Narrow Margin

Friedrich Merz’s bumpy ascent to the chancellorship exposes the legacy of Angela Merkel’s drift and Germany’s struggle to redefine itself in a harsher world.

Germany has long traded on the illusion of stability. For nearly two decades, it wore the mask of quiet strength: a consensus-driven, export-led, rules-abiding economic power, steered by Angela Merkel’s steady hand. But illusions tend to collapse suddenly. That collapse has now come.

Friedrich Merz’s troubled election as Chancellor goes beyond being a mere personal embarrassment. It marks the end of an era in which Germany could glide past political tension and global disruption with cautious rhetoric and fiscal rectitude. For the first time in the Federal Republic’s postwar history, a chancellor failed to win a majority in the first round of parliamentary voting. Merz ultimately secured 325 votes in a second round - barely nine above the required threshold - but the damage to his authority and to the confidence in the governing coalition has been done.

The Merz debacle reflects a vacuum at the centre of German politics. The coalition he forged with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) already looks brittle. A quiet revolt from within his own CDU/CSU bloc prompted in part by a massive borrowing plan rammed through the outgoing parliament has underscored the simmering discontent with the compromises that have come to define German governance.

For all her global acclaim, Angela Merkel left her country geopolitically timid, structurally complacent and economically overexposed. Under her watch, Germany deepened its dependence on cheap Russian gas, allowed critical infrastructure to atrophy, and turned a blind eye to the rise of geopolitical competition from China and the United States. Merkelism prioritised export surpluses and domestic calm until both became untenable.

Now, Merz is left to pick up the pieces. He enters office as Germany’s tenth chancellor since the war, with little room to manoeuvre. His coalition partners distrust him, his party remains ideologically divided and the country’s strategic environment has deteriorated rapidly. The Russian invasion of Ukraine ended Berlin’s energy illusions. Donald Trump’s return to power in the United States has revived trade tensions and put Germany’s reliance on American security guarantees in question. Chinese overcapacity and aggressive industrial policy now pose an existential threat to German manufacturing.

The resistance Merz faced in parliament and even within his own ranks speaks to the uneasy transition Germany is undergoing from being a post-Cold War economic giant to a nation forced to reckon with ideological divides and internal reform.

Part of that reckoning includes confronting political fragmentation. Much ink has been spilled warning of the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), often caricatured as a ‘far-right’ menace. But simplistic labels obscure the causes of its appeal. The AfD emerged not from ideological extremism alone, but from legitimate frustration with elite complacency, chaotic migration policies and the erosion of fiscal discipline - many of them legacies of Merkel-era centrism.

Treating AfD voters as an undereducated rabble or the party itself as a neo-fascist aberration has done little to stem its growth. A more honest diagnosis would recognise that Germany’s political centre has failed to grapple with real anxieties: stagnating wages, demographic decline, a creaking energy transition and the cultural costs of rapid social change. These are not inventions of populists but the lived realities of many Germans outside the elite bubbles of Berlin and Frankfurt.

Merz, unlike Merkel, does not shy away from confrontation. He has long advocated for a more assertive conservatism, though his erratic style and past missteps have left some wary.

Still, he now has the opportunity to reframe the national conversation. That includes overhauling energy policy, making defence spending credible, and confronting the sclerosis of Germany’s bureaucracy and infrastructure.

This is a country that still commands deep global respect. But respect alone cannot substitute for strategic clarity. Friedrich Merz begins his term not with a mandate for continuity, but with a warning that the old consensus has collapsed. What comes next will define Germany for a generation.