Dark Clouds Over the German Election
The CDU is likely to win, but the AfD will still be sidelined, and there’s little chance of better policies.
By Joseph C. Sternberg
Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz before a televised debate between chancellor candidates in Berlin, Feb. 19. Photo: fabrizio bensch/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesEven by Germany’s normally morose standards, the mood here ahead of Sunday’s election is gloomy.
Tempers are flaring over a seemingly intractable migration crisis, anxiety is mounting about the economy’s abysmal state, and nerves are fraying over fraught foreign relations.
Worst of all is a nagging suspicion that this election won’t solve any of it.
Start with migration, since so many German voters do.
In the decade since then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the gates for refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere, migrants have arrived by the hundreds of thousands each year.
Germany hosts north of 2.5 million asylum seekers, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, including roughly one million who fled Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion.
“We can do it!” Ms. Merkel famously declared in 2015.
Apparently “we” don’t want to anymore.
Voters are weighing the fiscal costs of welfare benefits and the like for migrants—and the cost to public safety amid a string of possible terror attacks and other high-profile crimes allegedly perpetrated by migrants.
One such attack set in motion the biggest political meltdown of the campaign.
On Jan. 22 in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, a 28-year-old from Afghanistan allegedly attacked a daycare group with a knife in a park.
A 2-year-old boy and a man passing by were killed and several others wounded.
Authorities say the suspect has a history of mental illness, had several run-ins with the law, and was supposed to have been deported to Bulgaria after German officials denied his asylum claim in June 2023.
The tragedy seemed likely to bolster the fortunes of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, whose hostility to immigration is the party’s signature issue.
Instead, Friedrich Merz—leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union and all but certain to become the next chancellor—seized the initiative in an attempt to present his party as a credible alternative to the AfD.
Mr. Merz proposed two motions in favor of border crackdowns in the parliament the week after Aschaffenburg, the more stringent of which predictably didn’t pass but did gain support from AfD lawmakers.
Leftwing opponents and even some in Mr. Merz’s own party then denounced him for breaking the political “firewall” around the AfD—mainstream parties’ refusal to work with the party and thereby legitimize it.
The episode highlights one of Germany’s biggest political dysfunctions.
Contrary to Mr. Merz’s critics, the firewall is intact: He refuses to consider a postelection coalition government with the AfD, and at every opportunity in recent weeks has listed all the policy areas where the two parties are incompatible (on top of high-profile AfD members’ less-than-critical comments about Hitler and his elite killers, the SS).
Still, around 70% of the general electorate in most opinion polls thinks Germany accepts too many migrants, and Mr. Merz’s legislation enjoyed majority support in a poll after the debate.
Germany’s political class defines the anti-extremist firewall so stringently that mainstream parties aren’t supposed to heed that popular opinion, simply because the AfD might agree.
It’s preposterous, and leaves many voters no party but the AfD willing to tackle their priorities.
As for Mr. Merz, his real interest is the economy, and here too Germany is a mess.
The story of recent years is accelerating deindustrialization.
Industrial production is down about 10% since 2021, and some 20% in energy-intensive industries.
This is leading to hundreds of thousands of job losses and a spike in business bankruptcies.
One explanation is the two-decade forced march toward renewable power and other net-zero climate policies.
Energy costs are much higher than in the U.S. or even France.
This particularly burdens such mainstay industries as steel, chemicals and ceramics, and also the high-tech manufacturing such as computer chips that politicians love to hype.
Green policies are hollowing out demand for some of Germany’s most successful products, such as internal-combustion-engine cars.
Yet business groups insist energy costs are only part of their problem.
Europe’s and Germany’s perennial overregulation is the other.
Mario Draghi, a former Italian prime minister and an éminence grise in European politics, last year published a major report on the European Union’s competitiveness failures.
The line that drew particular attention in Germany was his observation that, between 2019-24, the EU approved 13,000 new laws and regulations while the U.S. imposed 5,500.
I hear this figure cited again and again by industry associations, economists and political observers.
And although it’s passé to say it these days, taxes are too high.
Germany’s corporate tax rate, at an average total of 29.9% for federal and state taxes, is the third-highest in Europe behind Malta and Portugal, according to the Tax Foundation.
This exacerbates Germany’s problem of high labor costs as an added deterrent to investment.
Throw in the threat of President Trump’s tariffs and the fiscal burden of higher military spending under pressure from the U.S. (and under threat from Russia), and you can understand the gloom.
The bad news is that the election is unlikely to fix any of this.
Partly the trouble is ideological and intellectual.
Mr. Merz seems to get it on these economic issues and proposes tax reforms and tweaks to the most expensive parts of the green agenda.
Christian Lindner, formerly the finance minister in the outgoing administration and leader of the small free-market Free Democratic Party, also gets it and is campaigning on a promise to deregulate.
But Mr. Merz leads a party internally divided on many economic and climate matters, with a substantial wing still under the sway of Ms. Merkel’s woolly centrism.
Mr. Lindner’s party is so unpopular it may not reach the 5% vote threshold to secure seats in Parliament.
As for the parties of the left (the Social Democrats, or SPD, led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the Greens, led by Robert Habeck), they helped create the current malaise.
Meanwhile, German politics faces a much bigger structural problem: It currently is impossible to form a center-right governing coalition.
The political firewall around the AfD exists for good reasons, but it means in practice that the vote on the right-hand side of the political spectrum is split between two parties that can’t govern together.
Mr. Merz’s CDU and its Bavarian sister, the CSU, are polling steadily in first place with about 30% support, far ahead of the SPD at 15% and the Greens at 14%.
But due to the firewall, he can’t form a coalition with the AfD, which seems likely to receive around 20%.
That will leave Mr. Merz to form an administration with either the SPD or the Greens, or perhaps both, and to make policy compromises with the left to do so.
To judge by the combined CDU/CSU and AfD support in opinion polls, Germans want a right-leaning administration after 3½ years of the left.
They won’t get it.
Elections are supposed to have consequences.
This time it seems clear what the election result will be, but not what it will mean for policy.
Brace for more political and economic turmoil as Germany finds out.
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