Although much ink has been spilled about the decline of Social Democracy across Europe, its former rival and sometime counterpart Christian Democracy isn’t faring any better, with the US-Israeli war on Iran showing its fundamental contradictions in this new geopolitical age.
More so than the Christian church or free markets, European Christian Democrats were always truly united by one thing: pro-United States policy. And they are running out of road, with the US not only threatening to annex Greenland but also with the war on Iran leading to already-embattled European governments to flounder even further as they try to insulate their populations from cost-of-living impact of the oil price rises.
The United States is no longer there to protect Europe, and in some cases may be actively hostile, leaving leaders stuck in the splits of trying to prepare for the worst case scenario of a NATO-Russia conflict without military support from America.
For a life-long transatlantacist Merz initially reacted quickly and decisively to the re-election of Donald Trump, flattering the president on account of his German roots, while also pledging significant defence spending and criticising the US.
But with Iran, he threw this calculus out of the window, claiming during the 12 day melée last summer that Israel was doing the West’s “dirty work.” His long-harboured hatred of the Islamic Republic of Iran overtook domestic political interest, and voters paid attention.
Western voters increasingly tend to be dissatisfied with their leaders, who offer them little more than managed decline. A recent poll found Germany’s Friedrich Merz to be the world’s least popular leader, slightly below even France’s lame duck president Emmanuel Macron. And this is no surprise.
Merz was hailed for a long time by his party the Christian Democratic Union as the true conservative prince-across-the-water during Angela Merkel’s centrist governments by his party’s right wing while he took time off to work for American law firm Mayer Brown and to sit on the board of controversial private equity giant BlackRock.
His fundamental promise in government was that he could do more conservatism than Merkel, but in last year’s election he received fewer votes than she ever had, just beating her jovial and gaffe-prone successor Armin Laschet, and even failed to be nominated by his own coalition as Chancellor in Germany’s parliament the Bundestag.
Merz’s grumpy and polemical style is unsuited to lead Germany in this tricky time. He alienates the centre with bigoted outbursts about migrants and foreigners, saying they are ruining the cityscape, blaming migrants for a “explosive” rise in sexual violence after a prominent case that featured an ethnic German celebrity.
Even abroad, this so-called “foreign-policy chancellor” has complained about not being able to get German bread and being happy to return home after foreign trips. He annoys his allies, while not actually achieving enough to keep his voters happy, as more of them flock to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Despite Merz reducing migration by a third, the far-right AfD is beating his CDU in most polls, showing that their populist grievance isn’t actually offset by enacting policy wins, and that rhetoric can trump action.
Merz’s initial support for the war in Iran as a way of boosting NATO has opened him to the charge of not caring about the fragile German economy, which is being further damaged by fuel price rises, while the AfD pivoted agilely to vote-winning anti-Trumpism.
The party actually called for the closure of US military bases as a response to the damage done to the German economy by their former ally Trump’s misadventures in Iran.
Now this summer the AfD is set to win yet another important eastern state election, possibly with enough for a majority to govern alone depending on how long the economic damage caused by Iran lasts. The impact of this would be enough to undermine Germany’s “firewall”, a political tradition against collaborating with the far-right, itself already damaged by Merz’s vote with the AfD on migration before his election, a mistake that studies have shown lost him votes and undermined confidence in him before he even entered office.
Merz is helped only by the weakness of his rivals: forced to implement social cuts and migrant controls, the Social Democrats aren’t faring any better. But as we increasingly see, however many problems the democratic centre faces with Trump, this can benefit the far-right, who are unencumbered by principle and can embody cold naked pragmatism.
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