Merz holds the future of the German centre-right in his hands

The writer directs the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution

The death at 81 this week of the centre-right statesman Wolfgang Schäuble, one of Germany’s most ardent Europeanists (only a day before the passing of another great European and friend of Germany, Jacques Delors) casts a sombre light on one of the most urgent political questions of the coming year: can conservatives hold firm against a surging hard right at a time of momentous challenges to peace in Europe and the world? 

Schäuble was postwar Germany’s longest-serving legislator, parliamentary president, party whip, party leader, twice cabinet minister, closest adviser to two chancellors, an architect of German reunification in 1990 and of European integration thereafter, and an enduring conservative powerbroker. 

His disappointments and failures, too, were larger than those of other men. He was foiled in his desire to become Germany’s chancellor or president; he became caught up in an illegal party financing scandal; and he wanted then-chancellor Angela Merkel to force Greece out of the European currency union during the financial crisis of 2010. (The latter, he admitted afterwards, had been a mistake.) 

Discipline and a prickly sense of humour helped him weather these and other blows (he was confined to a wheelchair after an assassination attempt in 1990). His passion for politics and a healthy sense of his superior intellectual and rhetorical abilities fuelled him into high age. Yet what truly set him apart was his abiding loyalty to a European Germany — he was always dutifully serving a cause higher than himself.

As Germans mourn Schäuble and Delors, they contemplate war in Europe and the Middle East, an uncertain protector in the US, a declining international order and a global alignment of authoritarian powers. All this at the threshold of a year in which the EU, the US and several European countries hold elections in which established centre-right parties are being challenged aggressively by rightwing extremists. In France, the hard-right populist Marine Le Pen is polling ahead of president Emmanuel Macron. It feels like the end of an era.

Germany’s next national vote is only in 2025. But three eastern German states — Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia — hold state elections in the autumn of 2024. In all three, the openly extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) is running in first place, polling between 27 and 35 per cent. And the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) need to decide in the coming year who will be their candidate for the election campaign.

Usually, that right would naturally fall to party chair Friedrich Merz. His CDU is the frontrunner in all national polls, while the governing traffic light coalition and Chancellor Olaf Scholz are at a popularity nadir.

At 68, Merz is the King Charles of German conservatism. Like the UK’s king, he’s had to wait patiently for power. As an ambitious young(-ish) legislator he lost the battle for power to Angela Merkel in 2002, and ended up leaving politics for a career in business. Merkel made sure he never joined any of her four cabinets; after she stepped down as party chair in 2018, Merz twice lost bids to succeed her. He returned to parliament in 2021, and was finally elected CDU leader that year. Merkel, for her part, has all but broken with the CDU.

For now, the opposition leader is laser-focused on making life miserable for the government. In November, he successfully hauled it before the constitutional court for violating the debt brake. Now, he is demanding that Scholz should step down, and open the way for early elections in June.

But the preternaturally self-assured Merz has a knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Having vowed to halve support for the AfD by steering his party towards a more hard-edged conservatism, he has appalled not just the CDU’s liberals with ill-judged remarks about migrants, gendered language, homosexuals, Muslims, the Greens (“our main enemy”), and the need to collaborate with the hard right at the local level. A new draft party programme is long on “pride” and notably shorter on explaining how it intends to “protect our interests without jeopardising [our] prosperity”. The AfD’s support, meanwhile, has nearly doubled since the beginning of 2022.

Which is why Merz has a Prince of Wales of his own: Hendrik Wüst, 48 and conservative prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia. And there is always his Bavarian colleague Markus Söder, whose conviction that he is called to highest national office remains undimmed. Yet in a recent survey, only 35 per cent thought a conservative government would perform better.

Perhaps it is time for Merz, who calls Schäuble his mentor, to make the case that he, too, has a cause higher than himself.