View from London: Friedrich Merz has become Germany’s Keir Starmer

Germany’s ruling party, the Christian Democratic Union, is facing a political earthquake, UnHerd notes. The trigger was a botched cabinet reshuffle initiated this week by party leader and Chancellor Friedrich Merz. After Jens Spahn resigned as parliamentary head of the governing CDU/CSU coalition in the Bundestag, Merz reshuffled eight positions. In one case, he fired a minister without lining up a successor.

But then he fired a very popular minister from east Germany, Christiane Schenderlein, previously minister for sport, and demoted her to a junior ministerial role. This decision triggered the rage of CDU leaders in eastern Germany. At a meeting of the coalition group, one MP then told Merz that he runs his party like a company. Normally, MPs do not openly attack the chancellor in such meetings because everything always leaks out, as it did in this case. But Merz has triggered a level of dissatisfaction that is unprecedented in his party.

So why is Merz so unpopular inside his own party? There are some parallels here with Keir Starmer. The former British PM never overcame the controversy surrounding his appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to Washington. But this affair was only the trigger. The cause is more prosaic. Labour concluded that it could not win the next election unless it changed its leader, and what is happening with the CDU is very similar. The CDU/CSU is now polling barely above 20%, with the AfD comfortably ahead. And there will be three state elections in east Germany in September – Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin – where the CDU is likely to do badly.

Meanwhile, every new crisis will hit Merz unfiltered. He has lost his shield. There will be eight elections over the next year – including in some of the west German heartlands of North-Rhine Westphalia and Lower Saxony —  which Merz’s party must win in order for him to survive. To do so, he should propose one substantive change: dropping the firewall against the AfD as a rigid construction that is binding on everybody, and let state and regional leaders decide what to do on a case-by-case basis.

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