Germany’s Traditional Conservatives Are Caught Short, Again

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his Christian Democratic Party have not had a happy September.  In the midst of efforts to reform and modernize the German Economy while also continuing to support Ukraine’s defense of itself against Russian aggression, electoral shockwaves have rocked the party in the last week. Two significant state level elections in the eastern Laender of Sachsen-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern were lost to the Far Right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party in results that led to calls for Merz to resign as Chancellor.

This is somewhat equivalent to expecting a U.S. President to resign because of a loss of a state election, and it is unsurprising that Merz has refused to step down. But, he must endure the loss of Sachen-Anhalt to the AfD, which it won as the majority party with 39 seats on September 6. Even more stinging were two electoral results on September 20^th.  In Mecklenburg, the AfD won the largest single share of the votes, completely eliminating the CDU presence in the regional government. They will not govern there due to the strength of the coalition of the left, but this result, along with that in Berlin, which saw the CDU lose 15 seats, or half of its overall numbers, to the AfD and its mirror party on the far left, “The Left” hurt nonetheless.

While on the surface, this is the loss of one state, the overall results are a very significant, and a portent of things to come. The AfD has been steadily increasing its national electoral hold on Germany, most recently in second in the February 2025 Federal elections, the same ones which brought Merz and the CDU to power. In those elections, the CDU won about 28 percent of votes, while the AfD won just over 20 percent, making them the second largest party in the country. The recent results prove that the AfD, a populist, anti-Europe, and anti-immigration party, has significant appeal to mainstream German voters from across the political spectrum.

While there may be some logic in broad terms in the parties of the right cooperating to form a government, that is not the case in Germany. The CDU, like all of the traditional German political parties, have sworn not to work with the AfD, creating a “Firewall” designed to keep them out of any conceivable coalition government. Real and perceived violations of this agreement, particularly in Sachsen-Anhalt, have been the bane of the national CDU leadership going back at least as far as 2019. Nevertheless, they belief that the firewall is necessary to protect German democracy and the positive legacy that the country has built since 1945.

So the question is, how long can the firewall hold? At what point does the CDU decide that it is better to work with the AfD than to form a coalition government with the left? While Merz was quoted earlier this summer as saying that the CDU must respect the results of democratic elections (he was referring to minor AfD victories in local elections), he has vociferously denied that this implies potential cooperation in elections. It seems very likely that Merz himself would not desire to continue to lead a CDU that openly cooperated with the AfD. But what happens if pragmatists in the party rise up who prefer electoral victory to defeat? This summer, Merz ally Michael Kretschmer caused a furor when he suggested something along these lines even before September’s defeats. After the September 6 elections, CDU Education Minster Karin Prien suggested that Merz lacked “the necessary empathy” to lead, but so far he remains in control, at least for now. Expect the debate, and pressure, on Merz to continue in the coming weeks and months.