Opening to the AfD: Risk Merz his chancellorship?

Internal resistance

When the vote result is read out hours after his appearance, you get the impression: yes, quite. Because the law to limit the family reunification, which he wanted to bring back with the AfD, failed, probably also due to the resistance of his own party. Merz received 350 votes, he needed 367, that is a clear difference.

The first surveys for the Union also point down rather than upwards. But of course, nothing is decided: it is still fought loudly and toxic about the sovereignty of interpretation as to whether Merz’s step was necessary or a “fall”, as the SPD called it.

The protagonists are becoming more and more. On Thursday, former Chancellor Angela Merkel will show her eternal adversary for his “wrong” approach, a previously unseen process in an election campaign. For them it was probably revenge and rescue of honor: Merz not only emphasized that it was Merkel’s policy that the country brought into this imbalance. The next day, Sebastian Kurz spoke up, and that looked like a counter-speech to Merkel, who briefly saw as an opponent: Austria’s ex-chancellor, himself always very strictly when it comes to migration, called Merz’s steps via Bildzitung Not only “right, but” absolutely necessary “.

No gambler

Merz is actually not known as a player, he is not a passionate political gambler like FDP boss Christian Lindner. In the Union, many therefore tell that the CDU boss acted out of conviction that after the murder of two-year-old Yannick in Aschaffenburg, he was so stunned that everything that followed really had to follow for him. Alone: ​​Even if many in their own party can emotionally understand what leads their boss, not everyone is behind him politically. Even from the CSU, which is traditionally a little further to the right than the CDU, come critical voices, the questions: Did that really have to be now?

Fear in Bavaria, formulated by some mayors, is an “upgrading of the AfD”. Merz brought all the Union politicians to the bredouille who have so far gone proudly if, for example, an AfD party party wanted to cite Goebbels quickly.

With whom?

Merz summarizes that he never wanted to coalition with the AfD, and in the Bundestag he also promised that as a chancellor of a minority government with the FDP, he would not be tolerated by the right -wing populists. In terms of mathematical, this model is currently assuming, but not in terms of content: “The AfD wants to destroy us,” argued Merz, and he will never shake his hand.

Finding other majorities will be very complicated for him – as he is the first to get through the finish. The coming weeks will use the SPD and Greens to differentiate themselves from him as the “collaborator” of the right -wing radicals. Negotiations with both parties, of course, make this massive.

Merz has put everything in his decision, perhaps also his possible chancellorship. He can win everything. But he can also lose everything.