No Alternatives for Merkel

By Andrew Stuttaford

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

In the wake of the Alternative for Germany’s victory on Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt, I looked back at some articles I had written about the party in the past, including this one from 2016. It was mainly devoted to discussing an article in Der Spiegel asking why people were voting for the AfD, a party for which the authors did not have much sympathy, but about which they had clearly thought carefully.

 

Der Spiegel:

 

 At its core, the rise of the AfD is the story of strife and of growing alienation between the chancellor and a portion of the German electorate. The triumph of the AfD is nothing less than a revolt against Angela Merkel.

 

It is a rebellion targeting a CDU leader who has continually led her party to the left, stripping many conservatives of a political home. It also targets a chancellor whose open borders policy in the refugee crisis may be attractive to left-leaning Germans, but is one which strikes more conservative voters as high-handed. . . .

 

And so we see the developing stages of a process in which Merkel’s CDU (the story was somewhat different with her partner-party, the CSU in Bavaria, although the AfD is now making substantial inroads there, too) had left a gap on the right, which the AfD filled, and filled in a much more aggressive way than it would have been able to had Merkel herself not chosen to ignore those on the right who didn’t share the immigration extremism she revealed in 2015.

 

Der Spiegel:

 

A vital part of any healthy democracy is having alternatives and parties that are distinguishable from each other. At the moment, it’s no longer possible to tell what it is that separates the CDU from the SPD or the Greens. The party is whatever Merkel says it is. There are close to no correctives left in Germany and there is no longer a balance of power. The more Merkel tries to peddle her policies as being without alternative, the greater the anger within the populace will grow. . . .

 

Merkel has not understood the depth of this alienation, as her closest confidants proved in the wake of the March 13 [local elections]. Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, who has, at times, been seen as a possible heir to Merkel’s political throne atop the CDU, noted blithely that 80 percent of voters cast their ballots for parties that support the chancellor’s refugee policies.

 

Wait a minute, wait a minute. Ursula von der Leyen, the Ursula von der Leyen, the woman who now heads up the EU Commission?

 

The very same.

 

Von der Leyen, an incompetent defense minister, went on to become the president of the EU Commission in 2019. The Commission’s tolerance of dissent, never high, has fallen far lower since von der Leyen took over. She had clearly learned a lot from her old boss, a pioneer in the field of censoring online speech, something in which the EU, faced with rising unhappiness among its own subjects, has become something of a specialist.

 

The thickness of the bubble inhabited by Merkel’s loyalists can be seen from von der Leyen’s comment that 80 percent of voters voted for parties which supported Merkel’s “refugee policies.” That was indeed the case, but it did not mean that they liked those policies. Indeed, a chart accompanying the article reflects the findings of a survey that suggested that 61 percent of all German voters were either “not very” or “not at all” satisfied with them, including majorities in the AfD (99 percent!), but also in the free market (ish) FDP and the far-left Die Linke.

 

That latter result may well foreshadow the split within Die Linke that resulted from the departure of Sahra Wagenknecht. She had joined East Germany’s governing SED Party less than a year before the Wall came down as, it seems, a true believer. These days her beliefs combine both hard left and some conservative views — the horseshoe theory in action. The BSW, the party she formed in 2023 after leaving Die Linke, is currently talking to the AfD (which fell three seats short of an absolute majority), about giving it enough support to form a minority government, although there would be no coalition between them.

 

Looking at the chart in Der Spiegel, the only voters who supported Merkel’s refugee policies were her own (the CDU), the center-left SPD, and the Greens, but even within those groups the dissenting percentages were 45, 48, and 41 percent respectively.

 

Never mind! The future president of the EU Commission looked at the voting numbers and decided that the votes of those who thought they had nowhere else to go were good enough, an example of the cynical complacency that is such a hallmark of Brussels rule.

 

As for Merkel, Der Speigel reported that she was determined to plug on:

 

On the Monday following the election, the chancellor made an appearance at CDU headquarters in Berlin — and acted as though nothing had happened. There is “both light and shadows,” she said. The rise of the AfD is certainly not nice, she said, “but it is not an existential problem.” She was flanked by Julia Klöckner of Rhineland-Palatinate and Guido Wolf of Baden-Württemberg, both of whom had lost their respective elections — and they looked as though they couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They kept glancing at their boss with skeptical looks on their faces. . . .

 

Shortly before her comments at CDU headquarters, Merkel had met with party leaders and made it clear that she sees no reason to rethink her course. According to people familiar with the meeting, her words were met with a combination of horror and resignation. . . .

 

That sounds a bit familiar, but to be clear, Merkel was the second-worst chancellor in German history.