By Martin Suchanek, Infomail 1282, May 6, 2025

Workers’ Power Group

Automatically translated by AI

After a delay of around seven hours, Friedrich Merz was elected Federal Chancellor on his second attempt. The fact that it sometimes takes several attempts to achieve the desired goal is nothing new for him – after all, he also needed three attempts to secure the position of CDU party chairman.

Nevertheless, it came as a surprise that he was defeated in the first round of the election for Chancellor on May 6. He was 6 votes short of the absolute majority of all MPs required in the first round of voting. A total of 18 people from the ranks of the coalition parties voted against Merz, abstained or did not take part in the vote. He thus unintentionally made history – and is now the first German Chancellor not to be directly elected despite successful coalition negotiations.

But the whole thing is more than just a gaffe or a mere election rerun. It shows that the so-called grand coalition is nowhere near as stable as it likes to pretend.

Guilt and motives

The CDU leader, who likes to present himself as the strong man at the head of a strong Germany and Europe, and his coalition partners from the CDU, CSU and SPD were left speechless. There was no public statement for hours, with the CDU/CSU and Social Democrats more or less openly blaming each other for the disaster immediately after the vote. While the CDU/CSU asserted that it was in the DNA of their MPs to “vote for their own candidate – be it with their fist in their pocket” – and thus blamed the missing votes on the Social Democrats, the SPD parliamentary group rejected this. After all, their MPs would not only respect the coalition agreement, but also the large majority of 85% in their party’s membership vote – and they are used to following party discipline, even if they have to swallow many toads.

However, it is clear that loyalty to the coalition and party is not so far off. Merz himself has had many opponents in the ranks of the CDU for years. This applies all the more to the SPD after his (failed) pact with the AfD before the federal elections. There are certainly far more than 18 MPs from these parties who would have liked to teach him a lesson – even if many of the “dissenters” were probably speculating that their vote wouldn’t matter anyway and that Merz would still get his majority.

However, Merz’s staging as a chancellor who wants to clean up and lead German imperialism in Europe and the world with a strong hand was thwarted. Even if the motives of the MPs may have been coincidental or of a political-personal nature, it illustrates how fragile the political system of the Federal Republic of Germany, how narrow the basis of the “grand coalition” has become.

In the second, secret ballot for the office of Federal Chancellor, Merz then received 325 votes in favor – nine more than the required majority of 316, but still 3 votes less than if all members of the grand coalition had voted for him, as the grand coalition has a total of 328 seats in Parliament.

Damage limitation

The reaction of the parliamentary opposition was harsh after the first round of voting. The AfD declared that Merz had been punished for betraying some of his extreme racist and neoliberal promises and making himself a “hostage” of the SPD. Accordingly, she is calling for Merz’s resignation, new elections and a “genuine” shift to the right – a coalition of conservatives and the AfD. While the AfD acts as a right-wing opposition, the Greens are worried about a government in which they would not be represented at all. “If they can’t manage that, how are they going to manage it?” worries former Green minister Künast. After all, according to the statist center, Germany plays such an important role that it cannot go on without a government.

The Left may not be quite so patriotic, but Ramelow is also concerned about parliamentarianism. The Left Party, Ramelow told the FAZ, “will not vote for Merz, but ‘will do everything to ensure that the Bundestag can convene in an elective assembly’ so that there is a new government soon.”

These reactions themselves also illustrate a key moment of the political crisis in Germany. While the AfD is trying to deepen the debacle of the coalition in order to get closer to its arch-reactionary goal of a right-wing, nationalist, ultra-liberal and at the same time völkisch political turnaround, the Greens, but also Die Linke, are worried about the political system of capital.

Supporting the state

In the case of the Greens, this fully corresponds to their own class character as a party of green imperialism. The Left Party reveals its own internal contradictions. While the main motion for the federal party conference promises to set a course towards the creation of a class party and a socialist membership party, it is obviously not only the governing socialist Bodo Ramelow who is unable and unwilling to ignore the concerns of the bourgeois class about their parliament and their form of political rule. It is little consolation that Jan van Aken once again assures us that they do not want Merz to become chancellor – after all, Heidi Reichinnek is the best chancellor anyway. So it is also clear here that parliamentarianism, bourgeois democracy – and therefore also the capitalist system – should be preserved. And this despite the fact that the debacle surrounding Merz represents nothing more than an initial, symbolic, but politically quite reparable operational accident in the coalition structure.

Instead of uttering such platitudes, a socialist party must use such moments, classify them and show a perspective. In any case, the episode surrounding the first round of elections unintentionally expresses the internal tectonic shifts, the struggle for a political strategy in the ruling class and the new government. The internal conflicts and the failure of Merz in the first round of voting make it clear that the government of general attack, militarization and armament, of deportations and attacks on democratic rights is by no means as firmly in the saddle as it would like to be. It is up to us to bring this weakness, which is ultimately only symbolic today, to a head and bring down the government through resistance on the streets and in the workplaces!