As such problems accumulated, so too did discontent with public policy and democratic politics. As a result, there has been a growing fragmentation of the postwar political party system, a decline of the established parties on both the center-right and the center-left, along with a Right-wing “populist” challenge to the political system inherited from the postwar era, in the form of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

Relatively little attention has been paid, though, to whether and how declining trust in political institutions extends to local government, which has traditionally been less politicized, with local families and networks allegedly making for a less ideological, less confrontational, and more socially embedded politics of pragmatic consensus and cooperation. It is from this perspective, then, that the recent local elections in the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW) may be of more than just local interest.

With 18 million inhabitants, 14 million of whom are eligible to vote, NRW is by far the largest state of the Federal Republic. With elections held every five years, voters elect local parliaments for cities and counties as well as county administrators (Landrat) and mayors (Bürgermeister, Oberbürgermeister) for the cities. If no candidate for county administrator or mayor wins more than 50% of the vote, a French-style run-off is held.

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By Wolfgang Streeck

The NRW local elections of 14 and 28 September were the last major elections of the year in Germany, and have been intensively studied by election strategists. Looking at the first round, one finds a considerable increase in turnout, from 51.9% to 56.8%, as is always the case when new “populist” challengers mobilize both friends and foes. More surprising was a remarkable regional stability in both CDU and SPD support, which at 33.3% and 22.1% respectively, lost no more than 1.0 and 2.2 percentage points — both ending up far above their Bundestag results of February 2025 and a national poll (by Forschungsgruppe Wahlen) taken around election day (see Table). The Greens fared far worse than the SPD, falling 6.5 percentage points to 13.5%, despite being in a governing coalition with the CDU at the state level. Finally, there were two winners compared with 2020, the populist Left Linkspartei (5.6% up from 3.8%) and, above all, AfD, which almost tripled its result, from 5.1% to a striking 14.5%.

 Credit: Polling data: Forschungsgruppe Wahlen. Table: Wolfgang Streeck.

North Rhine-Westphalia, which contains the populous cities of Cologne, Dortmund, Essen and Düsseldorf, has always been socially and politically on the more conservative side. This may well explain why the CDU and SPD, Germany’s legacy parties, held up relatively well — regardless of the looming social spending reductions at federal level under the no-longer-so-grand CDU/SPD coalition. But it does make the result of the AfD all the more impressive — especially given the fact that, at the time of the election, there were hardly any AfD members yet in political offices in local communities, where local ties tend to be at least as important as party programs, and the fact the AfD suffers in NRW from fierce public infighting. Moreover, as the AfD had been unable or unwilling to put up candidates in around 40% of constituencies, the official election result, computed on the basis of all constituencies, inevitably underestimates the AfD’s real support, probably by some margin. Where the AfD did not join the race this may have been because potential candidates were afraid of the social ostracism they might suffer after identifying themselves as AfD members. Or the party deliberately avoided constituencies where it could not expect to win a minimum of votes. In any case, both factors may have changed by the next election, which may explain the satisfaction of the party leadership after the first round.

Nonetheless, in spite of its gains, the AfD still did not manage to capture even one of the key trophies: the 52 regional positions of Landrat and Oberbürgermeister. But it did manage to disrupt traditional voting patterns. As a result of the AfD advance, 36 of the 52 races, many more than last time, had to go to a runoff. The AfD, however, was among the final two in only three of those races. There all the other parties united against the AfD candidate, leaving them with no chance of winning. The Brandmauer (firewall) remained intact. This, too, may no longer be the case five years from now, with the AfD currently present in all major local assemblies and in a position to build alliances with other parties and groups of voters.

If the AfD was the winner, the Greens were the losers — with the exception of Münster, where the Green candidate for mayor narrowly defeated the CDU candidate in the run-off. Münster is a beautiful and prosperous university town that has long been governed, and governed well, by Christian Democrats of the Merkel sort, in an informal coalition with the Greens — an alliance between a well-to-do liberal-Catholic bourgeoisie and a large international student community. In Cologne, the fourth-largest city in Germany, with one million inhabitants, and easily the worst-governed, the Greens lost, after having been in a formal coalition with the CDU for a decade. In the run-off, their candidate, of Turkish descent, vice chair of the state legislature, lost to a Social Democrat supported by the CDU, whose candidate had come in only third in the first round. Generally, the party paid the price for the last federal government’s climate-change policy, which tried to legally force homeowners to install new heating systems that could easily cost more than their houses; buy overpriced electric cars; and make local communities accommodate an open-ended number of refugees and asylum seekers assigned to them by Länder governments.

