It is time to say goodbye to Germany as an oasis of stability. Like many in Britain, I have long looked to it as a bastion of good, sensible, borderline-boring politics – especially during the Brexit chaos of the post-referendum years. Not any more.
As the country goes to the polls on 23 February, there is a real danger that its position as a lynchpin of liberal democracy in Europe might suffer lasting, if not irreparable damage. The election will also have an immeasurable impact on how Europe reacts to Donald Trump’s apparent willingness to surrender Ukraine – which will affect the security of the whole continent. In this situation, it is crucial to have a stable German government playing a leading role in Brussels.
Yet, such a government is by no means certain. On the contrary, there is a real possibility that the Federal Republic will emerge from these Bundestag elections ungovernable. Neither of the two main centrist blocs – the Social Democratic Party (SPD) or the centre-right alliance of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) – are polling anywhere near high enough to look as if they will form a government on their own. And, as the political landscape fractures, even a majority for a two-party coalition is looking unlikely. Meanwhile, the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) is at above 20 per cent – the highest it has ever polled and in second place behind the CDU/CSU.
Germany is now preparing for weeks or months of wrangling before something approaching a functioning government can be installed – if at all. Despite its size, the AfD will not be part of the next government: every other centrist party has expressly excluded the prospect of entering a coalition with it. The CDU leader Friedrich Merz – who will, barring a real upset, head Germany’s next government – has staked his political future on a categorical refusal.
But while the political centre has ruled out coalitions with the AfD, that doesn’t mean it is equipped to resist the draw of its politics. Whatever kind of coalition Merz might be able to form after the election, the AfD will be governing from the sidelines, destabilising his administration and undermining his political authority. In a way, the CDU leader only has himself to blame. Having made a habit of nabbing the far-right party’s issues and parroting its patterns of speech – particularly when it comes to issues such as immigration – he has drawn the AfD into the centre of the election campaign. In late January, he even used AfD votes to obtain a majority for a parliamentary motion – in breach of a long-standing taboo in German politics known as the “firewall” by which no centrist party should ever cooperate with the far right.
After an Afghan asylum seeker stabbed two people to death in an unmotivated criminal attack in the city of Aschaffenburg on 22 January, Germany’s smouldering debate around immigration was reignited. In an effort to secure his strongman image, Merz not only declared Germany to be an “unsafe country” – rhetoric that up until then was used by the AfD – he also proposed a series of measures to tighten the country’s borders, which would practically end free movement within the EU on a permanent basis.
In a weak attempt to protect the “firewall”, Merz garnished his draft motion with condemnations of the AfD in the hope the party would not back it – and that the SPD and the Greens would be swayed to vote with him. Yet the AfD leadership voted with Merz and the CDU, while the SPD and Greens voted against the proposed legislation on the grounds that it was incompatible with EU law. The motion passed (though, this close to the election, it will not be implemented). The firewall had cracked: it was the first time a German centrist democratic party had pushed through a piece of legislature on a national level with the support of a far-right extremist party.
Moreover, having previously promised not to cooperate with the AfD, Merz severely damaged his own credibility. In an effort to restore the firewall, he has reiterated that he will not form a coalition with the AfD following the election. However, who’s to say that he won’t, having broken one taboo in January, break the next? If coalition talks with other parties fail, could he try to lead a minority government, which would occasionally need further support from the far right to pass legislation?
Something that has been considered inconceivable in Germany since 1945 has now become a distinct possibility: a far-right party shaping, however indirectly, the nation’s government. The AfD isn’t just any right-wing populist outfit, either. It was founded in 2013 as an anti-euro party but has become increasingly radical with each passing year. Today it is one of the continent’s most extreme far-right groups: still anti-EU, but also pro-Vladimir Putin, and determined to destroy the democratic foundations of postwar Germany. It has proved too toxic for France’s Marine Le Pen, who booted it out of her “Patriots for Europe” grouping in the European Parliament in 2024 for being too extreme. German courts have even ruled that one of the AfD’s leaders, Björn Höcke, may officially be referred to as a “fascist” without constituting defamation. And in parts of former East Germany, local AfD groups are cooperating with neo-Nazi groups.
The AfD has sought to make migration the core issue of every electoral campaign – and Merz has helped the far-right party do just that. His error in January was to tie a single horrifying attack to wider problems in immigration policy, playing right into the AfD’s rhetoric instead of pursuing workable solutions. Indeed, the policy proposals he has now passed with AfD support will be almost impossible to implement. Merz, in a distinctly Trumpian fashion, has said that when he is in power, he will close Germany’s borders and refuse entry to all “illegal” immigrants on a permanent basis. This neglects how it is simply not possible to close the Federal Republic’s 4,000-kilometre-long border – German police unions estimate that such an endeavour would require at least another 10,000 new officers to guard the border – and ignores the inconvenient truth that German chancellors do not have the same executive power as US presidents. What’s more, his CDU/CSU is polling at 30 per cent, meaning he would need the SPD and probably one other party to form a government – partners who will not support permanent border closures that might be refused in European courts.
