Nancy’s Whip for Rebellious Union Deputies

Friedrich Merz failed in the first round of voting. This explains what the classification of the AfD as “confirmed right-wing extremist” was really meant to achieve: to whip CDU members into voting for their own candidate!

(Nancy Faeser: Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

I had originally planned to publish a substantive analysis today of the classification of the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party. The reasoning based on the ethnic concept of the nation has already sparked one or two fundamental debates within the right. Above all, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz) has inadvertently exposed the wound that its political masters have inflicted on constitutional reality. But now Friedrich Merz has failed to be elected Chancellor in the Bundestag in the first round, and albeit he won the second round, no candidate for the chancellorship has ever failed to win this formality in the first round, so that will have to wait.

What just happened? There’s speculation about whether it was Union or SPD deputies who let Merz fail. The most likely answer: both. There’s been noticeable unrest in both parties since the election. But the question is wrong. The right question is: How many deputies could the black-red coalition afford to lose? Or conversely: How many of the potentially dissatisfied deputies did the leaderships of both coalition partners need to persuade to vote for Merz anyway? The Union and SPD together have 328 deputies. 310 voted for Merz in the first round. The absolute majority in the current Bundestag is 316. The headline that “6 votes were missing” is factually correct but somewhat misleading. In total, 18 deputies from the would-be coalition parties did not vote for Merz.

From the perspective of the party leaderships before the chancellor election the situation was this: It was known that not everyone in the Union or the SPD was on board with the new coalition. The reasons are opposing, Union dissenters come from the right wing, SPD dissenters from the left wing of their respective parties. But the coalition parties have 12 more deputies than needed. So, they could afford to lose 12 for the chancellor election. This means that if no more than 12 of the SPD’s 120 deputies break party discipline, Merz and the coalition will get through, provided the Union votes for him unanimously. The smaller the proportion of SPD dissenters, the more dissenters the Union can tolerate. So far, so trivial. The key point is: From the perspective of the party leaderships before the election, the situation wasn’t “We’re missing 6 votes.” It was: “We need to get 316 out of 328 deputies to vote for Merz.” All of this gets lost in the headline “6 votes missing!” which is why I’m elaborating here.

Now, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the SPD leadership. The leadership knows there are some intransigent members in their ranks. An I mean intransigent. The coalition negotiations amounted to the unconditional surrender of the Union. The chancellor election should really have been scheduled for May 8 or 9, not May 6.

But any SPD deputy refusing to vote for Merz, claiming he’s a neoliberal fascist or some such nonsense, is out of his mind. The SPD turned a crushing election defeat into a total victory at the negotiating table. Until a few hours ago, people forgot how high SPD chairman Klingbeil had gambled. The only reason the SPD could demand anything, the only reason it was even considered, let alone indispensable, as a coalition partner for the Union, is the firewall, the refusal of all other parties in Germany to forma coalition with the AfD. But the Union can abandon this firewall doctrine at any time. In fact, it’s not only pointless for the Union but has become highly damaging. The firewall against the right made sense for the Union as long as it could prevent the rise of parties to its right. The basic agreement of the Federal Republic’s party cartel was that the left-wing parties set the societal agenda, while the Union, as a conservative brake, could capture the votes of the majority who didn’t lean left but had no alternative to the Union. The AfD changed that, and it’s unclear how the party cartel could reverse this democratically. There’s a reason why people like Wanderwitz, who want to return to the old party cartel, demand the AfD’s ban: It’s their only chance to achieve their goal.

This has turned the situation on it’s head for the Union. Previously, the firewall reliably made the Union the strongest party. While the SPD had to share the left-wing voter spectrum first with the Greens and then with the Left Party, the Union could capture the entire right-wing spectrum and compete for the center without losing right-wing voters to a competitor. Angela Merkel perfected this, embodying the unwritten cartel agreement between the established parties like no one else: 16 years of Union dominance while jettisoning even the last conservative remnants.

That era is now irrevocably gone. Before the Bundestag election, I had bet on a black-blue (Union-AfD) government (here and here). Though I must admit I misjudged Friedrich Merz. After the Bundestag’s vote on refugee caps, he looked stronger than he does now. But my prediction wasn’t based on the Union suddenly embracing its patriotic duty, but on the assumption that the Union has enough self-preservation instinct and political savvy to see that times have changed. If the Union clings to the firewall, it will be ground to powder at the firewall. If nothing else, the last two months have shown that. It will be programmatically blackmailed from the left and lose its voters to the AfD.

It’s sheer inertia that keeps the Union tied to the firewall, solely the fear of every top Union official of being the first to state the obvious. You need to keep this in mind to grasp how high the stakes are for the SPD. For Merz, this chancellor election was about his lifelong dream, but the vast majority of the Union could do without it. For the SPD, Merz’s chancellorship is about the party’s future. If the firewall breaks, the SPD becomes a mid-sized party on a downward trajectory.

Let’s consider the alternative available to the Union: a coalition with the Alternative. The Union and AfD together have 359 seats. Before Sieghard Knodel’s exit from the AfD due to its “confirmed right-wing extremist” classification, it was even one more. Instead of just 12, a black-blue coalition could tolerate 43 dissenters. In percentages: 12 out of 328 is 3.7% dissenter tolerance for black-red. 43 out of 359 is a full 11.9% dissenter tolerance for black-blue. If it’s said that black-blue is impossible because some deputies would rebel, well, the same problem proved to be the case with black-red. But black-blue could afford a more than three times higher share of rebels.

The vote in the German Bundestag on the influx restriction law¹ on January 31, 2025, was essentially a vote within the Union faction on how many deputies were willing to follow the party leadership if it tore down the firewall. The result²: 184 out of 196 in favor. The twelve remaining Merkelians didn’t even abstain—they didn’t show up at all and were recorded as “not cast.” It was this vote, and the one on January 29, that led me to my black-blue prediction. After the Bundestag election Merz lacked the courage to follow through on what he started with these votes. But Jens Spahn has since subtly positioned himself by demanding that the AfD be treated like other parties. The firewall is grinding down the Union, and deep cracks are appearing in the Federal Republic’s political elite.

None of this is a secret at Willy-Brandt-Haus³. For the SPD, everything is at stake. That’s why the AfD was classified as “confirmed right-wing extremist.” The SPD tried, through the internal security agency, to whip Union deputies into voting for their own candidate! Welcome to the Federal Republic of 2025!

1. A proposal by the Union, mainly to restrict the right to claim asylum.

2. Deutscher Bundestag (2025): 211. Sitzung des Deutschen Bundestages am Freitag, 31. Januar 2025 Endgültiges Ergebnis der Namentlichen Abstimmung Nr. 1, Link: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/1042614/84f41fdc1725dbbbd0cf4e9e5e1ea407/20250131_1.pdf

3. SPD party headquarters.