Of the two traditional majority parties, the CDU and SPD, the former did better than the latter, notwithstanding the record low national support for the CDU and its Chancellor, Friedrich Merz (see the table above), after barely six months in office. This may be due in part to the Minister-President of NRW, Hendrik Wüst, also CDU, who is Merz’s main internal rival. Governing with the Greens, who do not have much to say under him, he radiates a friendly competence and calmness that Merz all too obviously lacks. More importantly, the CDU can cohabit more easily with the AfD than can the SPD, not necessarily for programmatic reasons but because its social milieu, lower-class and middle-class Catholic communities, common in the Rhineland and Westphalia, continues to be more resistant to AfD rhetoric than the SPD’s working-class milieu. This may explain why in Dortmund, an old industrial center that the SPD had governed for the past 80 years, the AfD inflicted such heavy losses on the SPD that the CDU candidate won in the runoff. That so few SPD voters turned to the Linkspartei instead of the AfD may be due to the traditionally low presence of the Linke in local politics, and to SPD voters having grown too old to be attracted by the radicals’ youthful image.

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All in all, the NRW election result will only add momentum to efforts to have the AfD banned by the Constitutional Court, by those in the SPD parliamentary party who consider Kampf gegen rechts (Battle against the Right) to be their party’s foremost political mission. Under the German constitution, a party can be found unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court if it is found be hostile to “the liberal-democratic basic order”. There is a long legal literature on what this could mean. In the past, two parties were declared unconstitutional: the Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands in 1952, a self-declared successor organization to the NSDAP, and the Kommunistische Partei (Communist Party) in 1956. Once found unconstitutional, a party is formally dissolved by the government, its funds confiscated, and attempts to continue it or establish a substitute organization become punishable under criminal law, with imprisonment from six months to five years, or from one to ten years “where the offender acts as a ringleader or instigator… Attempt shall also be punishable” (Section 84 of the Criminal Code).

There are good political reasons for the SPD to wish the AfD banned as soon as possible. After all, if the SPD’s decades-long decline continues, it may end up under 10% in the next federal election in early 2029, with the AfD the strongest party by far. As the Court will need time to investigate and deliberate, those in the SPD that want to see the AfD banned will have to ensure that the case is brought to the Court very soon, given that the Court may be hesitant to render a decision in the midst of the next federal election campaign, which will begin roughly in the spring of 2028. While two new judges, recently appointed on the SPD ticket, might support a ban in time, other judges under the influence of the CDU might not. Of course, if the Court were to decide only after the election, the fact alone that the AfD could then be found unconstitutional might damage its electoral prospects; expect the court proceedings to be professionally orchestrated by the government’s public relations machinery and dutifully dramatized by the public and private media. Potential AfD candidates might be scared away, and potential party members might not join for fear of being disqualified from jobs in the public sector after a party ban. Not least, Kampf gegen rechts before the Constitutional Court might also help hide the inability of the new federal government’s U-turn to fiscal profligacy to solve the local problems accumulated over decades of austerity, and it might divert attention from the cuts in social spending that will be necessary to finance the war in Ukraine.

Even if the Constitutional Court were to decide in favor of the established parties — and it could hardly decide otherwise in the midst of a highly politicized election campaign — the huge political and legal problems of banning and enforcing a party representing at least a third of the electorate would not disappear. While the Court can outlaw a political party, it cannot remove its members of parliament from their seats, at any level, federal, Länder, or local. In fact, if the AfD were banned, one third if not even more of all seats might be occupied by MPs elected on the AfD ticket after the next election, and all would be legally safe for the rest of the legislative term unless found to have engaged in something that government prosecutors considered “continuation” or “substitution” of the AfD. Accusations to this effect by political competitors could be expected en masse. (According to Section 46 of the Constitutional Court Act, details of how a party ban is to be executed are determined by the federal government by statutory order, without need for legislation.)

With a verdict after the next election, this would make a new, early election inevitable. In it, former AfD MPs could run as individual candidates or on lists of new Right-wing parties, unless excluded from running by the Länder electoral boards or, of course, in prison for continuation or substitution. There would be litigation galore. During an election campaign in the wake of a party ban, the Office of the Federal Prosecutor (Bundesanwaltschaft) would be busy day and night, observing suspicious candidates’ every move to determine whether they were in violation of the AfD ban, which would be a statutory offense. If they were found to be, they would have to be immediately disqualified from running and taken to the courts where they would face imprisonment. What a spectacle that would be.

