For many centrist supporters of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the prospect of Friedrich Merz leading her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was once considered a worst-case scenario. The hard-right Merz had rivaled Merkel for the CDU’s top post at the turn of the century and was gradually sidelined before he left politics for corporate law and finance in 2009. An indefatigable opponent of the liberal migration policy Merkel became known for, Merz returned to Berlin in an attempt to claim the conservative party’s mantle after Merkel announced her retirement in 2018.
Last January, Merz was finally tapped as CDU leader following the party’s historically poor performance in Germany’s September 2021 federal elections. By that point, the so-called “Merkel continuity” candidates who defeated Merz in 2018 and 2021 CDU leadership contests—Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and Armin Laschet—had floundered. Laschet’s bid for chancellor that year proved particularly calamitous. The CDU lacked a clear policy platform and suffered from Laschet’s several public gaffes. The party bled masses of votes to the Greens and Social Democratic Party (SPD), which campaigned on climate and social policy and formed a coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP) under SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
In the 14 months since Merz was elected to the CDU’s top job, the party has—predictably—shifted to the right. But it has also revitalized itself. Merz has proved to be a more comfortable fit than many observers expected. Free from the compromises and policymaking of governing, he has thrived as a combative opposition leader against Scholz’s limping coalition.
For many centrist supporters of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the prospect of Friedrich Merz leading her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was once considered a worst-case scenario. The hard-right Merz had rivaled Merkel for the CDU’s top post at the turn of the century and was gradually sidelined before he left politics for corporate law and finance in 2009. An indefatigable opponent of the liberal migration policy Merkel became known for, Merz returned to Berlin in an attempt to claim the conservative party’s mantle after Merkel announced her retirement in 2018.
Last January, Merz was finally tapped as CDU leader following the party’s historically poor performance in Germany’s September 2021 federal elections. By that point, the so-called “Merkel continuity” candidates who defeated Merz in 2018 and 2021 CDU leadership contests—Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and Armin Laschet—had floundered. Laschet’s bid for chancellor that year proved particularly calamitous. The CDU lacked a clear policy platform and suffered from Laschet’s several public gaffes. The party bled masses of votes to the Greens and Social Democratic Party (SPD), which campaigned on climate and social policy and formed a coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP) under SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
In the 14 months since Merz was elected to the CDU’s top job, the party has—predictably—shifted to the right. But it has also revitalized itself. Merz has proved to be a more comfortable fit than many observers expected. Free from the compromises and policymaking of governing, he has thrived as a combative opposition leader against Scholz’s limping coalition.
The CDU has topped most national polls since last February, and currently leads the SPD by around 9 percent. The party scored a major victory in Berlin’s Feb. 12 elections, sweeping the city-state’s suburban belt and finishing first among a smattering of parties with 28.2 percent of the vote. The CDU has now begun negotiating with the SPD to lead a two-party governing coalition there. It would be the CDU’s first time leading a government in the capital in more than two decades.
The election in Berlin is an omen for Scholz’s federal coalition. The famously left-leaning city-state was previously governed by a disharmonious SPD-led coalition, yet the CDU managed a win by railing ceaselessly against what it perceives as failed integration in immigrant neighborhoods, overly zealous climate protection measures, and out-of-control criminality. These themes are now a mainstay of the CDU’s national platform as it appears to be sharpening its talons for a culture war Merkel largely avoided during her 16 years in the chancellery.
Since 2016, when the SPD ditched a coalition with the CDU to govern Berlin alongside the Greens and Left Party, German conservatives have propagated an apocalyptic vision of the city-state. In the lawless and ungovernable capital, conservatives claim, a referendum to expropriate corporate landlords threatens a return to communist East Germany, unruly migrants and anarchists terrorize police, and cars will soon be banned from the inner-city so yoga moms can ride their cargo bikes in peace.
This “Chaos Stadt” theory was given some credence by the fact that February’s election was the re-run of a botched vote in 2021, when a marathon scheduled the same day disrupted polling centers’ operations. This year’s New Year’s Eve celebrations—when, as always, the streets become a legal free-fire zone for pyrotechnics—didn’t help the city’s reputation.
Videos circulated online of paramedics being attacked with fireworks in the borough of Neukölln, known for its large Arab- and Turkish-origin populations. Although the number of attacks was in line with previous years’ festivities, unconfirmed and incorrect figures initially suggested they had risen dramatically. The smell of gunpowder had barely dissipated before the CDU began its election campaign in earnest.
“The group of perpetrators must be clearly named,” Kai Wegner, the CDU’s leader in Berlin, announced on Jan. 3. “They were young men with migration backgrounds, who have nothing but contempt for the state and its representatives.”
Berlin’s SPD and FDP leaders also called for criminal prosecutions, but balked when a CDU representative in Berlin’s parliament requested the police publish the first names of German citizens arrested on New Year’s—an apparent attempt to determine who among them was not white.
The move earned sharp rebukes from all other major parties, and some within the CDU (though not Wegner). Only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which pulled a similar stunt in the state of Saarland in 2019, approved of the CDU representative’s demand. On television, meanwhile, Merz blamed “young people from the Arab world” for the violence, and inveighed against how teachers could not discipline children with migrant backgrounds without their parents intervening on behalf of their “little pashas.”
The campaign continued with attacks on the Greens’ plans to introduce car-free zones in the city, and ended with the Berlin CDU’s general secretary tweeting about a potential “election steal” should the CDU finish first but not lead the next government. (This is a not-uncommon occurrence in Germany, where coalition talks are the ultimate determinant of a government’s structure.)
