What is going on in Germany?

Constanze Stelzenmüller:
Scholz’s center-left “traffic light” coalition took office in December 2021 with the promise of tackling much-needed transformational reforms after 16 years of cautious incrementalism under Chancellor Angela Merkel (2005-2021). What the three partners—Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the Liberals—thought they were aiming for was (respectively) social justice, climate and energy transformation, and bringing government debt to zero. What they got was Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the promise of a “Zeitenwende”  (a historic turn in German foreign and security policy) by a deeply shocked chancellor, and a near-complete decoupling from Russian fossil fuel imports in less than a year.

The coalition fell apart slowly at first, then quickly: bureaucracy and the chancellor’s fear of escalation bogged down the military Zeitenwende (despite Germany sending 44 billion euros in humanitarian and military support, including extremely effective air defenses, to Ukraine); the Greens stumbled over a nepotism scandal and fumbled a key energy transition law; the Liberals stayed intransigent against pleas to loosen the constitutional debt limit in order to fund weapons for Ukraine and boost the defense industry. Scholz finally fired Liberal finance minister Christian Lindner on November 6 and set in motion the no-confidence vote. He remains head of a minority government together with the Greens.

Constanze Stelzenmüller:
The AfD’s rise has shocked many Germans. It is one of Europe’s most openly far-right and pro-Kremlin parties; in the European Parliament, it caucuses on the extreme right of the political spectrum in the “Europe of Sovereign Nations” group. No other German party will form a coalition with it, and Merz himself has repeatedly ruled this out. Nonetheless, some conservatives openly question this “firewall” between the CDU/CSU and the AfD.

The AfD’s strategy is clearly to deepen this fissure within the conservative camp by forcing polarizing topics like migration on it, and by presenting itself as the true champion of “conservative-liberal” values—as the AfD’s co-chief, Alice Weidel, called her party in a nationally broadcast debate on Sunday. Elon Musk’s repeated interventions on behalf of the AfD in the German election campaign have taken up both these points.

As for the stakes, Musk told a crowd of AfD supporters on Saturday that the German election “could decide the entire fate of Europe”—illustrating the fact that American supporters of European far-right movements, much like the Kremlin, see Germany as the linchpin of the continent’s democratic political order.

Constanze Stelzenmüller:
The fact that Scholz now helms a minority government makes it possible for the opposition CDU to pass legislation. On January 29, Merz introduced a non-binding five-point plan to curb irregular migration in the Bundestag; it proposed permanent border controls and the rejection of any entrants without papers. Two days later, he submitted a binding legislative draft expanding federal border police powers. The first motion passed with the support of a sneeringly triumphant AfD; the second failed to pass because 12 of his own legislators refused to support it.

Merz had felt compelled to act by the murder of two people in Aschaffenburg by a mentally unstable Afghan who had been slated for deportation; the latest in a string of similar cases. Overall asylum requests, while much lower than at the height of the migration crisis in 2015-2016, had been rising in the past two years. And although national and European Union asylum laws had been sharpened, authorities and local communities had been struggling with enforcing them.

Constanze Stelzenmüller:
They’ve reacted with outrage. Merz’s critics—which included the SPD, the Greens, and the national conferences of both Catholic and Protestant bishops—said the two drafts were a violation of European Union and German law. Friday, January 31, saw an extraordinarily angry debate in the legislature. Over the following weekend, citizens protested all over Germany; at least 160,000 marched in Berlin. Even Merz’s archnemesis, former Chancellor Angela Merkel, weighed in with a scathing critique: calling his decision “wrong.” She added: “It is necessary for all democratic parties to act together across party lines, not as tactical maneuvers, but with honesty on the substance, a measured tone, and on the basis of valid European law.”

For Merz, whose claim to be the next German chancellor had been seen as assured based on his 15-point lead over Scholz, the events of last week have revived old doubts about his judgment and impulsivity. Unless he stabilizes his campaign again quickly, he might risk entering political history as the candidate who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Constanze Stelzenmüller:
The latest Forsa poll from February 4—just after the nationwide protests—has the CDU dipping for the first time below its benchmark of 30% to 28%, with the Greens and the SPD at 15% and 16%, and the AfD at 20%. The Left party, already declared to be on life support, would just make it across the parliamentary threshold of 5%. Meanwhile, Lindner’s Liberals, despite a last-ditch effort to reinvent themselves as right-leaning libertarians like Elon Musk or Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, appear stuck at 4%. The national-Bolshevist BSW under the flamboyant populist Sahra Wagenknecht is in a similar position, despite three successes in East German state elections last fall. The same poll has about 8% of the vote consumed by numerous tiny, single-issue parties that never make it into the legislature. 

This suggests that Nordic-style political fragmentation is here to stay. It means that a Chancellor Merz (and chancellors after him) would likely need a three-party coalition to rule—and would find consensus-building and governing difficult and exhausting. That, in turn, plays into populist narratives about the weakness of representative democracy—and it could bolster the continuing rise of anti-system parties like the AfD and BSW.