This was in striking contrast to her public image during the Greek debt crisis, when cartoonists depicted her in SS uniform resplendent with swastika. But those cartoons were for the masses only. The European political elites, all of them, happily voted with the Merkel government when it came to disciplining the Greek dissidents. They were as eager as the Germans to keep European monetary union alive. Merkel has left Europe to a political class to whom she has not only taught the trickery of two-level politics — national and supranational — but whom she has also, in part, brought to or kept in office. It is a political class that has bet its future on a Europe built around German hegemony.

In many parts of Europe, it is still considered a pleasant surprise to see a German who is soft-spoken with good manners, a wide heart and a big purse, smiling rather than shouting. This proved useful in her rise to becoming informal ruler of the continent. It also helped that she was a woman — someone who could be pictured as a nourishing mother as opposed to a punishing father.

But other things were more instrumental in her rise. When she took office, in 2005, major developments had recently taken place, and major decisions made, which certainly eased her career progression. In the Nineties, centrist political parties, of the Right as well as the Left, had been programmatically emaciated by the advance of neoliberal globalisation. Her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), had been unable to reconcile ever more rapid capitalist modernisation with its traditional commitment to paternalist social protection. This left an ideological vacuum that would give her unprecedented room far for manoeuvre once she became leader.

It also helped that her main rival, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was breaking apart over the Third Way social policy reforms of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder — in particular Agenda 2010, which cut unemployment benefits and increased the pressure on people to accept job offers. Not only did the Agenda weaken the SPD for decades, but it spared Merkel, once she had ascended to the chancellorship, from having to implement the neoliberal reforms she had promised as opposition leader. Instead, she could allow the SPD, her partner in three coalition governments, to try to work out reforms to the Schröder reform, thereby reminding its constituents that it was responsible for policies they hated. Merkel, for her part, could claim for herself rising levels of employment and the balancing of the federal budget.

Rising employment and declining fiscal deficits weren’t just a result of the Agenda, though. Merkel’s third and most important long-term advantage was the work of the European heads of government who had created European Monetary Union in the Nineties. It is worth remembering that the common currency was a project not of German but of French and, to a lesser extent, Italian elites, who had hoped that a currency shared with Germany would force neoliberal restructuring in their own countries while protecting them from German financial competition. As it turned out, the former goal was defeated by domestic opposition, while the latter evolved into a Plan B: the southern member states would extract monetary and fiscal policy concessions from Germany in exchange for remaining in the union.

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For Germany, on the other hand, the monetary union was an economic godsend. It made the country the growth pole of Europe, the centre of a liberal economic empire. It also firmly established the preservation of the euro as Germany’s paramount national interest.

Unlike others in Germany, Merkel understood early on that preserving the monetary union would require side payments to its losers. These did not necessarily have to be financial but could be symbolic, for instance by occasionally allowing her colleagues on the European Council to outvote Germany. At home, Merkel had to overcome opposition to what the German public was always prone to see as excessive concessions to profligate southerners. To avoid conflict between domestic and European political needs, most side payments, especially the more expensive ones, had to be made under the counter, through complex operations deep in the bowels of that monster technocracy, the European Central Bank.

This does not mean that there were no tough negotiations on the magnitude of compensations due. Merkel tried to keep the price Germany had to pay as low as possible. But she also understood that the cost had to be sufficient to keep the currency union together. The transfers did not need to solve the continent’s structural imbalances. Their main purpose was political: keeping pro-EU governments in power by helping them fend off challenges from anti-euro parties and movements; providing them with the material and ideological resources to reward their supporters and thereby preserve ‘political stability’.

Very early in her tenure, Merkel realised that the central concern of German policy in Europe had to be defending monetary union against the disappointment of its original proponents. This required keeping alive the impression that the EU was run, if not by all members alike, then at least by a French-German “tandem”, and not Germany alone. Four French Presidents — Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron — had to be reassured on this score.

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French aspirations for ‘European sovereignty’ — meaning French sovereignty extended to Europe as a whole — and for a shared ‘strategic culture’  —meaning the EU adopting French military doctrine and ambition — Merkel could satisfy only symbolically. In reality, German national security remained firmly in the hands of the United States and NATO. To keep both the US and France happy, German foreign policy had to rely on rhetorical obfuscation and double-dealing, disciplines in which Merkel excelled. German troops were sent to both Afghanistan and Mali, and would have had to be sent to other places as well had the government not had the excuse that under the postwar German constitution, out-of-area military missions have to be formally approved by the Bundestag.

