Friedrich Merz's reign of error

Spectator

4 days ago

We are 100 days into Friedrich Merz's chancellorship, and Germany has achieved something truly remarkable: a coalition government so perfectly dysfunctional that it appears to have been designed by the AfD's campaign strategists. The signs of trouble emerged from the very beginning. Merz, who could barely contain his eagerness to finally assume the chancellorship, stumbled at the first hurdle on 6 May when he failed to secure the necessary majority in the first Bundestag vote, only managing to cross the line later that day. Some observers already spoke of a botched start and they were not wrong.
What we are witnessing is not mere political incompetence. It is a masterclass in how to gift-wrap a democracy for populists while maintaining the earnest conviction that one is defending it
Where one might expect the traditional honeymoon period, that blessed interval when voters give new governments the benefit of the doubt, Merz has instead been greeted with tepid approval ratings that would make even the most modest politician wince. While Gerhard Schröder enjoyed 63 per cent satisfaction after his first hundred days, Angela Merkel a robust 74 per cent, and even the ill-fated Olaf Scholz managed 56 per cent, Merz limps along at a dismal 32 per cent – with some pollsters offering an even more brutal 29 per cent. What we are witnessing is not mere political incompetence. It is a masterclass in how to gift-wrap a democracy for populists while maintaining the earnest conviction that one is defending it.
Merz, that stalwart champion of conservative principle, swept to power promising four concrete changes within his first hundred days: reform the bloated Bürgergeld welfare system, slash business taxes, turn back migrants at the borders and eliminate the bureaucratic stranglehold on German enterprise. Simple enough goals for a man who had spent years thundering from the opposition benches about the urgent need for such reforms. What could possibly go wrong when your coalition partner fundamentally opposes every single one of these objectives?
Enter the Social Democrats, stage left, with a performance that borders on the supernatural. Having been comprehensively rejected by the German electorate – scraping together a humiliating 16 per cent of the vote – they have nonetheless managed to transform this historic repudiation into remarkable negotiating leverage. It is political sorcery of the highest order: turning electoral lead into policy gold.
While their traditional working-class constituency defects en masse, the very party they claim to oppose, the AfD, now leads national polling. The SPD has since doubled down on defending precisely the policies that hemorrhaged their support in the first place.
Minister Bärbel Bas recently declared from the Bundestag that 'there will be no cuts with us' regarding the Bürgergeld system, a programme that has seen benefit sanctions plummet from 19 per cent to 8 per cent while costs soar to €41.5 billion annually.
Their genius lies in their unwavering commitment to ignoring the message their former supporters have sent them: that perhaps, just perhaps, unlimited welfare payments to all (including Ukrainian refugees who, unlike asylum seekers, qualify immediately) might not be the vote-winner they imagine.
To be fair to the Chancellor, he has managed to implement precisely half of his promises, rather like a surgeon who successfully removes half a tumour. His tax package delivers real benefits to business: €46 billion over five years in various write-offs and incentives. Companies can now depreciate machinery faster, electric company cars receive preferential treatment, and corporate tax rates edge downward. Whether this will spark the 2 per cent annual growth he promised is another matter entirely, particularly when the economy actually contracted by 0.1 per cent in the second quarter of his tenure.
On migration, Merz has delivered something resembling action. The Federal Police have indeed turned back 474 asylum seekers since May – a modest achievement when measured against the 23,000 people who filed initial asylum applications in the same period. It is rather like claiming to have solved London's traffic problems by removing three cars from the M25 during rush hour.
While this coalition comedy unfolds, the AfD watches with barely concealed delight. Every SPD defence of unpopular welfare policies, every half-hearted Merz reform, every economic indicator pointing toward recession – it all feeds directly into their narrative that the established parties are fundamentally unfit for purpose.
The mathematics are brutally simple: either mainstream parties offer genuine solutions to the concerns that drive ordinary Germans to despair, or the AfD will eventually eclipse the CDU as the dominant force on the right. Each migrant who arrives at Germany's borders, each headline about migrant crime, each welfare payment to a non-contributor adds another few thousand votes to the AfD column. The countdown clock is ticking, and this coalition appears determined to accelerate the tempo.
What makes this betrayal particularly devastating is its timing. As Europe confronts unprecedented challenges from Russian aggression, Chinese economic warfare, and the uncertainties of a second Trump presidency, Germany desperately needs coherent centre-right leadership. Instead, it has received a reheated grand coalition dominated by a party that voters explicitly rejected.
The fiscal consequences alone should terrify anyone with passing familiarity with economic history. Germany's constitutional debt brake – that sacred pillar of fiscal conservatism – has been functionally neutered through accounting gimmickry worthy of Enron's finance department. The proposed €500 billion 'future investment fund' represents nothing less than deficit spending dressed in Sunday clothes, coming precisely when Germany's economy teeters on recession and its industrial giants flee to more hospitable shores.
More devastating still is what this capitulation reveals about the state of Germany's political imagination. The CDU, once the party of visionaries like Adenauer and Erhard, the architects of the post-war economic miracle, now appears incapable of articulating any vision distinct from social democratic orthodoxy. They have become SPD tribute artists, performing covers of leftist greatest hits with marginally less enthusiasm.
The truly artistic achievement here is how both coalition partners simultaneously undermine each other while strengthening their mutual enemy. The SPD blocks the very changes that might stem their electoral collapse, while Merz appears increasingly impotent – hardly the image of decisive leadership his party promised.
This leaves Germany's centre-right electorate with a grotesque non-choice: stomach Merz's SPD-lite compromises, drift toward the AfD's 'brown-tinged socialism', or withdraw from politics altogether. The AfD, despite its nationalist packaging, offers economic policies that would make trade unionists blush: protectionism, expanded welfare, and state intervention. Their rightward cultural positioning merely disguises a fundamentally collectivist economic agenda.
For Germany's disillusioned centre-right voters, watching this government is not merely observing political failure – it is attending the funeral of the political home they once knew. When mainstream conservatives betray their principles so thoroughly, they do not convert their voters to progressivism. They orphan them politically, leaving them susceptible to whatever radical alternative promises to address their abandoned concerns.
Merz positioned himself as the saviour who would restore conservative credibility after years of Merkelian drift. Instead, he has revealed himself as just another spineless politician, willing to sacrifice principle for the illusion of power. His first 100 days have not been a failure – they have been something far more dangerous, a masterpiece of political suicide disguised as governance. The AfD could scarcely have scripted it better themselves.