J.D. Vance was right that "there is no room for firewalls," and if the CDU are not careful, they may well prove his point with their own destruction

Behind all of the disingenuous fact-checking and the performative outrage, one detects in German mainstream commentary the deeper recognition that J.D. Vance was very far from wrong about a great many things in his landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference last Friday. Only the truth can provoke the kind of panicked and intemperate reactions that followed Vance’s remarks. German politics have become a sad farce – a ridiculous performance that every day I find a little more embarrassing. The primary reason for this farce, as Vance said, is the fear our political class harbour towards their own people, and their complete inability to reverse course on any of the catastrophic policies they have put their names to, from the energy transition to mass migration to the war in Ukraine.

The firewall will keep German politics frozen in amber for some time still. It will keep everything as it was ten years ago under Angela Merkel, until this inflexible, sclerotic system suddenly breaks and unleashes all of the potential energy it has accumulated in one great chaotic crisis. And make no mistake about it, that crisis coming, precisely because the controlled demolition that would be in the best interests of our rulers is also utterly beyond their imaginations and their talents. This might read at first like a pessimistic post, but I promise it’s not. I’m developing a cautious optimism almost despite myself as I try to ponder what will happen in the coming months.

In two days and thirteen hours, German voters will elect a new Bundestag. The polls could not be worse for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and their smaller Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union. The latest INSA survey presents a nightmare scenario for both parties. It has CDU/CSU at 30%, Alternative für Deutschland at 21%, the Social Democrats (SPD) at 15%, the Greens at 13%, Die Linke (the Left Party) at 7% and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) at 5%.

On the left are the INSA poll results, and on the right is the “theoretical seat distribution” that these numbers, if they were election results, would yield.

Readers often ask me whether the polls are understating AfD support. That is possible, but I’d argue the question is not important, because whether AfD come in at 20% or 23% won’t make much difference. Everything actually depends on the small socialist parties that few are talking about right now. Die Linke – successor to the DDR-era Socialist Unity Party – seems all but certain to make it back into the Bundestag, following a social media blitz that has won them wild popularity with young voters. The BSW, meanwhile, probably have even odds of clearing the 5% hurdle for representation.

If both Linke and BSW make it in, CDU and CSU are absolutely screwed, and this by their own cowardly insistence on the firewall. Refusing AfD votes means they will have to cave to the SPD and the Greens on everything to form a coalition with them. Otherwise, the left-wing parties will band together, hijack Bundestag procedure and form their own minority government right under their noses.

That’s right: The firewall means we stand a real chance of getting basically the same deeply unpopular SPD-Green government we have now, additionally radicalised by the hardline socialists of Die Linke. This is precisely the thing nobody wants and precisely the thing our political elites are prepared to deliver, all to keep the Evil Fascist Nazi Party away from power. If this happens, we’ll get a paralysed leftoid Chancellor who is incapable of so much as passing a budget. The AfD will climb in the polls and the CDU will bleed voters until the pressure grows so great, or the political crisis so intense, that they decide to break the firewall after all and chase the leftists out of power.

I wrote about this scenario earlier, but I considered it an exotic possibility unworthy of extended commentary. I now think I vastly underestimated how crazy all of these people are. CDU Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz, cowed by the press, continues to distance himself from the AfD at every opportunity. And while he does so, left-leaning politicians have begun to say things that suggest they are hatching unusual plots. In a recent interview, Olaf Scholz, Chancellor candidate for a decimated SPD that is polling at 15%, rated his chances of being re-elected chancellor at 60%. Robert Habeck, for his part, is suddenly saying that he would “of course not” rule out a “coalition” with the SPD and Die Linke (h/t Mathias von Gersdorff).

How can this happen, eugyppius? Even if all four left parties band together, they’ll have only 277 seats according to the latest INSA poll! That’s 39 short of a majority! This is nothing to worry about! This can never happen!

