Why Merkel’s successor could be a disaster for Germany

‘The die is cast,’ said Markus Söder in a press conference yesterday as he stepped back to allow his rival Armin Laschet to run as the chancellor candidate for the conservatives in Germany’s upcoming election. This ominous phrase was carefully chosen by a man who thought a disastrously wrong decision had been made by the CDU elite.

Söder was by far the most popular chancellor candidate, and had a 20 point lead over his conservative competitor in the polls. Söder, the minister-president of Bavaria, won his own state and the wider German public over with his straight-talking and decisive action during the pandemic. With the charismatic Bavarian at the helm, Merkel’s CDU/CSU would have stood a good chance of not only retaining power, but winning the election comfortably.

Meanwhile the CDU/CSU’s chosen candidate, Laschet, is as unpopular as ever. One survey, taken shortly after his candidacy had been confirmed, put the German Greens seven points ahead of his party. As minister-president of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, Laschet had recently drawn the ire of his boss in Berlin as well as the wider public. His personality is as uninspiring as his political compass is off course. Selecting him as the chancellor candidate was a purely tactical choice for the conservatives, the product of internal power-politics.

The CDU elite think they are playing the long game: they want to let Laschet fail, give the party time to de-Merkelise, then bounce back before the next election. It’s a solid plan if you assume the electorate are a grey mass of predictable lemmings. In reality it is a dangerous scheme that goes right to the heart of German democracy. One can only assume that the CDU leaders have forgotten that they returned their lowest result since 1949 in the 2017 election – or the many elections during Merkel’s reign with historically low turnout, as people became increasingly disaffected with the German political establishment.

Merkel dragged the Christian Conservatives so far into the political centre that they became indistinguishable from their coalition partners, the Social Democrats. Add a consensus-driven Green party to the mix and the black, red and greens of German politics – once distinct political parties – have all washed into a nondescript beige.

Centrist German voters have plenty of parties to choose from in the September election, but there is a gaping hole at the right end of the political spectrum. Söder could have filled that well. His Catholic CSU are socially more conservative than their sister party, Merkel’s CDU. He has also voiced concerns about controversial issues such as immigration policy, or the EU’s botched Covid response. The Bavarian could have been a safe pair of hands to disperse the political steam heating up under Germany’s centrist lid for decades.

For years, Merkel’s own personal pull has helped keep her party afloat. Relying on a concept she called ‘asymmetric mobilisation’, she drew more of her own voters to the polling stations than her uninspiring political competitors. Her successor Laschet, however, has no such star dust. So the big question is: what will the huge mass of politically homeless Germans do when no party is able to give them shelter?

Many might simply decide to stay at home and hold on to their political opinions until Germany’s bars reopen. Some might turn to the FDP, an economically liberal, centre-right party. But others might vent their anger by voting for the AfD, especially in the former East Germany. The far-right party has, however, recently haemorrhaged a lot of support due to its bizarre Covid stance, which has included wild conspiracy theories and anti-vax diatribes.

But the lack of political variety on offer doesn’t mean that Germans are obediently going to swallow whatever the political elite puts in front of them. Laschet’s appointment has left a volatile power vacuum, which none of the established parties care to fill. It speaks of staggering arrogance and complacency that the country’s most successful political party refuses to field a candidate that could fill it.

But the die is indeed cast and the parties are gearing up for battle. Armin Laschet’s ranks are already battered and bruised from the fight to get him this far. Many of his political footsoldiers had openly pledged allegiance to Söder. Meanwhile, the latter has urged his CSU troops to throw their support behind his erstwhile rival. But Söder’s call for unity jarred with his recitation of Caesar’s words as he crossed the Rubicon and began a civil war.