The unprecedented bombshell Bundestag vote on Tuesday that briefly paused the confirmation of Friedrich Merz as Germany’s new chancellor spotlights cracks within Berlin’s post-war polity. Indeed, the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader was elected as the country’s 10th post-war chancellor in a second vote held later in the day.
But the dramatic suspense of a few hours, notwithstanding a secret ballot, inevitably fuelled speculation as to the six dissenters who denied Merz the 316 votes he needed to win a parliamentary majority. The stark truth is that these were MPs either from Merz’s own CDU or from its sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), or their arch rival, the Social Democratic Party (SDP). All three parties are constituents in the new governing coalition crafted following the country’s February 23 snap federal elections.
Tuesday’s episode is another reminder of the increasing scrutiny that Germany’s famed firewall against political extremes has recently come under. Classic instances of this efficacious formula, known as “cordon sanitaire”, are the so-called grand coalitions between the CDU and the SDP that have imbued German governments with stability over the decades since the inauguration of the 1949 Constitution.
Ironically, the practical application of the cordon sanitaire formula is proving to be less straightforward at a juncture when anti-immigrant and xenophobic parties are on the ascent, politically and electorally, in Germany and across Europe.
For instance, the populist Eurosceptic and xenophobic Alternative for Germany (AfD), the second largest party in the current Bundestag, has decried its exclusion from government as anti-democratic and a fraud committed on the German people.
The claim will resonate with many voters now that the SPD, after losing the February polls, its worst electoral showing since 1887, has returned to power under a different government.
The US vice-president, JD Vance, too, has thrown his weight behind this populist rhetoric, causing a flutter at the annual Munich Security Conference days before the German elections when he castigated Europe’s leaders for telling their electorate what to believe or think. Savouring the irony of the fiasco on Tuesday, one of the AfD’s leaders, Alice Weidel, was quick to call for fresh elections.
The new chancellor is set to embark upon a massive programme of public investment in Germany’s defence industry in the wake of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine and President Trump’s opposition to bankrolling the western military alliance.
After Tuesday’s shock vote, expect Merz to look over his shoulders. He would be mindful of the fiscal hawks within his own party who were less sympathetic to loosening the constitutional limit on public borrowing and who may well have had a hand in what happened at the Bundestag.
