2 August 2026 - 1:00pm
Germany’s ruling party, the Christian Democratic Union, is facing a political earthquake. The trigger was a botched cabinet reshuffle initiated this week by party leader and Chancellor Friedrich Merz. After Jens Spahn resigned as parliamentary head of the governing CDU/CSU coalition in the Bundestag, Merz reshuffled eight positions. In one case, he fired a minister without lining up a successor. But then he fired a very popular minister from east Germany, Christiane Schenderlein, previously minister for sport, and demoted her to a junior ministerial role. This decision triggered the rage of CDU leaders in eastern Germany. At a meeting of the coalition group, one MP then told Merz that he runs his party like a company. Normally, MPs do not openly attack the chancellor in such meetings because everything always leaks out, as it did in this case. But Merz has triggered a level of dissatisfaction that is unprecedented in his party.
It would be easy to dismiss this as a passing summer story. Yet CDU grassroots members are not the type to stage revolutions. They usually suffer their disappointments quietly. In recent history, there have only been two serious revolts: first in 1988 against Helmut Kohl, who won this battle and governed for another 10 years. And in 1999, the party again revolted against its leaders over a scandal involving illegal donations. Angela Merkel put the dagger in with an article calling on her party to liberate itself from Kohl. Shortly afterwards, Wolfgang Schäuble was forced to resign as CDU party leader, and Kohl resigned as honorary leader. But that coup was a battle between rivals: nobody ever accused Kohl of not knowing how to run a party or a government. Merkel, meanwhile, never faced a revolt.
So why is Merz so unpopular inside his own party? There are some parallels here with Keir Starmer. The former British PM never overcame the controversy surrounding his appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to Washington. But this affair was only the trigger. The cause is more prosaic. Labour concluded that it could not win the next election unless it changed its leader, and what is happening with the CDU is very similar. The CDU/CSU is now polling barely above 20%, with the AfD comfortably ahead. And there will be three state elections in east Germany in September – Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin – where the CDU is likely to do badly.
As so often happens when politicians are in trouble with the public, though, they think the problem is down to communication. Merz said at yesterday’s meeting of the CDU/CSU group: “A key focus of my work will be ensuring good communication amongst the federal government, the parliamentary group and the party – communication that explains and conveys things more effectively.” So he is blaming his critics for not understanding him properly. It is not hard to see where that strategy goes wrong.
Meanwhile, every new crisis will hit Merz unfiltered. He has lost his shield. There will be eight elections over the next year – including in some of the west German heartlands of North-Rhine Westphalia and Lower Saxony — which Merz’s party must win in order for him to survive. To do so, he should propose one substantive change: dropping the firewall against the AfD as a rigid construction that is binding on everybody, and let state and regional leaders decide what to do on a case-by-case basis.
