A year from now, Germany will be in the final stages of a general election that will shape European politics for the rest of this decade and beyond. With 12 months still to go, the question of whether Angela Merkel will lead her centre-right CDU party into that election is the great unknown. Mrs Merkel has been chancellor for 11 years and is nearing the end of her third term. She is globally respected and generally popular with voters, but she cannot go on forever. Her handling of the refugee question has shaken up German politics and damaged (though in some quarters burnished) her mystique, causing speculation that the Merkel era may be nearing its end.
The weekend elections in Germany’s most north-eastern region, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, were the latest lightning-rod for post-Merkel speculation, given a special twist by the fact that the chancellor herself sits for the region. The results on Sunday were unquestionably bad for the CDU, whose vote fell by 4% from 23% to 19%, slipping into third place behind the centre-left SPD on 31% and the anti-migrant AfD on 21%. The region will continue to be governed by a “grand coalition” of SPD and CDU, similar to the one that Mrs Merkel leads at federal level. Yet the setback has triggered the once unmentionable subject of the CDU adopting a new leader in time for the general election.
Objectively, there is not much basis for such speculation. The 4% fall in the CDU share in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern does not, on its own, justify real panic. All major parties lost vote share on Sunday. The AfD’s genuinely spectacular success has also been drawn from all parties, including from the Left party and the SPD. More enduringly, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is not typical of Germany as a whole. It is one of the poorest regions in the country and formerly part of communist East Germany. Markedly the strongest vote for the AfD, moreover, was in the extreme east, the poorest part of all. It has been a long time since the former DDR was the CDU stronghold that it was in the aftermath of German reunification.
It is of course true that the results in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern illustrate political trends that can be seen all over Europe, including Germany. Anti-migrant feeling has risen everywhere, as has racial tension. Dissatisfaction with national governments is widespread and hostility to the European Union has grown. But these trends take different and nuanced forms in each country and in each region of each country. Mrs Merkel is admired as well as disliked for her handling of the migrant situation. It is misleading to see everything in European domestic politics through the single prism of Brexit – or any other preoccupation.
Nevertheless there is absolutely no doubt that this result will be weighed alongside those in the upcoming regional contests in Lower Saxony and Berlin to form a general view of Mrs Merkel’s standing as the general election draws nearer. Nor is there much doubt that a politician who has dominated her country for so long will eventually and rightly come under pressure from a new generation. Mrs Merkel’s weaknesses are under the microscope at the moment. Yet the instinct for stability is strong in Germany and it would be foolish not to remember Mrs Merkel’s great strengths too, especially when there is little evidence yet that a different centre-right leader would win more support.
