Political ghosts, past and future, will hang over Friedrich Merz on Friday when he faces delegates of his ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Stuttgart.
Exactly 12 months have passed since the CDU won Germany’s snap federal election, snatching back power and handing Merz the keys to the chancellery.
The year since has been high on geopolitical drama, from Ukraine to Greenland, but low on the economic recovery Merz promised, leaving Germany’s voters and its neighbours nervous in equal measure.
While CDU leaders have chosen as their conference motto “bound by responsibility”, Berlin wags suggest a more appropriate choice would be “bound by recession”.
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In the last five years the global economy has grown by 19 per cent in total while Germany has managed 0.2 per cent at best and waits for a big-bang boost from two historic debt-financed stimulus packages: €500 billion for infrastructure and an effective blank check for security and defence spending.
Beyond the economic phantoms are growing political ghosts. The last time the CDU met in Stuttgart, its leader was Angela Merkel.
On Friday she will attend her first CDU conference since 2019 and nervous Merz allies fear Merkel, at best, will steal the show just by being there. At worst Merz loyalists fear she will highlight unresolved tensions between her and Merz, long-running political frenemies, and their respective centrist and conservative camps inside the CDU.
It’s no coincidence the party is meeting in Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg in Germany’s southwest. In two weeks’ time the CDU is on course to take back power in this important industrial heartland, kicking off a year with four state elections.
But hanging over these and later polls in September is the CDU’s political future vis-a-vis the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). With up to 40 per cent support in eastern state polls, some inside the CDU will use the party conference to demand a rethink of its “firewall” ban on co-operation or AfD cohabitation.
Merz resists such a shift and will use Stuttgart instead to revive his election campaign message: Germany’s comeback rests on Germans rolling up their sleeves and working harder.
“We work 200 hours fewer each year than the Swiss,” said the 70-year-old chancellor this week. “Many people work an awful lot but, overall, the job performance in Germany is not high enough. We have to talk about this.”
CDU officials have attracted cheers and jeers for claiming that too many Germans have embraced part-time work as a “lifestyle choice”, a targeted provocation of Merz’s junior Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partner.
Since last year’s election, the SPD has pivoted further to the left and delivered on several key campaign welfare promises. Merz is likely to draw a line in the sand in Stuttgart, refusing further SPD demands for higher income and wealth taxes.
While Merz tries to get his house in order at home, the chancellor is struggling with key European relationships – above all Franco-German ties.
Like Ireland, the German leader fears White House ire from French president Emmanuel Macron’s proposal for a “Europe first” clause in European contracts.
And though Merz has confirmed discreet talks over Macron’s offer to extend its nuclear deterrent, too many cooks may have spoiled the broth over FCAS, a €100 billion flagship war plane project co-developed by Germany, France and Spain.
This week Merz accused France of being determined to build a next-generation jet that met its – nuclear-ready – needs but not those of Berlin or Madrid. “This is not a political dispute, but we have a real problem in the requirement profile and, if we can’t solve this, then we can’t maintain the project,” he said.
That would be a significant blow for European efforts to step up its home-grown security efforts.
A week after Merz warned in Munich that the postwar order “no longer exists”, Stuttgart attendees will be listening for further clues about the road ahead.
On Wednesday, Merz warned the Trump administration that Europe was “well able to push back” against further tariff shocks.
And ahead of his first trip as chancellor to China next week, Merz said the term of the moment is “strategic partnerships”.
It remains unclear if he will accept Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi’s offer last weekend to join forces and take their “comprehensive strategic partnership to a new level . . . of high-level exchange”. Either way the trip will be a political tightrope walk for Merz, as years of bumper German industry growth in Chinese operations have yielded to dependency hangover.
Whether at home or abroad, German business leaders are demanding that Merz move from promising to delivering big-bang reform – on taxes, bureaucracy, pensions and energy costs.
For analysts, a busy first year for chancellor Merz cannot disguise a politician in trouble.
“They are all scared of the upcoming state elections. His CDU camp is frustrated, as are his voters,” said Prof Klaus Schubert, political scientist at the University of Münster. “Merz is not able to lead, set an agenda, move things forward, negotiate and compromise. The distance between him and the party is growing.”
