Readers might have noticed that I’ve been taking a bit of a break this week, so apologies for the lack of blogging. But I did want to quickly draw attention to a piece from earlier this month by Nette Nöstlinger at Politico, on the possibility of a change of prime minister (“chancellor”) in Germany.
It’s just over a month since Britain changed prime ministers, replacing Keir Starmer with Andy Burnham. That was the sixth such change in about ten years, all but one of them involving a mid-term replacement of a leader with someone from the same party. And while the speed of change was something new, there’s nothing very unusual in a British (or for that matter an Australian) prime minister leaving the job mid-term, voluntarily or not.
In Germany, however, there is. As Nöstlinger points out, no prime minister has given way to a colleague from the same party since Willy Brandt in 1974. So for Friedrich Merz, elected only last year, to be displaced would be a major event. But with his approval rating at record lows and his centre-right CDU now running some seven points behind the far-right AfD in the polls, some of Merz’s colleagues are apparently thinking that extraordinary measures might be required.
The similarity with Starmer extends further than that. Although nominally from politically opposing sides, they had jointly made the front running among European leaders in the project of demonising immigrants. I singled them out for blame on that score this time last year:
To describe this as fighting with one hand tied behind your back would be too kind. It amounts to agreeing in advance with the opponent’s position, immediately giving it (and them) credibility and respectability … If you’ve already conceded that the far right’s main grievance is in fact justified, what then is your argument for why voting for them is such an awful thing?
While that was not the only factor in the demise of Starmer, there’s no doubt that it contributed to his unpopularity with many Labour supporters. To quote George Monbiot again, he and his inner circle “seem[ed] to despise people who voted for them, while courting and flattering those who didn’t and won’t.” Now Merz is falling foul of the same problem. If his voters had wanted an anti-immigrant narrative, they would have voted for AfD in the first place.
Most of Merz’s worries involve domestic policy, and so far there’s no sign that a replacement for him (Nöstlinger mentions Hendrik Wüst, premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, as the most likely candidate) would do anything to break the anti-immigrant consensus that has taken hold of the major parties. But the message must eventually get through that giving up the moral high ground to the far right is not just cowardly but politically self-destructive.
The World is Not Enough 