Don’t be fooled: Germany’s Christian Democratic Union is not the same party it was under the former chancellor, Angela Merkel.
In early February, just a few weeks before the German federal elections, Merkel released a rare public statement criticising the CDU’s leader and presumptive chancellor, Friedrich Merz, for pushing through a bill on tighter immigration control with the help of the far-Right party, Alternative für Deutschland. “I believe it is wrong,” Merkel said of the vote, which broke a long-standing political taboo, and accused Merz of going back on a vow he had made in November to only seek majorities with mainstream parties and not the AfD.
The vote came in the wake of two deadly attacks by people with immigrant backgrounds, one carried out by an Afghan asylum-seeker in Aschaffenburg that killed a toddler and the man trying to protect the child, and one in Magdeburg, where a Saudi man ploughed a car into a crowded Christmas market. Although the attack in Magdeburg showed signs of being a far-Right-driven assault, rather than an Islamicist-driven attack, it was cited as a call to arms by the Right to toughen immigration. Merz called an emergency vote in Parliament, saying he didn’t “care who votes for it”, suggesting that he would count on the AfD’s support if necessary.
In response, the Holocaust survivor, Albrecht Weinberg, who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, returned his Federal Order of Merit medal to the German State in protest, while Michel Friedman, a Jewish community leader and member of the CDU’s presidency in the 1990s, quit the party. Several hundred thousand protesters gathered in streets across Germany to protest the vote as well, calling themselves the ‘firewall’ against the far-Right.
Germany held its federal elections on February 27 and the CDU won — but coalition talks are still going on since the CDU will have to compromise with the Social Democratic Party. The Free Democratic Party is out of Parliament entirely and the Left party, Die Linke, had staged a surprise comeback. The AfD also had its most impressive results, coming in with more than 20% votes, becoming, without a doubt, Germany’s largest Opposition force.
Germany has a habit of killing its darlings, especially in the political arena. Of the four chancellors since German reunification, all except Merkel have faced legacy-killing scandals. Helmut Kohl, the chancellor from 1982 to 1998, admitted to accepting illegal donations for his party, the CDU, and refused to name his donors. Kohl’s successor, Gerhard Schröder, had fallen from grace for his involvement with Russian State oil companies and for his close ties with Vladimir Putin. Even the current outgoing chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has been shadowed by the murky role he played as mayor of Hamburg in the 2012-2015 Cum-Ex scandal, one of the biggest tax fraud cases in German history with estimated taxpayer losses of up to 30 billion euros. Merkel is the only one who has remained untarnished.
But her legacy is under attack, particularly from Germany’s incoming chancellor, Merz, who wants to distinguish himself from Merkel.
It is hard to deny that the Germany that Merkel left behind after her 16 years in the chancellery is in a political mess. The governing coalition that entered in her wake, split among the Greens, the Social Democrats, and the Liberals (FDP), was the first three-way coalition in decades. Under the chancellor, Scholz, Germany had seen a budget crisis of a magnitude not seen since reunification, a stagnant economy, and the AfD surging into ever-increasing popularity. This led to a constantly bickering and ineffective government that was put out of its tortured existence when Scholz expelled its enfant terrible Liberal finance minister, Christian Lindner, last November.
Merz, a ‘back to the roots’ candidate according to his supporters, is a textbook Christian Democrat in every way that Germany’s last CDU chancellor, Merkel, was not. A Catholic by birth who still lives primarily in his West German hometown, a near life-long politician with stints in finance, married for 40 years with children and grandchildren, is a profile that is in stark contrast to that of Merkel — a twice-married, child-free, East German protestant with a PhD in quantum chemistry and a meandering path to politics.
Merkel was also Merz’s longstanding rival in the CDU’s party politics. She sidelined him when he tried to break into the party leadership in 2000. Having been outmanoeuvred, one witness famously likened Merz’s angry reaction to a “headless chicken”. He quit Parliament once Merkel became chancellor and by 2009 he had left politics entirely for a lucrative career in the private sector. He re-entered politics years later once Merkel stepped down after almost 19 years as party chair in 2018. Merz was, once again, defeated in his run for the party chair by other candidates in 2018 and in 2021 before finally winning the position as head of the party in 2022. He has never held government office.
Merz is now seen as returning the CDU to its reputation as a good old boys’ party. He also openly blames Merkel for moving the Centre-Right party too far to the Left, particularly on issues related to immigration. He has since yanked the party back to the Right, adopting many of the AfD’s speaking points in the process, while promising to be the guardian against the far-Right’s takeover of Germany.
Merkel meanwhile has been publicly distancing herself from the CDU since Merz’s return. In 2023, she not only declined an offer to join the board of the CDU-affiliated think tank, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, but she also left altogether. Once the face of German austerity, Merkel also gave a speech at the launch of her memoir in November in which she criticised the debt brake, which Merz and other CDU officials have staunchly defended in the face of mounting criticism from Left-of-Centre parties.
Although the return of the CDU to the German chancellery might at first glance seem to indicate a return to the Centrist times of moderates like Merkel, make no mistake, it is a hard jerk to Germany’s Right. The shift comes at a time of unprecedented pressure on the European Union to hold together Europe’s economic powerhouse.
In her speech delivered at her book launch, Merkel also offered perhaps a gentle warning to Merz: when asked if he would close Germany’s borders, which itself might violate EU’s freedom of movement laws, she said, “That’s not what Friedrich Merz wants. He is a European.”
Even in her withdrawal from the spotlight, Merkel remains a quiet presence — reminding Germany of the centre it once had.
Carol Schaeffer is a journalist based in Berlin, Germany, and is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington D.C.
