Merz should have done a deal with the AfD in 2025. Now it’s too late

History weighed too heavily on the chancellor-in-waiting

Dear Reader,

An apocalyptic premonition stalks the editorial rooms of German newspapers; it gives centrist politicians sleepless nights. It goes like this: if you let the AfD into government just once, its rise will be unstoppable.

Friedrich Merz explained it with the metaphor of a viper. “At some point it will bite you to death,” he prophesied. Olaf Scholz declared ominously that if the AfD gets into power, there might never be another election.

This is quite the theory. In the real world, bringing a smaller party into a coalition actually tends to weaken it.

There is ample evidence that the larger party can co-opt the smaller one’s most popular policy pledges, create split loyalties within its leadership, and alienate it from parts of its base by forcing it to choose between core positions.

As a junior partner in Olaf Scholz’s coalition, the Free Democrats gave up on their pledge not to take on new debt. Party leader Christian Lindner was split between loyalty to the government and loyalty to his party—his attempts to bridge this gap by constantly questioning government policy made him look like a mischief-maker. By the time he finally pulled the emergency cord, his party was on its way out of the Bundestag.

When the Greens first entered government in 1998, the SPD co-opted their main policy goal: the end of nuclear power. The fundis inside the Green Party were defeated over their opposition to NATO. For years afterwards, the eco-party wandered along without a unifying purpose. What eventually emerged was a bland new cadre of Realos who drive electric Mercedes and leave politics to work as lobbyists.

In the UK, a rare experiment with coalition politics ended in disaster for the Liberal Democrats. The Tories’ price for a 2010 coalition was raising university tuition fees. The Lib Dems burned bridges with one of their core voter bases and spent the following decade in the wilderness.

The last election would have been a good opportunity for the CDU to bring the AfD into a coalition and thus tame it. The Christian Democrats could have co-opted the unifying factor inside the AfD—its migration policies—while forcing it to cross several of its own red lines on military support for Ukraine and opposition to NATO. Pragmatists in the AfD could have been given high-profile government posts, splitting their loyalties between the government and the party.

The AfD would have faced a choice: show that it was genuinely interested in the conservative coalition it claimed to seek, or stay out of government and shy away from responsibility. Either way, it would have been weakened.