There is only one man who can save the CDU now—and he isn’t even a member of the Christian Democrats.

Yes, the time for Markus Söder, the bombastic, self-aggrandising Bavarian premier, has arrived.

Various names are being discussed as successors to Friedrich Merz, but Söder is the only one capable of returning the CDU to its former status as a Volkspartei—a party whose appeal cuts across class and region.

With Merz teetering on the brink after a humiliating loss to the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, the rumour mill has gone into overdrive. Further defeats are already looming in Berlin and Mecklenburg, fuelling speculation about an inner-party coup against the luckless chancellor.

Other names being discussed include Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Hesse state leader Boris Rhein. Neither stands a realistic chance.

There are only two serious candidates to take over.

Read more

Read more

What explains the fact that the CDU did even worse than expected in Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt?

The answer to that question might just tell us whether Friedrich Merz’s time as chancellor is up before it really began.

Polling showed the CDU on course for around 23 percent. That in itself would have been a dreadful result. At the last election in the eastern state, in 2021, the CDU won comfortably with 37 percent. In the end, though, the chancellor’s party didn’t even make 18 percent.

Ask Merz why things went so wrong and he will point to a traitor within his ranks.

“A deputy faction leader from the Bundestag … kept stabbing the leadership in the back in the days before the election,” Mr Merz told a press conference on Monday.

Summoning his inner Ceaușescu, Merz said that, when he mentioned the betrayal at a meeting with the party’s executive committee, his comments were “met with long and sustained applause.”

The traitor in question was Sepp Müller, aged just 37 but already deputy CDU leader in the Bundestag. Ahead of the election, he went on the attack against the hard-left Die Linke and said on Sunday that the AfD had won the right to govern.

Merz had been planning to create another state government where a weak CDU state leader relies on votes from the hard left to pass legislation, as they currently do in Saxony and Thuringia. He was furious that Müller had tried to throw a wrench into the strategy, blaming this for tactical voters switching to left-wing parties.

This is, to put it mildly, crusty communist dictator-level delusion over the causes of the crisis.

Read more

Four hours after the first results came in from the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, a lot is still up in the air.

What is clear is that the AfD has scored a victory that goes even beyond what the polls suggested it would achieve. The first exit polls are putting it at over 44 per cent. The populist party’s candidate for state leader, Ulrich Siegmund, ran, by all accounts, a very impressive campaign.

Even the broadsheet media, which are almost universally hostile to his party, concede that Siegmund is a talented campaigner who managed to draw huge crowds to his soapbox-style campaign.

One analyst I spoke to last week said that Siegmund is the first AfD politician whose central message is a positive or optimistic one. Driving around on a GDR moped and talking about bringing back “the good old times”, he managed to create a sense that Saxony-Anhalt was at the avant-garde of a new counter-revolution in German democracy that would sweep away the old elite and bring about a conservative revival.

It looks, however, as though the AfD has just missed out on an overall majority.

Read more

The upcoming state election in Saxony-Anhalt is being described as one of the most important votes in German history. You could view that as part of the hyperbole surrounding the breakdown of functioning German governance. But the narrative is not wholly without reason. And with it comes the possibility of real disruption after the vote.

At the start of campaigning a month ago, the AfD set itself the target of winning an outright majority, an extremely rare occurrence in Germany’s multi-party system. The AfD candidate for state governor, Ulrich Siegmund, has even said that he is not prepared to enter any sort of coalition. It is either all or nothing, he has said in speeches. The bombastic claim is slightly beside the point, however, as no other party seems willing to enter into a coalition with the populist group.

Winning an overall majority would be quite the way for the AfD to elect its first state leader. The only time it has previously won the largest share of the vote, in Thuringia in 2024, an unwritten law of German parliamentarianism would suggest that it had the right to build a coalition. Instead, it was shut out by the other parties. The result was a coalition in which a CDU minister-president is reliant on the anti-capitalist Die Linke party to pass legislation.

If the AfD pulls off this feat, it will be the first time that a party to the right of the CDU has taken control of a state parliament in the history of modern Germany.

At the start of campaigning in July, polling showed the AfD on 43 percent. With the right maths of smaller parties failing to make the 5 percent cut-off, that could be enough to give it an overall majority of seats. Since then, though, the party’s polling share has dropped slightly to around 40 percent, making the chances of an outright majority somewhat thinner.

For Germany, which takes its historic responsibility to keep far-right parties out of government very seriously, it would be a watershed moment – and the clearest proof yet that centrist parties’ previous attempts to win back voters from the AfD have been a complete failure.

Why might Saxony-Anhalt in particular be the place where the AfD scores its first major election victory? Timing, no doubt, plays a role. The results of state elections are as much a statement on voter satisfaction with federal politics as they are about any local issue. Friedrich Merz’s government is historically unpopular – no mean feat given the disregard in which his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, was held. In voting for the AfD, voters are rejecting a centrist consensus that they blame for inflation, higher living costs and job losses in manufacturing.

