For the first time in the postwar history of the Federal Republic of Germany, it took more than one parliamentary vote to elect a German chancellor. The far-right AfD duly crowed and called for another general election, while the media is full of “wounded Merz” and his “wafer thin” mandate.
The chancellorship fiasco came only days after JD Vance and Marco Rubio, speaking with their master’s voice in Washington, lambasted the “tyranny” of the German elite for branding the opposition AfD party as an extremist organisation. The designation came from the German security services, gifting the AfD a victim complex which Trump, the world’s greatest connoisseur of victimhood, will help them exploit to the full in his bizarre and fraught battle against “liberal” Europe.
For all this, it is far too soon to write off Merz, or even to brand him weak. On the contrary, the speed with which the German centre-right leader regrouped and forced a second successful vote for the chancellorship, accomplished within five hours of the initial fiasco, points to an instinctive steeliness. This may prove to be the essential quality needed for Germany, which has the EU’s largest economy and population, to lead Europe in facing up to Putin, Trump and the various pro-Putin mini-Trumps closer to home, not least in Hungary and Romania.
The ferocity of the Trumpite attack on Merz is itself a tribute to the stance taken by the German leader in criticising Vance and Elon Musk for their attacks on Germany in the months since the US election. In stark contrast to Keir Starmer, Merz has called explicitly for Europe to plan for “strategic independence” from the US in the wake of Trump’s tariffs and threatened abandonment of Ukraine.
Merz exudes personal strength in the face of a bully. The question is whether he can build a strong enough government in Berlin to give it expression.
The first failed chancellorship vote might be thought an ill omen. But Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany and still the country’s greatest leader of the postwar era, was elected by just one vote in his initial election in 1949. This did not hold him back thereafter.
The chancellorship vote is exceptional in the German system in that it is a parliamentary secret ballot. Almost every chancellor since Adenauer has underperformed his or her government’s notional majority in this vote, no doubt because of “frenemies” keen to wound in private. This includes the sainted Angela Merkel who was the balm of emollience compared to Merz, her longtime rival in the CDU.
But the chancellorship vote does not mean that Merz’s grip on his parliamentary majority will necessarily be weak hereafter. As with Adenauer, it all depends on his competence, success and momentum. He has already achieved a fair degree of all three through his radical changes to the German constitution, to allow for significant new spending on defence and infrastructure, secured in March before he even became chancellor.
Merz carried that seismic constitutional vote by a margin of 512 to 206. Europe and the wider democratic world, which now looks to Germany above all for leadership, will be hoping it is a better indicator of the new government’s strength and capacity to act than this week’s hiccup.