Oh, it can. Let’s pretend that Sunday gives us a Bundestag roughly in line with those INSA poll results I pasted above. No more than 37 days after the election, the new Bundestag must convene to elect a Chancellor. This is the first phase of voting, in which the Federal President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, will nominate a candidate following back-room discussions with the major parties. If Merz has hammered out a coalition agreement with the SPD and the Greens – by giving them everything they want, because as we’ll see there is no reason they should concede anything – then he’ll be elected in a landslide, and he’ll form the worst government we have ever seen. Robert Habeck might well be Economics Minister again. Merz has said this will never happen, but it doesn’t matter, he’ll have no choice. Nancy Faeser (SPD) will probably return to the Interior Ministry, despite her repeated disgraces. And in a betrayal of his own voters unprecented even for the CDU (which is saying something), Merz will bury the entirety of his anti-migration programme.

To understand why, let’s say Merz remains intransigent. In that case, the SPD and the Greens will abstain or cast their ballots for their own people, and the first phase of voting will fail. No Chancellor candidate will get a majority mandate to form a government. We’ll enter the second phase of voting – a two-week period in which the Bundestag can nominate candidates from their own ranks. Merz cannot be elected Chancellor with AfD votes, remember, because that would violate the firewall. The Union parties would probably nominate some left-leaning CDU member who would be unpalatable to AfD, or they might refuse to nominate anybody. The firewall is so sacred, you see.

So, they’ll vote and vote for two weeks, and either Merz will cave to the left on everything, or for some reason he won’t and all those votes will fail. At this point we’ll enter the third phase of voting, where the left parties have all the power. This is because, in the third phase, you only need a plurality to elect a Chancellor; absolute majorities are no longer required. If you look at the theoretical seat distribution according to that INSA poll above, you’ll notice that the SPD, the Greens and Die Linke among them have 242 votes, while the CDU/CSU have a mere 208 and the AfD 145. At this point, the left parties will agree on a common candidate – a Chancellor Scholz or a Chancellor Habeck. The CDU will again have to field an unpalatable left-leaning Chancellor candidate to keep the AfD away, or tactically abstain from voting for Friedrich Merz lest he win with the assistance of Evil Hitler Fascists.

In the very first vote of the third phase, you’d have a Chancellor Scholz or a Chancellor Habeck, appointed with the approval of President Steinmeier, who is himself a member of the SPD. This Green or SPD Chancellor would proceed to appoint a cabinet, and there is nothing the CDU could do about it without violating the firewall. They would have to bring something called constructive vote of no confidence to get rid of this hated red-red-green government. That means they would have to elect a replacement Chancellor from their own ranks, and this could only happen with AfD support. The firewall would lock the leftists in power.

I am not the only person thinking about this. As I said, the left parties are hinting that this is also on their minds. I also suspect it was not only the Aschaffenburg stabbings that caused Friedrich Merz to issue his anti-migration ultimatum to the SPD and the Greens and to step across the firewall at the end of January. This was precisely the moment Die Linke began to recover in the polls, edging towards that crucial 5% cutoff. CDU leadership saw this whole scenario and judged it prudent to signal that they would violate the firewall if the left parties did not bend to the CDU on migration. Alas, the protests against the right and the extended media campaign have forced these weak and foolish people to back down, and now they are caught in their own trap. There is no room for firewalls, and the CDU will prove why that is so – whether it is in the next several months, or the next several years.

Alternative für Deutschland should make this scenario very explicit. They should be talking about this right now, and if Die Linke and BSW make it into the Bundestag after Sunday’s vote, they should talk about little else. They should explain to voters that the Union parties will have absolutely no leverage in coalition talks with the left. While negotiations are happening in March, they should say that Merz is presently giving away the keys to the kingdom because he is terrified of becoming Chancellor with their support. Either Merz emerges from these talks with an unstable Kenya coalition that everybody hates and the AfD becomes the strongest party in Germany, or he finds himself approaching the third phase of voting, where he can tear apart his own party in one of two ways – by trying to find a path to the chancellorship with the AfD, or by deliberately empowering a triumphant and dysfunctional left coalition.