In early march 2025, as Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz laid the groundwork for a massive German military build-up, sidelining the newly elected parliament to push through fiscal reforms that would double the annual defence budget to €100 billion, the Euro-establishment was in celebratory mood. Merz’s rearmament drive was ‘a stroke of commendable boldness’ and ‘a fantastic start’, declared the Economist. ‘From Paris to Warsaw, Brussels and beyond’, Merz’s move had understandably produced ‘giddy excitement’. The Guardian hailed it as a ‘bold and necessary leap’, a ‘chance to renew mainstream politics’ and ‘unleash the radical centre’. For the ft , it represented nothing less than ‘the reawakening of Germany’; for Le Monde, a ‘major and welcome turning point’. The measures may have required certain ‘democratic gymnastics’ to bypass the freshly elected Bundestag, Le Monde conceded, but ‘the times call for boldness’, and ‘the new dynamic in Berlin should be encouraged’. For El País, ‘“Germany is back” means “Europe is back”!’ Merz’s leadership ‘points the way for the rest of Europe.’footnote¹

How did we get here? It is worth rewinding to 6 November 2024, when Germany’s ‘traffic-light coalition’—red for the spd, yellow for the fdp, green for the Greens—came to an end after spd Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired his fdp Finance Minister, Christian Lindner. At issue was Lindner’s refusal to support a ‘reform’ or ‘suspension’ of the Schuldenbremse, or debt brake, a fiscal rule against high public borrowing that was written into the German Constitution at Merkel and Schäuble’s behest in 2009. The background to the Scholz–Lindner fall-out was a dispute over how to fund additional German military aid to Ukraine, as demanded by Lindner and the Christian-Democrat opposition. Scholz refused to pay more out of the federal budget, as under the debt brake that would mean cutting social spending. Lindner, on the other hand, insisted that the debt brake must be observed, precisely because more aid for Ukraine would have meant less aid for the spd. Even more militant than Lindner in defending both Ukraine and the debt brake was Merz, the leader of the cdu–csu opposition.

It was not, however, the unfolding fiscal crisis, nor the apparently inexorable process of global warming that dominated the 2025 election campaign, and certainly not in the decisive weeks leading up to polling day on 23 February. Nor was it economic stagnation, the long goodbye to prosperity, the rise of poverty, the accelerating decay of Germany’s physical infrastructure—bridges, railways—or the decline of primary and secondary education. Instead, the main election issue by the end of 2024 was the far-right Alternative für Deutschland and what role it should be allowed to play in German politics. The 2024 Euro-Parliament vote and three regional elections in the East made clear that the AfD was not just here to stay but could score a major victory in the Bundestag. Under Merkel, and with her prodding, the self-proclaimed ‘democratic’ parties of the centre had sworn to have no contact with the AfD, declaring it tabu (from the Polynesian for ‘untouchable’). This may have been an attempt by Merkel to contain the political damage of her open-border virtue-signalling of 2015, which had given the AfD its finest hour up to this point. The anti-AfD covenant always benefited the centre-left more than the centre-right, as it deprived the cdu–csu of the option of forming a coalition, or threatening to do so, with a party outside the centre-left—one of Merkel’s lasting legacies for her party, which she had never much liked. It was only logical for the centre-left and the left to insist that ‘all democratic forces’ keep the AfD strictly incommunicado, thereby locking the cdu–csu into something like a centre-left Babylonian captivity.

