Merz calls it a “disaster” — and changes exactly nothing

It was a remarkable performance. After the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin, Friedrich Merz stands in front of the microphones, federal flag on the left, European flag on the right, and finds one word:"Disaster".Then he says, with all the pathos that comes with the office, that nothing will change. No change of course, no consequence, no resignation. Ricarda Lang sums it up: "Who is this supposed to give orientation or security?"

You have to follow Lang a little bit to be right on this point. There was no chancellor who was leading a country through a crisis speaking. A CDU chairman spoke who wanted to stifle a personnel debate in his own party before it even began. The “disaster” that Merz means is not the country’s shift to the right. It's a danger to his own chair.

Three strokes, one pattern

Saxony-Anhalt, now Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin: the same picture in all three cases. The AfD is moving in as the strongest or second strongest force, the CDU is just shy of re-entry in MV, and in Berlin the Union is being overtaken by the Left. Merz came into office with the promise of supporting the AfDhalve. The result was the opposite - the credibility of the person who promised that was halved.

The mechanism is not one that needs to be explained if one can name it: a union that adopts the cultural framework of the right - "ethnic cleansing" here, gas price campaign gifts there - does not make the copy any more attractive than the original. It just makes the original socially acceptable. Dennis Radtke, head of the CDU workers' wing, says it himself internally: too much attack, not enough of his own response to rents, wages, prices. If you don't offer people anything except a harder tone, you drive them to those who scream the hardest.

Why he stays anyway

The fact that Merz changes “exactly nothing” is not just stubbornness - it is also calculation that the Basic Law gives him. A chancellor cannot simply be removed. The Bundestag can only replace him with a constructive vote of no confidence, and that means at the same time organizing an absolute majority for a successor. This majority is not in sight. Merz knows this. That's why he can declare a "disaster" and in the same breath announce that he will continue as before - it won't cost him anything in the short term.

For us, the teaching is different than that of the Berlin company. The question of whether Merz falls or holds on is a party's question about itself. Our question is who pays the price for this course: It is the same people who always pay it. Migrants who become bargaining chips. Tenants in Berlin who voted for the expropriation of real estate companies in 2021 and are still waiting five years later. Employees who are given alms from fuel prices instead of wages.

A chancellor who goes in front of the camera after losing three elections to say that he is not learning anything is actually not giving anyone any guidance. But he says a truth about the situation: the parliamentary center has nothing to oppose the right other than the echo of its own slogans. What stops them does not arise in these halls. It happens on the street, in the workplace, in the neighborhood - among those who don't wait for a vote of no confidence to say no.

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