Although the tweet seemed to be a tacit admission that the CDU did not expect to enter Berlin’s next government, the SPD soon gifted it that opportunity. After the CDU’s election success, SPD incumbent Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey said she would no longer seek to continue leading her ruling coalition, which retained a majority—relegating the SPD to being junior partners of the CDU. (Giffey, who is to the right of her party’s mainstream, has never hidden her disdain for the Greens and Left.) This arrangement would also give the CDU a substantial blocking majority in the Bundesrat, Germany’s upper house of parliament, to which each of Germany’s 16 states sends a delegation reflective of its state government.
Soon after Giffey’s concession, Wegner began to backtrack on the first name scandal. “Mehmet belongs to Berlin just like Michael—that’s good, Berlin is a diverse city,” he tweeted. Suddenly faced with the prospect of power in a city where 54 percent of the electorate voted for left-of-center parties, the Berlin CDU dialed back its inflammatory rhetoric. Coalition negotiations will likely focus on more mundane issues, such as bolstering the police force, increasing private-sector home construction, and a transportation policy that accommodates car owners.
“On the federal level, you have to make your point and go for conflict, but on the state level, at least in some states, you have to cooperate,” Stefan Marschall, a political scientist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, told Foreign Policy.
Low voter turnout, a worsening housing crisis, dysfunctional administrative services, and a fatigued SPD-led governing coalition all but guaranteed the CDU a strong performance in Berlin. But the party’s campaign focus on immigration and security also appeared to pay off. A survey cited by German broadcaster ARD found “security and order” to be Berlin voters’ top priority, and 83 percent of the CDU’s new voters said it was good that the party had “clearly named problems with immigration.”
“The CDU in central office will learn lessons from this success, which indeed is a reward for a rather controversial and negative campaign strategy,” Marschall said. How far right the CDU can fan the flames of a culture war before it alienates its centrist voters—or potential coalition partners—remains to be seen.
The CDU’s new strategy is not limited to Berlin. In January, the party’s secretary-general, Mario Czaja, honed in on the issue of integration in education. “It’s not acceptable that other languages than German are spoken in schoolyards,” he said. “Otherwise, parallel societies will already form in schools.”
In Hamburg, another city-state where the CDU finds itself in opposition to the larger SPD and Greens, the party is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative to end the use of gender-inclusive language in public institutions. In German, such language extends not only to pronoun usage but also gendered nouns for groups of people and professions, and its sudden ubiquity is polarizing. By dwelling on these new linguistic conventions, the CDU and conservative press have found a proxy to agitate those who feel excluded by progressive social change more broadly. In the state of Thuringia, the CDU passed an opposition motion against using gender-inclusive language last November, with support from the AfD.
The CDU has also flexed its muscles in the Bundesrat, watering down a new welfare reform last November. Taking the Berlin mayoralty would increase the party’s ability to counter the Scholz government’s agenda on divisive issues such as citizenship reform, which the CDU has long opposed.
Among other measures, Scholz’s coalition intends to reduce the number of years before a resident is eligible for naturalization and to lift a near-total ban on dual citizenship. This could open citizenship to millions of long-term residents of Germany, including many within its sizable Turkish-origin community. The CDU launched an inflammatory campaign in the late 1990s to oppose the last major citizenship reforms under SPD then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Merz carried this mantle into the 2000s by propagating the notion of a “leading culture” that implied immigrants should abandon their own customs in favor of Germany’s.
“We are seeing a certain polarization and charging of the discourse here,” Julia Reuschenbach, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin, told Foreign Policy. “We are already familiar with this development from the United States in recent years and it now seems to be gaining ground in Germany as well.”
The CDU is broadly in line with the SPD-led federal government on Ukraine, however, and has urged quicker and more substantial weapons deliveries to the country. Still, there have been missteps: Though Merz was the first major German politician to visit Kyiv last May, he described some Ukrainian refugees in Germany as welfare tourists a few months later. (He later apologized for his comments.)
On climate, the CDU opposes the European Union’s 2035 combustion engine ban, which has now also been stalled by FDP Transport Minister Volker Wissing, to much consternation from other EU member states. Disruptive climate protests by the group Letzte Generation, or Last Generation, have found little support among any major party, but the CDU—traditionally the party of law and order—has been particularly sharp in its criticism. This week, the deputy chairman of the CDU’s parliamentary group compared the group to Islamists.
As with Wegner in Berlin, such rhetoric is not guaranteed to transfer into government or policy. The CDU is currently consulting with its members and regional chapters to produce a national policy platform for next year. The final draft will be a measure of how much influence the party’s moderate faction—led by figures such as Laschet and North Rhine-Westphalia Minister-President Hendrik Wüst—still have, Reuschenbach said. A permanent shift to the right is by no means certain. Merz must navigate a Germany that is significantly more socially liberal than during his early career, a trend that Merkel recognized and capitalized on.
Merz is not averse to bending toward the center, as seen in his backing of gender quotas within his party and expulsion of CDU member Hans-Georg Maaßen, the former spy chief accused of anti-Semitism. Merz’s pledge to uphold the firewall between his party and the AfD will also be a major challenge ahead of elections in Saxony and Thuringia next year, where CDU officials have already worked with the AfD or depended on its support.
Even as the CDU tops the polls, Merz’s personal ratings remain poor. A recent poll found that only around 20 percent of the German public regarded him as a suitable candidate for chancellor. A clear majority favor another candidate, such as the bombastic and opportunistic Bavarian leader Markus Söder or the ambitious Wüst, who has staked out a position on the party’s left by calling for more support for refugees and a quicker transition to green energy.
“At the federal level, I think we can see that the party is benefiting primarily from displeasure with the [Scholz] government,” Reuschenbach said, “and … less because of its own program or people.”
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