German opposition ‘disrupter’ battles rising far right and internal rivalry

Friedrich Merz, leader of the German opposition, should be basking in sky-high approval ratings and positioning himself as his country’s chancellor-in-waiting. In theory, at least.

Instead, he is watching in disbelief as voters dissatisfied with Olaf Scholz’s government increasingly plump for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), now the country’s second-most popular party.

Merz’s Christian Democratic Union has slumped in the polls, just as the AfD — buoyed by inflation, recession, anxiety about the war in Ukraine and the government’s confused climate policies — is experiencing a surge in support.

“People are feeling very insecure, but unfortunately the CDU — Germany’s biggest democratic opposition party — is struggling to channel that insecurity,” said Marco Wanderwitz, an MP in Merz’s party. “Too many voters are backing the AfD instead.”

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It is an outcome that is likely to be particularly galling for Merz, who was elected CDU leader last year promising to win back conservative voters now flirting with the AfD.

“Merz said he would halve the AfD’s share of the vote and instead it’s doubled,” said Klaus-Peter Schöppner of pollsters Mentefactum. “Meanwhile the CDU seems stuck in a 30 per cent hole it can’t get out of.”

Adding to Merz’s woes is an internal rivalry with Hendrik Wüst, CDU prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state. The German press increasingly views Wüst as a potential CDU candidate for chancellor in elections scheduled for late 2025 — a role Merz had long expected to be his.

Wüst has been popping up everywhere, publishing an op-ed piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which he asked friendly MPs in Berlin to share on social media, making speeches at regional conferences of the CDU and giving interviews to local newspapers.

This has clearly rattled Merz, who last Sunday launched an unprecedented attack on his rival. Speaking to public broadcaster ZDF, he said dissatisfaction with Wüst’s government in NRW was “nearly as great as it with the federal government”.

“If we had regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, the AfD would be nearly as strong [there] as it would be nationally,” he said.

Seasoned observers were shocked. German politicians rarely criticise party comrades in public, especially those running a regional government in a big state such as NRW.

“A lot of people in my state found that really insulting, especially as Wüst is polling a lot better than Merz,” said one CDU lawmaker from the region. “He obviously sees Wüst as real competition.”

It is a stressful time for Merz, who has long had his eye on Germany’s highest office.

Seen as one of the CDU’s rising stars in the early 2000s, he abandoned politics after being sidelined by his arch rival, Angela Merkel. He ended up serving as chair of BlackRock Germany for four years and becoming a millionaire in the process. But the 67-year-old always hankered to return to national politics.

It was a difficult road, however. Merz was only elected CDU leader on his third attempt in January 2022. Many in the party saw him as a polarising figure whom they feared might alienate floating voters.

Wüst, who is 20 years younger, is seen as more moderate. The trained lawyer was catapulted to the front rank of CDU politics after winning elections in NRW in May last year and forming an unprecedented coalition with the Greens, which many saw as a model for a national government in Berlin.

Since that victory, Wüst’s national standing has gradually grown. In a recent popularity ranking by pollsters Insa, he came second behind Germany’s well-liked defence minister Boris Pistorius. Merz limped behind in eighth place.

Meanwhile, Wüst has begun to set out his political stall, portraying himself as Merkel’s natural heir. In his Frankfurter Allgemeine article, he said the CDU must remain an “anchor of centrist stability”.

“Those who score cheap points and run after the populists are taking an axe to their own roots and pitching themselves into chaos,” he wrote.

That was widely interpreted as a swipe at Merz who occasionally dabbles in the kind of rhetoric more often heard at an AfD rally. Last year he accused Ukrainian refugees of “welfare tourism”. Earlier this year, he described the sons of immigrants as “little pashas”.

A controversial speech by Claudia Pechstein, a policewoman and former German speedskating champion, at a CDU event over the weekend only fuelled the doubts about Merz’s leadership.

Pechstein, who was widely criticised for wearing her police uniform to the event, railed against asylum seekers, gender-neutral language and non-traditional families. Merz called her speech “brilliant”.

Liberals in his party were horrified. “We’re not even trying to reconnect with the young, the city dwellers, women,” said one CDU MP. “We’re sticking to the 70-year-olds living in rural areas who go to church every Sunday. That’s not a growth strategy.”

Wüst’s supporters say he would avoid such mis-steps. “He would never have let someone like Pechstein on to the stage,” said one CDU MP.

The convention Pechstein spoke at was one of several events Merz has organised to pave the way for a new party programme. The idea is to canvass members on what the party actually stands for before turning to the question of who should run as its candidate for chancellor in 2025. “We need a bit of strategic patience,” Merz told ZDF.

But Wüst has thrown a spanner into his rival’s works. Asked by the Rheinische Post last week whether he wanted to run as the CDU’s candidate in 2025, he said his “duties currently lie in North Rhine-Westphalia”. The word “currently” seemed designed to get tongues wagging about his future ambitions.

“Merz always said he needed two to three years to restore the CDU’s fortunes,” said Schöppner of Mentefactum. “But people don’t seem prepared to give him that. Already the talk is who should be their candidate for chancellor — even though, with 2.5 years to go till the election, now is clearly not the right time.”

Wanderwitz sees the clash between Merz and Wüst as a symptom of their party’s identity crisis. “What do we want to be? A constructive opposition? A mainstream centrist party in the tradition of Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel? Or do we want to make a noise and be disruptive?

“We haven’t really resolved that conundrum yet and until we have, it’s a real problem for us.”