From the start, the AfD question was intertwined with the immigration question, the AfD’s favourite and essentially only political issue, dramatized as the election came closer by reports of a number of random knife attacks and car-rammings by Syrian, Afghan and Saudi refugees. In time, this developed into an entrenched conflict between the AfD, with a zero-immigration platform, and a heterogeneous centrist camp superficially united on a complex mix of German and European measures for immigration control, impracticable enough in reality to amount to a policy of almost-open borders plus court rulings on deportations. Both internal disagreement and external similarity among the parties were covered up by rhetoric that declared the AfD’s anti-immigration—and anti-immigrant—demagoguery to be incompatible with the freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung, or liberal-democratic basic order, of the German Constitution. The AfD’s real goal, it was suggested, was the overthrow of democracy and the establishment of a racist-cum-fascist system like the Nazi regime after 1933. Egged on by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), a subordinate agency of the Interior Ministry charged with making democracy wehrhaft (militant), the parties of the centre committed themselves to maintaining a Brandmauer, or firewall, between themselves and the AfD. After some to-and-fro, the cdu–csu decided that it could not afford to remain on the sidelines, due in part to the lasting influence of its Merkel wing. This raised a problem for its leadership, in that the positions of its base on immigration were in large part identical with those of the AfD. Yet as long as the AfD remained tabu, with the centre-left attentively protecting its pro-democracy centre-right coalition partner from fascist temptations, there was no way for the cdu–csu to make use of this electorally, let alone act on it in government.

The situation escalated when in January 2024, the exorcism of the AfD evolved from a bureaucratic exercise into a popular movement, after a pro-democracy government-funded non-governmental organization named Correctiv published a report on an allegedly conspiratorial ‘secret’ meeting of a handful of AfD members and sympathizers three months earlier. This had taken place in a hotel in Brandenburg which, as Correctiv did not fail to point out, was near the site of the Wannsee Conference, where in 1941 Eichmann and his fellow mass-murderers had planned the extermination of European Jewry. Details are contested and under litigation. What is not disputed is that one of several presentations was given by a well-known Austrian völkisch extremist, author of a book on how to bring about the ‘remigration’ of immigrants, including ones with a German (or Austrian) passport.

Over the following months, remigration, up to then a technical term for the voluntary return of migrants to their country of origin, became the keyword for a broad protest movement. Organized by the established parties, the trade unions, the churches, federal state governments, local communities, schoolteachers, writers, artists, actors and musicians of all sorts, rallies were staged in a nationwide Kampf gegen Rechts, or fight against the right. Slogans were raised against Verfassungsfeinde, or enemies of the constitution, and for Vielfalt, or diversity, drawing liberally on key phrases of German anti-Nazi memory culture, such as Nie wieder, never again, and Nie wieder ist jetzt, ‘never again is now’. All in all, between January and June 2024, more than three million people took part in about 1,200 anti-AfD demonstrations across Germany. In the weeks before the February 2025 election there was another, smaller wave—although in Munich alone more than 200,000 people demonstrated for ‘diversity and democracy’ and against a Rechtsruck (shift to the right)—celebrating the anniversary of the movement and protesting against the demands for ‘remigration’ in response to the knife and car incidents.

It was around this time that Merz and his team must have concluded that their participation in the Kampf gegen Rechts, and the political polarization it generated, was benefiting only the forces to their left and the AfD itself. The cdu–csu’s core voters were disappointed by its alliance with the spd and the Greens, guardians of the immigration status quo. Shortly before election day, the memory of a January knife attack in Bavaria still fresh, Merz felt it necessary to make a dramatic gesture to convince voters that with him as Chancellor things would change, and fundamentally so. As proof, he had his parliamentary group table a Bundestag resolution on immigration reform, technically non-binding, that was both largely identical to the official AfD position and not far from a legislative proposal of the sitting government that had been under discussion in the relevant committees. Although Merz’s draft included an explicit denunciation of the AfD, the latter happily voted in favour. As a result, the resolution passed only because of the AfD’s support—precisely the situation that was to be avoided at all costs under the Brandmauer covenant. The parliamentary leader of the spd declared that the vote had ‘opened the gate to hell’. A few days later, savouring what he thought was a victory, and hoping to show that he was not to be intimidated, Merz reintroduced the same text, this time as legislation—only to discover that enough members from his own party had deserted him for it to be defeated, despite the unanimous support of the AfD.