Present-day German politics present a puzzle.
The more you think about it, the harder it becomes to explain.
No party has shaped the Federal Republic more than the Christian Democratic Union, or the CDU. Since 1949, CDU chancellors have ruled Germany for 53 years, all told; the Social Democrats, their rivals, have had the helm for less than half that time. Union chancellors rebuilt Germany after the war, oversaw reunification and collaborated in founding the European Union. A lot of what we think of as Germany and even Europe today has something to do with the Union, and soon all of that will be over with – over and gone.
The Union has entered a period of protracted decline, which has now progressed so far it begins to resemble an implosion. Because the fate of the Federal Republic and the CDU have been linked for nearly 80 years, the consequences for Germany, its people and its economy have been almost as dire. The press reports on the electoral losses, the dismal poll numbers, Chancelor Friedrich Merz’s endless gaffes and stupidities and the rise of Alternative für Deutschland, but above all these details there towers a much bigger story, too large for the media to appreciate. This story is that Germany’s politics are changing forever, for reasons that are hard to grasp and in ways historians will puzzle over for decades to come.
It is getting easier every day to imagine a world in which the CDU collapses completely or breaks up into several regional successor parties. Already the Union is on track to lose all but trace support across multiple east German states. Nobody knows what Germany will look like, or what kinds of politics Germany will have, should the Union go under – or what the death throes might look like. I think the result is unlikely to be an unvarnished and indefinite AfD utopia, and there are multiple ways this political transition could turn into a catastrophe and lock us into a kind of DDR-light Green-socialist nightmare.
If you want to read more about why the CDU – the dominant political force of postwar Germany – appears to be committing suicide, and what it all means, I invite you to subscribe. Without your support nothing I do here would be possible.