers to a coalition with the SPD or with the Greens alone stand doubly in the face of Kenya. With the reds and the greens up in arms against him, Merz’s best path is to find a way to govern with only one left party, and not with both of them.

4. “The FDP, eugyppius, you’re forgetting the FDP. Those scrappy market liberals may just squeeze into the Bundestag despite everything! That could make all the difference!”

Okay. Let’s say that despite all the polls everywhere the FDP make it over the 5% hurdle and back into the Bundestag. That alone would be a miracle, but miracles can happen. In that case, the FDP would be most useful as the junior member of a Green/CDU government – a so-called “Jamaica coalition.”

This is where you begin to think that our politicians are not only saying crazy things and making impossible promises out of incompetence or ignorance, but that they are actively trying to prevent any solution to the problem of who will govern Germany. Yesterday, FDP chief Christian Lindner said unequivocally that his party will not govern with the Greens at all, and that he hopes his party can adopt an anti-Green resolution at their upcoming congress on 9 February. So, forget about Jamaica.

5. “The cordon sanitaire will collapse eugyppius. The CDU will see the light and govern with the AfD. That gives them a solid majority. As senior partner, the CDU will control all the most important ministries. The AfD will impose few conditions. It is a match made in heaven.”

From tagesschau:

Three weeks before the federal election, CDU Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz has once again ruled out any cooperation with the AfD. “There will be no cooperation, no toleration, no minority government, absolutely nothing…” the party leader promised … The CDU wants to “do everything in this election campaign to make this party as small as possible again.”

There can be no doubt now about the CDU’s position. The AfD is against “everything that our party and our country have built up in Germany in recent years and decades,” [Merz] said …

CSU leader Markus Söder also clearly rejected any cooperation with the AfD. “We must not leave our country to the AfD,” Söder exclaimed. He said that nobody else could stop them … “In the end, it’s just us.”

So much for that.

6. “The CDU will form a minority government tolerated by the AfD. Merz will have himself elected to the chancellorship with AfD votes. The CDU will control not only the most important ministries, but all the ministries. They will be powerful as never before.”

First, for American friends, I must explain what a minority government is.

Ordinarily, a candidate must win an absolute majority vote of the Bundestag to become Chancellor. Once he is Chancellor, he appoints a cabinet and forms his government. Those who vote for the Chancellor are generally his coalition partners, and he distributes ministries among them according to a prior coalition agreement. Theoretically, however, Friedrich Merz could receive votes from parties with whom he has not agreed to govern – the AfD, for example. He could then form a minority government, filling posts with CDU ministers. He would not command a majority of votes in parliament; he would have to seek ad hoc majorities for every bill he wants to pass. In this way, Merz might find a soft way around the cordon sanitaire and cut the Gordian knot. This is the plan, right?

No it is not. First, I call attention to Merz’s statement in that tagesscahu quote above: Merz said there will be “no toleration” (i.e., by the AfD) and “no minority government” (i.e., with votes from the AfD). Not only will there be no minority government with an assist from the AfD, there will be no minority government at all, according to CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann:

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is ruling out a minority government after the federal election. In the Table.Media podcast, Carsten Linnemann said that he would “completely rule it out”. The General Secretary justified this with an appeal to “much-needed stability”: “Imagine if we were to go to a NATO summit with a minority government now,” Linnemann said in the podcast. “As the fourth largest economy in the world, Germany cannot afford a minority government. We finally need stability and planning security again, and that is why I rule out a minority government.”

Aware that his words seemed to be painting his party into a corner (in light of everything else I typed above), Linnemann proceeded to say that after the elections he hopes that potential coalition partners can pull themselves together, get a good night of sleep or two, and come to the negotiating table despite everything. That is the kind of thing you say when you have no plan and no idea how any of this is supposed to work.

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Realistically, I think this resolves only one of three ways: with a realignment to the left, a catastrophic and farcical collapse to the left, or a realignment to the right.

Leftward Realignment

The most plausible of slim possibilities remains a coalition between the CDU and the SPD, if those parties together can manage a majority. Perhaps, wonder of wonders, the FDP squeeze into the Bundestag and make their majority. Maybe the SPD even sign onto this, despite the fact that the FDP is presently loathed by SPD Chancellor (and Chancellor candidate) Olaf Scholz for the crime of bringing down his government in November. My justifiably cynical friends are convinced this will happen and that Merz will betray his voters once again in the grand tradition of the Union parties.

Merz may be ready to do this, but as I explained above, the SPD don’t seem quite so eager. Almost overnight, Merz’s violation of the cordon sanitaire has become not just a talking point, but the central theme of the Social Democrats’ campaign. Their activists are going wild and nobody in the party wants to call them off. SPD co-chief Saskia Esken has said that Friedrich Merz has “disqualified himself as a chancellor candidate”; her fellow co-chief Lars Klingbeil appeared to rule out future cooperation with the CDU on the floor of the Bundestag, though he has since qualified his statements in an interview. The head of the SPD youth organisation, Philipp Türmer, is demanding that party leadership rule out any cooperation with the Union. Türmer aside, it’s important that a lot of the anti-CDU rhetoric is focussed on Merz personally. Perhaps he steps down or is forced out in an internal coup and the CDU field a more palatable chancellor for the reds. That does not sound overwhelmingly likely to me, but anything can happen. These are crazy times.

Leftward Collapse

Another possibility is that the SPD remain intransigent, and Merz and his CDU do too. In this scenario, Merz also clings to the cordon sanitaire against the AfD like grim death. In consequence, the Bundestag tries to elect a chancellor and nobody receives a majority. They enter the second phase of voting and still nobody receives a majority. To avoid being elected to the chancellorship with AfD votes, Merz may have to direct his own party to vote against him. Such is the iron logic of the cordon sanitaire.

This brings us to the very dangerous third phase of voting, where an outright majority is no longer required to make a Chancellor. You only need a plurality in the third phase. And while the left parties want to exclude the CDU and the AfD, and the FDP wants to exclude the Greens, and the CDU wants to exclude the Greens and the AfD, you might notice that the left parties don’t mind working with each other. What they would do in the third phase, is agree on a common chancellor candidate – Robert Habeck or Olaf Scholz. They might well have more votes than either the CDU or the AfD separately. Or, perhaps they are not quite as strong as the CDU, but it doesn’t matter because Merz is forced once again to ask his own party to vote against his candidacy to forestall an election via the AfD.

Just like that, Germany would have a new Chancellor Scholz or a new Chancellor Habeck – thanks to the CDU and their political hypermorality. We would have that government because the Union parties voted against their own leader, just to spite the AfD. What is more, the only way to get rid of this paralysed (because no Bundestag majority) and loathed (because it would simply restore to power some of the least popular leaders in the Federal Republic) government, would be for the CDU to violate the cordon sanitaire after all and bring a constructive vote of no confidence with AfD support.

Rightward Realignment

I don’t think either Merz or the CDU are quite willing to set their party on fire in that way. If there can be no rapprochement with the SPD and no viable coalition from the “democratic centre,” they will bury the cordon sanitaire for all time. Merz will have himself christened Chancellor with AfD votes and we will have a minority CDU government tolerated by the AfD despite everything.

Something has to give here, some of our politicians will have to go back on some of their promises in a very big way. The only question is who, and which ones.