With top politicians of the center left and center right feuding over key government policies, it’s affecting Germany’s place at the heart of the EU as other countries are having a hard time figuring out Berlin’s position on a host of key issues. There are also growing doubts over the coalition’s long-term survival prospects.
Fewer than one-third of Germans think the coalition will be able to govern until the end of the legislative period in 2029, according to
a survey by polling institute Insa for Bild, which also saw government approval fall to a record low of just 25 percent.
At the same time, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has recently overtaken Merz’s conservatives as Germany’s most popular party, according to
POLITICO’s Poll of Polls, and its rising strength is adding to coalition tensions.
Since taking office in May, Merz’s Christian Democrats have tried to take the wind out of the sails of the anti-immigrant AfD by
vowing to lead a crackdown on migration. But members of the SPD, Merz’s junior coalition partner, are
increasingly trying to distance themselvesfrom a discourse they say is taken straight out of the far-right playbook.
The deputy leader of the SPD in parliament, Wiebke Esdar, went as far as
joining anti-Merz protests over the weekend.
“The two major parties of the former center are now in a dilemma in that, on the one hand, they naturally have to distance themselves from each other to a certain extent, but at the same time they must always fear that, in a sense, if they do not work together properly, it will benefit the fringes,” said Florian Grotz, a political scientist at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg.