CDU stumbles as the Merkel era draws to its close

It will be difficult for Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats to shrug off the defeats to which they crashed in two state elections on Sunday. With only six months before German voters elect a new Bundestag, the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel recorded its worst results in the two western states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, according to exit polls.

State ballots are not necessarily a reliable guide to the outcome of a national vote, and the CDU will still hope to form part of whatever government emerges after the Bundestag elections. Nevertheless, Sunday’s results suggest that, as Merkel’s 16-year chancellorship draws to its close, the CDU is in trouble in areas of western Germany that were once its natural strongholds.

Exit polls gave the CDU 24 per cent in the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg, far behind the Greens, and 27 per cent in Rhineland-Palatinate, where they lost to the left-of-centre Social Democrats.

These two elections represented the first chance for millions of Germans to give their verdict on the CDU since party members chose Armin Laschet, the state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, in January as their new leader. But the results were so disappointing that Laschet, who was Merkel’s preferred choice to lead the party, no longer looks like her natural successor as chancellor.

Instead, pressure is likely to come from the Christian Social Union, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, to choose Markus Söder, its leader, as the chancellor candidate of the centre-right. Such a step would be something of a gamble insofar as the centre-right has never won a national election when it has put forward a CSU leader as its candidate for chancellor.

The results [are] so disappointing that Laschet no longer looks like [Merkel’s] natural successor as chancellor

The CDU’s weak performances on Sunday appear connected to a corruption scandal that erupted in the party’s parliamentary ranks just before the state elections. Even some CDU politicians say this has plunged the party into its worst crisis since a party financing scandal in the late 1990s ended the career of Helmut Kohl, the former chancellor and Merkel’s predecessor as CDU leader.

The public mood has also swung against the CDU, which governs at national level in coalition with the Social Democrats, because of the perception that it is handling the Covid-19 crisis less competently than in the early months of the pandemic last year. In particular, the slow rollout of Germany’s vaccination programme has damaged the CDU.

A third factor behind Sunday’s results was the popularity of the CDU’s chief opponents: Winfried Kretschmann, the Greens party state premier in Baden-Württemberg, and Malu Dreyer, the SPD state premier in Rhineland-Palatinate. The comfortable victory of the Greens in Baden-Württemberg confirms the growing impression that the party is destined to form part of a national coalition government after September’s elections for the first time since 2005.

More broadly, however, the CDU’s travails are evidence of a deeper problem for the party that is related to the fragmentation of the German political landscape in the Merkel era. Like the SPD, the CDU sank in the 2017 Bundestag election to its worst result since the Federal Republic’s creation in 1949.

The chief beneficiaries have been the Greens and, to a lesser extent, the rightwing populist Alternative for Germany. However, the AfD’s main strength lies not in western Germany — a point underlined in Sunday’s elections — but in the five states that were once part of communist eastern Germany.

The CDU and SPD have ruled as a “grand coalition” in three of Merkel’s four governments since 2005, but few German politicians and commentators expect another such coalition after September. Both the “grand coalition” formula and Merkel’s brand of cautious centrism now appear to be reaching the end of the road.

tony.barber@ft.com