Domestically, Merkel’s main project was to build a hegemonic neo-bourgeois political centre, with her party in the driver’s seat. Early on, she decided on the Greens as ideal partners who could inject urgently needed new blood and close the generation gap from which older parties suffer in a world of fast cultural change. In the end, however, the alliance with the Greens failed spectacularly. Shutting down nuclear energy after Fukushima and later phasing out coal pleased the Greens but raised the question of how to secure a growing energy supply. The answer was making Germany dependent on Russian gas, to the dismay of the United States. Russian gas also is resented by the Greens, with their “value-driven” idea of foreign policy. While she went along with Western sanctions against Russia over its re-possession of the Crimean Peninsula, Merkel at the same time founded her energy and climate change policy on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a project that her Green friends want to abort, as do her French friends, who are eager to sell their nuclear-produced electricity to Germany.

Similar difficulties and domestic-international complexities arose after Merkel’s decision to open the German borders for one million mostly Syrian refugees in 2015. While her refugee policy once more endeared her to the Greens and the new middle class, it divided her party and reinvigorated a then declining Alternative für Deutschland. It also forced her to negotiate an agreement on behalf of the EU with the Turkish dictator, Erdogan, in which Europe paid him considerable sums of money to act as the EU’s gatekeeper, preventing Syrian and other refugees from crossing into Europe. Also to control immigration, Germany insisted on a quota system in Europe for future refugees, knowing full well that it would be unacceptable to most other member states as it would involve a de facto Europeanisation of the German asylum regime. The result was passionate opposition in Eastern Europe and a split in the EU just as in the German electorate.

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Merkel’s migration policy was one reason why the recent Green advance was accompanied by a decline of Merkel’s own party such that in the 2021 election, the CDU/CSU became too small to form a successor government. In the end, the neo-bourgeois centre that Merkel had intended to build was to consist of a three-party coalition under the leadership of the SPD and a chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who as Merkel’s finance minister had done his best to learn from her. As the new government was sworn in, the outgoing chancellor was so alienated from her party that she seemed quite content to see her office turned over to a Social Democrat.

For her successors, Merkel’s will be a hard act to follow. Her manner of leadership by evasion — deferring decisions, delaying moments of truth, papering over conflicts with ambiguous rhetoric, substituting opportunistic improvisation for strategy and suppressing uncertainty by a public display of optimistic equanimity — requires specific personal skills. The same holds for Merkel’s extraordinary ability to get away with abruptly reversing decisions and making conflicting promises to different constituencies. From Merkel, two or three generations of European statesmen and stateswomen learned that leadership in the crises of today means nothing more and nothing less than making yourself appear optimistic enough to satisfy public desires for public displays of optimism.

Now, however, this may no longer be enough. Merkel’s equivocally friendly stoicism is unlikely to serve the next German government, or a German Europe, as well as it served her. During Merkel’s tenure, there was always enough money around to keep most of her partners reasonably happy — enough slack, in cash and time, for making the incompatible appear compatible. That this is no longer true was indicated, among other things, by the recent German coalition agreement, which could come to pass only because the parties deliberately abstained from discussing finance.

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But financial issues will soon assert themselves whether the parties want to discuss them or not, as the monetary union and the pandemic do their work, and German domestic needs make themselves felt. Note that already before Covid struck, there was a crisis of German physical infrastructure. Moreover, the new government, unlike Merkel’s Grand Coalition, will face an opposition in CDU/CSU that it cannot exclude from public debate on principle — as Merkel and all the rest excluded the AfD. This means, among other things, that questions will be asked and have to be answered on Germany’s ability to pay to keep “Europe”, meaning the monetary union, alive by keeping pro-EU governments in control in the south. For this, the ECB will have to invent ever more extravagant methods of direct state finance, including holding interest rates down close to zero in spite of rising inflation and cutting government debt by “fiscal repression”.

The list of unresolved problems Merkel leaves behind is long. It extends from the future fiscal and monetary constitution of the eurozone to Europe’s ever-increasing public debt, the relationship of the EU and its member states to the two hostile global superpowers, the United States and China, the European and especially the German relationship to Russia, the tension between German Atlanticism and French Europeanism, the status of national sovereignty in the EU state system, the future energy supply of Western Europe, and asylum and immigration policies, national and European. More issues could be listed, each urgent, some critical, none easy to resolve.

In a few years’ time, Merkel’s tenure may be remembered as a golden era when pious wishes still helped — a time when hard decisions could still be successfully postponed, dilemmas hidden by optimistic denial and benevolent neglect, and contradictions reconciled by all sorts of pocket money, borrowed or printed. Now, by contrast, things are about to get serious.