Friedrich Merz, Germany’s mercurial conservative opposition chief and a passionate hobby pilot, should be flying high these days as the country’s hotly tipped next leader.
One year before the next general election, his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has enjoyed a comfortable lead for months with about 32% support, nearly double the score of its nearest competitors, as the fractious government led by Social Democrat Olaf Scholz plumbs new depths of disfavour.
But the chance at the chancellery Merz has been dreaming of since the 1990s has hit turbulence stemming from the country’s inescapable 20th-century history. Whether and how he can extricate his party from the dilemma posed by last weekend’s bombshell state elections will help determine Germany’s democratic health for years to come in the battle to win back voters from the pro-Russian extremes.
In this month’s polls in two former communist states, a far-right force became the strongest party for the first time since the Nazi period in one region, Thuringia, and in the other, Saxony, it finished a very close second behind Merz’s party.
The strong showing for the anti-immigration, anti-Islam Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has left the mainstream conservatives navigating a minefield as all the democratic parties have committed to a ban on cooperation with the extreme right. A third election, in Brandenburg state surrounding Berlin, looms on 22 September, with similar results expected.
For the coalition arithmetic to add up to a majority, the CDU must now seek the strangest of bedfellows for a high-risk experiment in government. Cue the dramatic return of another of the most florid political characters of the post-reunification period, former Stalinist Sahra Wagenknecht, whose Kremlin apologist party came in a pivotal third place in both states.
Wagenknecht was known in those years for often antagonising – and perennially outshining – the members of her party, the successors to the East German communists who built the Berlin Wall. She finally broke with the far-left Die Linke last year and formed her own eponymous grouping in January.
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW, after its German initials) has shaken up the political landscape with stances tailored to pick up disaffected voters, particularly in the east, who are still angry about government restrictions during the Covid pandemic, dislike Germany’s arms shipments to Ukraine and are deeply anxious about immigration.
Wagenknecht, a bestselling author from the east who has never held government office, boasted to reporters on the day after the state elections that her young party had “become a power factor in Germany”. Polling at about 8% nationally, it now has every incentive to exact the highest price from Merz’s CDU during the state coalition talks, suggesting it will set an ultimatum on ending Berlin’s support for Kyiv and try to block plans to station medium-range US missiles on German soil.
After the state elections, Merz, a westerner and former BlackRock executive, warned that the BSW was “rightwing extremist on some issues and leftwing extremist on others” – a “black box” with uncertain and potentially explosive contents. He nevertheless gave each regional CDU chapter the green light to enter into coalition negotiations with the party, as there is no viable alternative. That decision, however, has now sparked a rebellion within the CDU just when the party hoped to be closing ranks around a flag bearer to lead it into the September 2025 national election.
“Wagenknecht contradicts everything the [centre-right] parties have stood for since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany: clear allegiance to the west, a united Europe and Nato membership as history’s greatest project for peace,” Christian Democrat Frank Sarfeld, who says he represents about 100 party dissidents, told the daily Tagesspiegel.
“Cooperation with the Kremlin offshoot is unthinkable,” added CDU lawmaker Roderich Kiesewetter, accusing both the Wagenknecht alliance and AfD of trying to “destroy” the CDU as a big-tent party.
Merz, whose impulsive nature sparks flashes of temper that concern even his allies, could now be looking more vulnerable with the revolt in his own ranks. The Munich broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung dubbed his predicament “Russian Roulette” as potential rivals line up.
“What will remain of Friedrich Merz when Sahra Wagenknecht is finished with him?” asked Die Zeit. “The electoral successes could plunge [his party] into crisis and cost him the chancellor candidacy.”
One key area where Merz and Wagenknecht overlap, however, is a hard line on migration – an issue that also plays to the strengths of the far right. Since 2015, when Angela Merkel allowed more than one million people fleeing war and turmoil to enter Germany, immigration has become one of the country’s most divisive political issues.
It prompted the rightward lurch in the AfD – then primarily a eurosceptic grouping – and opened up a civil war in Merkel’s Christian Union bloc, which led most of the West German and united German governments in the post-war period.
Merz, a longtime rival of Merkel’s who angrily resented several moves she made to consolidate power at his expense, has spearheaded an unyielding stance since she left the stage in 2021, which now appears to be gaining the upper hand in the country. But many observers say that the AfD, from the sidelines, is calling the tune. That issue, combined with a sense of martyrdom among far-right supporters because their party has been blocked from formal power, could prove to be explosive, said Ursula Münch, director of the Academy for Political Education thinktank in Bavaria.
“AfD supporters call it undemocratic that the party’s successes don’t result in it joining governments – they consciously overlook that you can vote for an extremist party but can’t expect that it will find coalition partners,” she said.
“However, not including the AfD will improve its prospects for the next election. That’s the big dilemma for the other parties.”
Political scientist Oliver Lembcke of Ruhr University Bochum said the state elections’ results leading to the upcoming coalition talks between Merz and Wagenknecht’s forces showed that the AfD boycott had at least, in part, backfired.
“The strategy of the firewall was to marginalise the AfD in the east by excluding it while pointing up the democratic parties’ steadfast principles,” he said. “That has clearly failed.”
Both Münch and Lembcke predicted that doubts about aid to Ukraine would grow as the national election campaign grinds on, potentially allowing Wagenknecht’s party to make greater inroads in the west. “Her success will drive her to gain further media attention and, at the same time, send the message to voters that it’s worth it to vote for the BSW,” Lembcke said.
