BERLIN, September 2 — Chancellor Friedrich Merz is staring down a political crisis that strategists in Brussels and Washington are watching with mounting alarm, as his conservative Christian Democratic Union sinks to record-low approval ratings amid internal warfare over pension reform and a botched cabinet reshuffle. The instability is not merely a domestic matter; the European Council on Foreign Relations argues in a new assessment that Germany’s drift could threaten the future of the continent itself. The broader stakes are stark.
Germany’s economy has endured six years of paltry growth, and its traditional industrial base is demanding protection against Chinese competition, US tariffs, and energy price shocks. Merz’s government has produced more reform announcements than actual reforms, looking backward to combustion engines, looser labour rights, and family values.
The one notable policy shift — a more active European posture on protecting markets from China — was enabled not by his leadership, the ECFR notes, but by the altered stance of Germany’s car industry, which now sees Beijing as a liability rather than a partner.
The East German reckoning
The immediate flashpoint is in the east. Saxony-Anhalt votes on September 6, and polling suggests the far-right Alternative für Deutschland could capture an absolute majority there — a result that would rewrite German post-war history and directly challenge the nation’s “never again” mantra. The AfD, the CDU, and the Left party may be the only formations clearing the 5% threshold for the state parliament, squeezing out the centrist alternatives that have long anchored German politics.
Two weeks later, Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern also go to the polls, with complicated three-party coalitions likely to emerge. The CDU leadership under Merz maintains its “firewall” against any cooperation with the AfD, but that position is drawing growing criticism from local politicians and conservative thinkers.
The calculus is unforgiving: with the liberal Free Democrats struggling to clear the 5% threshold, the CDU finds itself dependent on centre-left coalitions — and increasingly unable to offer voters a convincing vision for the country’s future. An AfD minister-president in a German state would signal, in the ECFR’s framing, that the political establishment has failed.
The party has been part of Germany’s landscape for over a decade and is now within striking distance of power on a revisionist platform: curbing immigration and asylum, reversing the energy transition, challenging European integration, ending the euro, and pursuing a nationalist foreign policy.
External shocks, internal drift
Germany is not failing in a vacuum. The war in Ukraine grinds on, volatility in America complicates transatlantic assumptions, conflict over the Strait of Hormuz threatens supply lines, and an epic drought is shrivelling hopes for economic recovery. Each external shock lands on a government that, by the ECFR’s account, has talked more about reform than it has delivered.
What this signals for the autumn is a leadership question as much as an electoral one. Speculation is growing that Hendrik Wüst, the minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia, could succeed Merz as chancellor this autumn.
For now, the CDU’s firewall holds. But with the east voting this week and next, the pressure on that position — and on Merz himself — is only set to intensify.