The predictable result of those negotiations is that Merz will be forced to scale down his rhetoric – leading, in turn, to further frustration among voters while the AfD triumphantly wields proof of its enduring criticism that the mainstream parties simply cannot deliver when it comes to stemming migration. He’ll leave the AfD looking like the only real opposition to what will likely be an unstable three-party coalition government.
Perhaps even more significantly, Merz’s policies are incompatible with European law. They contravene one of the pillars of the common market: the Schengen Agreement on freedom of movement. This also plays into the AfD’s agenda, as it wants to extricate Germany from the EU. While Schengen does allow border closures in exceptional circumstances, they must be time-limited, and several European legal experts doubt whether the attack in Aschaffenburg or even similar attacks constitute a national emergency of the kind required to justify such measures – all the more so because the number of refugees arriving in Germany is actually declining.
It is true that the country is struggling with way more than its fair share of asylum seekers, and that the joint European asylum system is in urgent need of reform. Yet giving national legislation precedence over European law would, in the medium term, likely weaken Germany’s position by provoking retaliatory measures from neighbouring countries who have already expressed their displeasure at Merz’s campaign proposals. Austria, for instance, has made it very clear that it would not take back any asylum seekers from Germany; Poland has adopted a similar stance.
In the summer of 2024, EU member states agreed on reforming the Common European Asylum System, adopting stronger entry checks at external EU borders with a view to spreading the load of asylum seekers across the bloc more equitably. Admittedly, this is a tedious, slow process not due to be implemented until 2026, but it is the only way to get a grip on migration without undermining the entire European project.
Merz knows all of this. Several members of his party have tried to explain away his pandering to the far right as a deliberate, calculated provocation during the election campaign meant to burnish the CDU’s right-wing credentials. After the election, they insist, he’ll moderate his position again. Yet this is a dangerously naive underestimation of the extent to which normalising far-right narratives undermines conservative positions and can, over time, destroy right-of-centre parties.
This is already happening. In late January, the CDU deputy leader Carsten Linnemann defended Merz’s strategy by saying that voters “have had enough of the AfD being branded Nazis and all the prattling on about the ‘firewall’”; another member of the party told the weekly Die Zeit that he was fed up with hearing “that some f***ing court order means we can’t do this or the Geneva Convention says we can’t do that”. This is the speed at which parts of the centrist conservative CDU have embraced AfD positions – and Merz may soon find that, in his efforts to position the CDU more firmly right of centre after the Angela Merkel years, he has gone much further than he meant to. If coalition talks with other centrist parties fail following the election, he will be under increased pressure from some quarters of his own party to form a minority government tolerated by the AfD.
Especially now the AfD has been given the official seal of approval from the very country that returned Germany to democracy after the Second World War. The Trump administration is openly supporting a far-right party with extremist members who consistently seek to minimise Nazi crimes. After having hailed the AfD as “Germany’s future” repeatedly on X, Elon Musk held an online talk with AfD leader Alice Weidel on 9 January, when he called on Germans to stop focusing on their historical guilt. At the Munich Security Conference on 14 February, the US vice-president JD Vance demanded that German centrist politicians should tear down the firewall against the AfD, before later meeting with Weidel.
The Trump administration is hardly ignorant of history. To the contrary: its support for the AfD is an attack on Germany’s historical conscience. This is because the firewall is the practical-political result of Germany’s memory of the totalitarian horrors of Nazi rule, a hard line drawn around the dangers of extremism. When Musk and Vance call for its destruction, they know exactly what they are doing. Supporting the AfD and normalising it for the German mainstream is an attack on historical conscience as an inoculation against authoritarian nationalism. The erosion of the firewall also has implications far beyond German borders. If Germany’s immunity to totalitarianism is lost, then it will be not just the EU’s largest country which has fallen, but the political and moral foundation of the EU itself. It’s notable that Hungary’s illiberal prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has long railed against the EU from within, hosted Weidel earlier this month. Following the meeting, a rare event between a sitting European leader and an AfD politician, Orbán said it was clear that the party was “the future”.
Yet nothing is certain. The sheer crudeness of Vance’s Munich speech has done the moderate wing of the CDU a service by showing the US’s intervention for what it is: a destructive force intent on destroying the EU. Merz has roundly rejected Vance’s foray into the campaign and once again underlined the importance of the firewall. In this way, Vance may have inadvertently pushed Merz’s CDU away from the AfD – and potentially galvanised Berlin’s political centre into installing a functioning government without excessive delay.
It’s a critical moment for Europe. The likelihood of a Russian attack on eastern Europe or the Baltic states has risen sharply, and a new German government will need to reassume its leading role in Brussels as soon as possible while rekindling its close alliance with France and Poland.
In this sense, the Bundestag election is not just a watershed moment for Germany, it’s one for global politics as well. If Berlin’s democratic centre holds, then so too will the EU in its present form. Yet if Germany – a country whose history has made it, thus far, the most immune to authoritarian tendencies in the 21st century – suffers a further tectonic shift in the foundations of its stable liberal democracy, the European project, too, will be shaken to its core.
[See also: Angela Merkel’s first principles]
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone