Auf Wiedersehen, Merkel?

After nearly a decade in power, German chancellor Angela Merkel, 60, appears a sure bet to remain in office for many years to come. Merkel is Germany’s best-liked politician and head of the nation’s largest and most popular party, the Christian Democrats. Under Merkel’s stewardship, the Germany economy has boomed even through the euro crisis. She is also one of the world’s most powerful women and is respected far beyond Europe as a stateswoman and modern conservative.

Yet Merkel’s chancellery is shakier than it looks, in part because of Germany’s shifting political landscape. Her far-reaching overhaul of German conservatism, which transformed a deeply traditional, Christian-minded political philosophy into one of Europe’s most liberal center-right parties, may in the long run be her undoing.

Merkel’s Christian Democrats are currently heading up its third consecutive coalition government. This was in part made possible through a partnership with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), the country’s second major party, which was also a collaborator during Merkel’s first term as chancellor from 2005 to 2009. For decades though, the Christian Democrats saw the business-minded Free Democrats, a small party known for its free-market ideology, as a natural partner. During Merkel’s second term from 2009 to 2013, the two parties joined forces, even if the partnership was much less harmonious than the rightist alliances under Helmut Kohl in the 1980s and ’90s.

In the 2013 elections, however, the Free Democrats failed to reach the 5-percent threshold necessary to join the national parliament. The party has since continued its spiral downward, losing representation in local legislatures across Germany’s 16 states. Its loss made the environmentally friendly Greens and the socialist Left Party, which has strong roots in eastern Germany, the only opposition in the Bundestag. Until recently, the Social Democrats have cooperated with the Left Party sporadically and grudgingly — all the while hoping it would disappear and thus enable the SPD to grab the leftist voting bloc, which they see as their exclusive domain.

In addition to the Free Democrats’ decimation, the emergence of Alternative for Germany (AFD) — an anti-immigrant, Euroskeptic right-wing party — has become the most damning turn of events for the Christian Democrats.

Today almost every European country hosts at least one far-right party in its national parliament, including some that have been players in domestic politics for decades (take France’s National Front, for example, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen and now his daughter Marine Le Pen.) Even in traditionally liberal countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark, far-right forces have bundled together populist themes such as Islamophobia, anti-immigrant bias, nation-first jingoism, law-and-order concerns and Euroskepticism to take upward of 10 percent — and sometimes 20 percent or more — of national votes since the early 1990s, periodically partaking in governing coalitions.

Germany is not immune to these sentiments. For example, opinion polls show Islamophobia is as high in Germany as anywhere else in Europe. However, Germany did not have a viable far-right party until now. Earlier this year, in one regional vote after another, the AFD sailed into state legislatures, garnering about 10 percent of the vote and sending shockwaves through the German political establishment. The Christian Democrats are no longer the only viable right-wing party on the block. There is now every indication that the AFD will join the Bundestag in the 2017 national elections.

Among the AFD’s polished frontmen are disillusioned Christian Democrats and Free Democrats, while their voter base spans the political spectrum, including even left-wing voters who oppose the EU for being a bastion of neo-liberalism. The AFD leaders project a polite, German-variety national populism at a long arm’s length from the beer-hall rabble rousers who have defined Germany’s far right since World War II. Until the AFD came along, dozens of pretenders unsuccessfully tried to inhabit this terrain in postwar Germany.

The AFD’s success has three main sources. First, unhappiness with Germany’s role in the European Union and the eurozone. This discontent ranges from latent to rabid in a minority of the German populace. Most Germans are proud EU supporters. But until now, EU skeptics have been politically homeless. Second, as with the rest of Europe, Germany faces a strong and growing illiberal undercurrent of anti-foreigner sentiment, which has taken on ever more Islamophobic contours.

Last, hard-line German conservatives are frustrated with Merkel’s efforts to modernize the Christian Democrats (which is simultaneously the grounds for her broad popularity, especially among women). Merkel — a woman, a Protestant, an eastern German, a divorcée without children — has brought the party into the 21st century. She set in motion changes that her predecessors, including Kohl, could not have imagined possible: ending military conscription, introducing a minimum wage, accelerating Germany’s phase-out from nuclear power, accepting gay rights and acknowledging Islam as one of Germany’s religions.

Merkel has sworn that her Christian Democrats will not enter into a coalition with the AFD at the state or national level. That leaves the Christian Democrats only with one possible partner: their main rival, the Social Democrats. But such partnership favors the Social Democrats, which poll at about 41 percent.

The SPD has another option, a left-wing coalition that it could lead rather than play second fiddle to the Christian Democrats. In fact, the SPD already does this in six states, with either the Greens or the Left Party as partner, and it is part of left-wing governments in two others, including the latest, in Thuringia, that includes all three leftist parties. The SPD governs as a partner in 14 of the 16 states, and the Christian Democrats partake in just eight.

The catch in the SPD–Left Party–Greens coalition is that the Left Party is obstreperously leftist at the national level, in contrast to its regional branches in eastern Germany, which are composed largely of pragmatic operatives who focus on municipal infrastructure and not geopolitics. In the Bundestag, the Left Party bashes Israel, praises Putin and communist Cuba and occasionally compares Merkel to Hitler. The SPD cannot team up with such party in a national government — or at least this is its line to date.

The left-wing dominance in the federal states has direct implications for Merkel’s government. The governing parties of the 16 Länder are represented in an upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat. (The Bundestag is the lower house.) The Bundesrat has powers to check the Bundestag in different ways and even initiate legislation. The SPD’s Bundesrat majority gives the party significantly more clout in the government than it would have otherwise.

A lot could still change between now and the 2017 elections. But Merkel is in no way as comfortably in office as the Christian Democrats are out front in polls. She might veer to the right in an effort to squeeze the AFD out of the running. But that would alienate the SPD and permanently scare off the Greens, a far-flung coalition option. And if she does, Merkel risks abandoning the most impressive, historic accomplishment of her political career: modernizing German — indeed, European — Christian democracy.

Editor's note: A previous version of this column misidentified the name of the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland) party. We regret the error.