Dear Reader,
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.