But state capital Magdeburg was also the site of the worst in a long line of massacres committed by migrants from the Middle East against the local population. Two years ago, shortly before Christmas, a man called Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a 4x4 into the packed Weihnachtsmarkt in the city centre, ploughing the vehicle through the narrow alleys. Eyewitnesses later recounted harrowing scenes of the wheels spinning over a pile of crushed bodies. Six people, the youngest just nine years old, died in the atrocity. Over 300 more were injured.

Strikingly, that crime has barely featured in the discussion of why the people of Saxony-Anhalt have swung in such great numbers towards the AfD, which has put the far-right Kampfbegriff “remigration” front and centre of its manifesto.

Read more

There is nothing particularly unusual about a photo ending a political career.

In the unforgiving world of British politics, a single image in the hands of a tabloid can be fatal. Labour leader Ed Miliband never recovered from his failure to eat a bacon sandwich. Covid-era health minister Matt Hancock was finished by an image of him kissing a…

Read more

Last week, I sent you three editions of a new German Brief designed to give you a quick overview of the most important news from Germany.

If you haven’t done so already, I would really appreciate it if you could take this very short survey. It should take less than two minutes.

Take survey

Thanks very much for helping me test the idea.

Best,
Jörg

Read more

In Germany, rental costs are rising sharply and so are energy bills.

The cause of both problems is supply shortages. On rents, city administrators can’t build fast enough to keep up with the number of people moving to big cities. For energy, geopolitical turmoil is restricting access to natural gas, which is key for winter heating and electricity production.

The solution to both problems is obvious enough, even if it is hard to implement. Build more houses and you will calm the rental market; source more gas and you will bring energy prices down.

Instead, solutions are being discussed that, at best, would do nothing to ease the problem, at worst, would just push bills higher.

Next month, Berlin is to hold its third state election in five years. Headlining the election is the question of whether the city should seize properties from the private sector as an alleged cure for spiralling rental costs.

A proposal to do just that won a majority at a citywide referendum in 2021. Now, the hard-left Die Linke party says it wants to enact the result of that plebiscite. A month ahead of the vote, Die Linke have a narrow lead in polling.

Under the plan, the city would expropriate around a quarter of a million rental properties from large property owners and put them into the public hand.

Obviously, in a Rechtsstaat, you can’t just seize property from a private owner.

Read more

As one of my most engaged readers, I’d really value your feedback.

Last week, I sent you three editions of a new German Brief designed to give you a quick overview of the most important news from Germany.

I’m considering making the Brief a permanent addition to The German Review as part of Substack’s Founding Member tier. Existing paying subscrib…

Read more

If you were to picture the next company to make a fortune from the AI boom, a family-run business that specialises in off-the-shelf handles, knobs and levers probably wouldn’t spring to mind.

But Ganter Norm, a decidedly unassuming company from the Black Forest, might just be one of them. Last year, the company received an order for 26,000 ha…

Read more

Read more

Nord Stream suspect arrested — at the third time of asking

Germany has managed to get hold of one of the alleged central conspirators in the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines — at the third time of trying. Wolodymyr Z., an instructor at a diving school, was holidaying in Croatia when he was detained on an arrest warrant issued by Germany…

Read more

I spent much of my holidays looking out the window and wondering when the rain would stop. Suffice to say, I wasn’t anywhere near Germany.

We drove from the Rhine Valley up to the northwest of Scotland in late July — and didn’t see a cloud until we were within a few miles of my home village. I barely saw the sun after that. A high-pressure sy…

Read more

After looking at the results of the summer survey, I’m experimenting with adding a new layer to the newsletter: a short morning briefing, sent three times a week at around 7am CET.

I’ve picked you as one of a small group of readers to test it. At the end of the week, I’ll send you a short survey to get your feedback.

Thanks for helping me exp…

Read more

Read more

MARKTKOST, a small catering company in Potsdam, recently had a modest ambition: moving its headquarters across the street.

Pretty straightforward, oder?

Yet its founder, Laura-Maria à Brassard, counted six federal authorities, four state administrations and three municipal institutions that needed to be notified. Each had its own preferred met…

Read more

The German Review is taking its customary two-week summer break. We’ll be back on August 12th.

In the meantime, I would like to hear from the people whose opinions matter most: our paying subscribers.

I have put together a short reader survey, asking what you value in the newsletter, which subjects you would like us to cover more often, and wh…

Read more

Unless you’ve been hiding out in a news cave, it’s hard to…

Read more

But this, according to Lithuanian foreign-policy analyst Linas Kojala, is exactly what is happening in cafés in his country’s capital, Vilnius.

“People are welcoming [the Bundeswehr] with open arms,” Kojala, CEO of the …

Read more

“Was your granddad in the SS?” asks the headline on the homepage of Der Spiegel. “What did your family do under Hitler?”

Want to find out whether Opa had a dirty secret that he never admitted to? Pay for a subscription and you can now find out!

But you don’t have to pay for Der Spiegel if that’s not your thing. The Süddeutsche Zeitung is also …

Read more