Merz’s Botched Flirtation With Far Right Shakes German Election
(Bloomberg) -- The sweat was dripping off Friedrich Merz after the frontrunner to become Germany’s next chancellor saw his bid to outflank an ascendant far right spectacularly backfire in the Bundestag.
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Shoulders sunken, he addressed reporters after a dozen colleagues from his own CDU alliance turned on him less than a month before a snap election he thought he had in the bag. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats sat back quietly, taking it in. The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany’s chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel, reveled in his humiliation.
He “jumped in as a tiger and ended up as a bedside rug,” she said at a Friday press conference in Berlin. “Mr. Merz is not only clumsy, he’s also not stringent. He has brought himself down.”
His strategy began to unravel within 24 hours of the vote — and his arch-nemesis and one-time rival Angela Merkel emerged from retirement to deliver a rare rebuke and as it turns out a deciding blow to his high-stakes gamble to appear tough on immigration.
She publicly criticized him for getting too close to the AfD, joining a chorus of critics who accused Merz of breaking a taboo in German postwar politics and compromising a firewall erected by mainstream parties designed to keep the AfD out of power.
Merz’s misstep undercuts his attempt to portray the CDU as a party of effective change and opens the door to the AfD and the Social Democrats.
Merz’s shift to the right was a calculated gambit to neutralize the AfD and deliver a breakthrough with wavering voters, according to people familiar with his thinking. Most party leaders and members of his CDU/CSU parliamentary caucus supported the strategy and are unlikely to change tack at this point in the race.
How Germany’s Anti-Immigration Debate Played Out: TOPLive Transcript
Merz seized on a fatal knife attack in Bavaria last week — in which the suspected perpetrator is a 28-year-old Afghan man whose asylum request had been rejected — to justify the CDU’s strategy, saying that radical action was needed.
In the wake of that attack, Merz proposed legislation dubbed the “influx-limiting law.” It included measures designed to reduce irregular immigration from countries outside the European Union and cut the number of family members following asylum seekers to Germany, and would give police enhanced powers to carry out deportations.
Despite opposition from the Social Democrats and the Greens, Merz thought he had enough support to pass the bill. His CDU/CSU bloc, along with the AfD, the liberal Free Democrats and the far-left BSW party, have 372 seats, more than the 367 required for a majority.
Before the Friday vote was held, the Free Democrats, the Social Democrats and the Greens tried to convince Merz to take the legislation back to committee to hammer out a compromise among the mainstream groups and without the AfD. The vote was delayed for four hours due to the last-ditch efforts to find a middle ground.
In the end, Merz refused and pushed ahead with the ballot. What he hadn’t counted on was that public criticism from Merkel helped give members of his own party enough breathing room to withdraw support for the bill.
The measure was rejected with 349 votes against, 338 in favor and five abstentions. Twelve lawmakers in the conservative bloc of 196 lawmakers broke rank and didn’t cast a vote — the same number needed to pass the bill.
The vote was mostly symbolic, given that the bill would likely have failed in the Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament, where the 16 federal states are represented. Kai Wegner, the CDU mayor of Berlin, said Thursday he would “never approve a law in the Bundesrat that was only passed depending on the votes of the AfD.”
A related non-binding CDU/CSU resolution was adopted earlier in the week, which marked the first time since World War II that a mainstream party relied on a far-right group to clinch a parliamentary majority.
“What a disgrace,” Scholz said in a social media post. “The whole maneuver was in vain and only damaged democracy.”
For Scholz, Merz’s miscalculation opens a window of opportunity in the final stretch of the election campaign, according to SPD officials familiar with the chancellor’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The Social Democrats will try to exploit the situation and paint his conservative opponent as unreliable and not fit to govern.
It also opens up the possibility that opponents aligned with Weidel will weigh in, including Tesla Inc. and SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk, who has taken an interest in the German election.
Merz tried to shift the blame to the SPD and the Greens, highlighting the deepening rifts in Germany’s mainstream.
“The asylum turnaround that we tried to achieve failed because of the Greens and the Social Democrats,” said Merz. “I would have liked to have seen a different result, but from our point of view, this result creates clarity — clarity about where we stand and where the Social Democrats and the Greens stand.”
It remains to be seen whether the misstep affects the CDU’s lead in the polls. An Insa poll for Bild am Sonntag newspaper published Saturday showed support for Merz’s conservative bloc at 30%, unchanged from the previous week, and the AfD at 22% in second place, up one point. The SPD also gained one point to 17% and the Greens were stable at 12%.
Following Friday’s debacle, Merz will likely return his focus to economic policy, said the people. But in the mean time, his opponents have been given a fresh line of attack.
“He is not a candidate for chancellor, he cannot lead the country,” the AfD’s Weidel said. “He can’t even lead his own party.”
--With assistance from Stephan Kahl.
(Adds new poll in third to last paragraph)
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