The “Last Bullet” of German Democracy Is Proving to Be a Dud
The ruling parties are struggling because their focus is on perpetuating power rather than serving the people
Shortly after last year’s election in Germany, there was a sense of relief that a two-party centrist alliance could rule Europe’s largest economy. The pairing of the conservative CDU/CSU and the center-left Social Democrats — which had backed three of Angela Merkel’s four terms as chancellor — secured a majority in the Bundestag, dispensing with the need for a messy three-way coalition, which had plagued Olaf Scholz’s administration. So far, so good.
But what was once called a “grand” coalition was a shadow of its past. Instead of a resounding mandate, the edge was a mere 13 seats (out of 630), and the far-right AfD had more than doubled its share of the vote to become the second-largest party in the Bundestag, supplanting the SPD. Meanwhile, the liberal Free Democrats — the kingmaker of German politics in the past — was voted out of parliament after bringing down the Scholz government.
Amid this sense of rupture and the evident struggles by the mainstream to contain the far right, Markus Söder — the head of the Bavarian conservatives — said the alliance of Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU and the SPD “is, in fact, democracy’s last bullet.”
While Söder is known for bombastic rhetoric, the idea that Germany could drift away from democratic ideals was widespread (I highlighted those risks in my book “Broken Republik” — now available in paperback with a fresh Afterword).
With Merz marking his one-year anniversary as chancellor today, things haven’t gone as planned. Only about one in three voters support the governing parties, the nationalist AfD has opened up a lead as wide as five points over the CDU/CSU at the top of the polls, and a vast majority of Germans disapprove of the job the government is doing. Merz also regularly has to field questions about how long his government can last.
While there has been a lot to deal with (from Trump’s tariffs to the U.S.-led Iran war), the bungling of the coalition was predictable, and the core problem was hinted at in Söder’s comment from last year.
By portraying the centrist parties as the final bulwark of Germany’s democracy, he articulated their shared self-image as the embodiment of democracy itself. In other words, their role legitimizes an administration as democratic. But that type of conceit makes them poor defenders of the system.
That’s because such an attitude deems a party’s actions to be democratic by default, even if the focus is really on securing power. That was evident when Merz and his allies manipulated the parliamentary system to force through hundreds of billions of euros in debt spending before the AfD could block such a move under the new parliament.
The goal of the shock post-election gambit was to defuse the fiscal issues that had destabilized Scholz’s administration. But in so doing, the mainstream sidestepped the public under the guise of preserving “democratic” power.
But parties are not the source of power in a democracy, people are. And the people are starting to see through these self-serving machinations.
Political parties are, of course, necessary. They are critical to organize support, delineate policies and set agendas. But a political machine is not end in itself. Parties are a means through which to solve problems. Too much reliance on them leads to outcomes like we’re seeing in Germany, where politicians struggle to see the people beyond the party.
Such conditions aren’t isolated to Germany. The traditional establishment has already collapsed in Italy and France, and the UK’s is on the ropes. That might ultimately be a good thing. There should be a certain amount of churn in a dynamic democracy. But disruption opens risk if vacuums can’t be filled constructively.
That’s the state that Germany finds itself in at the moment. And if the CDU/CSU and the SPD can’t find ways to solve the country’s problems, they risk undermining the very system they claim to represent. No party is worth that.