For some time now, I’ve wanted to catalogue in one place all the ways that CDU Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz is screwing up. His strategic failures are really a thing to behold; I’ve never seen anybody screw up this frequently and this dramatically before. Yet I have delayed writing this post, above all because I wanted Merz to reach the end of his present streak and stop screwing up for a while. I wanted to have a complete unit – a full collection of screwups – to present to my readers for analysis. I now accept that this is never going to happen, and that the coming months and years are going to provide nothing but an unending parade of screwups, one after the other, each more inexplicable and baffling than the last. We must begin the tiresome work of trying to understand Merz’s screwing up now, because there will only ever be more of this.
As with all deeply rooted phenomena, it is hard to tell where the present parade of screwing up began. There was the lacklustre CDU election campaign and Merz’s ill-advised flirtations with the Greens that began last autumn, which cost the Union parties precious points in the polls. None of that looked auspicious, but the screwing up did not begin in earnest until January, in the wake of Aschaffenburg – when Merz decided to violate the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland. For the first time in history, the CDU, the CSU and the FDP voted with AfD in the Bundestag, first in a successful attempt to pass a meaningless if sternly worded anti-migration resolution, and then in a failed attempt to pass an actual piece of legislation that would take real steps to stem the influx of asylees from the developing world.
This manoeuvre had the real glimmerings of strategy, and so we would do well to ascribe it to Merz’s underlings rather than to Merz himself. It was only superficially an attempt to stop the tide of voter defections to the AfD. Above all, it was an effort to gain leverage over the Greens and the Social Democrats in any future coalition negotiations. Merz and his CDU, sobered by polls showing a left so weakened that they feared having to govern in a nightmare Kenya coalition with the SPD and the Greens both, wanted to send a clear message: “We’re not afraid to achieve parliamentary majorities with the AfD if you won’t go along with our programme.” Had Merz stuck to this line, he’d be in a far better place than he is today. Alas, the man chose to screw up instead. Spooked by yet another wave of leftist protests “against the right” – a “right” which now included not only the AfD but also the CDU and the CSU – Merz lost himself in a string of disavowals. A minority government with AfD support would be unthinkable, he and his lieutenants said. The Union parties would never work with the AfD, he and his lieutenants said.
In this way, Merz’s firewall gambit succeeded only in outraging and energising his future coalition partners, while achieving nothing for himself or his own party. A lot of CDU voters would like to see some measure of cooperation between the Union parties and the AfD, and for his constant never-again-with-the-AfD rhetoric Merz paid a price. The CDU underperformed the polls, crossing the finish line with a catastrophic 28.5% of the vote on 23 February. The Greens whom Merz had spent months courting – at the cost of alienating his own base! – emerged from the vote too weak to give his party a majority, and so the man was left to deal with the Social Democrats, newly radicalised not only by their own dim showing but also by Merz’s firewall trickery.
Thus it came to be that Merz ceded the high ground in negotiations to the SPD, the biggest losers in the 2025 German elections. That is itself remarkable, the kind of thing you could not be certain of achieving even if you tried. And yet it is only the beginning!
The second screwup, it turns out, was in the making for a long time. Merz and his CDU, you will remember, used the constitutionally-anchored German debt brake to destroy the traffic light in 2023. They brought suit with the constitutional court in Karlsruhe against Chancellor Scholz’s budgetary chicanery, and secured a ruling that effectively killed traffic light spending plans. It took a full year for the traffic light to finally die, but it was dead in spirit long before.
After Scholz’s government folded last November, Merz and his party capitalised on their win to present themselves as beacons of fiscal responsibility. They pledged to construct carefully prioritised budgets; the SPD and the Greens might want to max out government credit cards, but not the CDU. They were the farsighted and mature ones. Merz and his party said this over and over, and they even inscribed the message in their party programme – in bold! Meanwhile, behind the scenes, that had begun to wonder whether increasing deficit spending might not be such a bad idea after all. They could have raised this matter with their own voters; it would hardly have cost them more support than their flirtations with the Greens had done. But no, the one party with by far the greatest credibility problem in all of German politics – the party that felt itself forced to step across the firewall to demonstrate sincerity to voters, after decades of Merkelian reversals – decided that the best path would be to promise fiscal responsibility in public while plotting to overturn the debt brake in private.
This brings us to the sad spectacle of coalition negotiations with the SPD, a disgraced party empowered precisely by Merz’s powerful screwups. Now I am not a politician, and still less am I a clever negotiator, but even I know that the key point of all negotiations is to extract concessions from the other party – even if those concessions happen to be things that you secretly desire yourself. The SPD love deficit spending; they are a party that exists entirely to give their constituents money. In these negotiations, Merz ought to have presented his party’s secret plans to overhaul the debt brake and borrow billions of Euros as a concession – something the SPD could have in return for supporting a hard Union line against migration, for example.
Everything we know about these negotiations, however, suggests that Merz entered them determined to convince the SPD of the singular point on which they required no convincing. Perhaps encouraged by the false panic over the prospect of an American withdrawal from Europe, or perhaps just using the Trump freakout du jour as an opportunity, Merz gravely told the SPD that they would have to agree to emend the constitution and blow massive holes in the debt brake. This is like telling your young child over dinner that not only will he not be allowed his vegetables, but that he will also have to eat an extra slice of cake. The CDU and SPD eventually agreed on a 500 billion-Euro “special fund” for infrastructure, and also on a scheme to exempt hundreds of billions in defence spending from deficit limits. The SPD were happy to acquiesce, and they were even happy to write a few stern if broadly meaningless words on migration into their preliminary negotiation paper. Afterwards, leading SPD politician Boris Pistorius, who was involved in the negotiations, told his comrades not to worry – the SPD had succeeded in defanging Merz’s migration restrictionism entirely. All that remained of Merz’s ambitions was a “placebo,” Pistorius said – a few brave words that will have “no effect whatsoever.”
That is bad enough, but actually it is only the beginning of Merz’s screwup on this front, which is so thoroughly bizarre as to enjoy fractal qualities. By this I mean that the more you focus upon it, the more screwed up it appears. Overhauling the debt brake requires a two-thirds majority of the Bundestag, and in the new twenty-first Bundestag Die Linke (the Left Party) and the AfD will be in a position to block any proposed revisions. Thus Merz’s grand and profoundly idiotic plan was to use the old twentieth Bundestag – the one elected in 2021 – to create his “special fund” for infrastructure and to exempt 400 billion Euros to pour into our profoundly dysfunctional Bundeswehr. In the twentieth Bundestag, which still has a few weeks left to live, the AfD and Die Linke are too weak to cause problems.
This is the kind of plan that sounds tactically brilliant at first but that, upon a few seconds of reflection, ought to have revealed itself to all concerned as really, really stupid. There are reasons incipient German governments have never tried to do anything like this before. To begin with, you have to get all kinds of people who have been voted out of parliament to support your plan. Fifty CDU/CSU representatives in the current Bundestag, for example, are not returning. Why should they go along with this train wreck and make their final political act one of complicity in an unprecedented programme of voter deception? I still have yet to read a good explanation anywhere of how this is supposed to work.
