How right is right?

Europe's Christian Democratic tradition is being gobbled up

What do moderate, one-nation Conservatives do now in this era of Trump mayhem? Do they even exist any more? That’s the question I’ve asked in this week’s election column for Politico. You can read it here or in the text below. The trigger for this wider look has been the continued furore in Germany over the attempts by Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader, to get his hardline immigration package through parliament, knowing that its main chance of success was support from the far-right AfD.

He failed, but the first opinion polls this week - contrary to some wishful thinking in liberal circles, who predicted a CDU slide suggest that it might, after all, be popular. At least among those who might be inclined to vote for the party. Which is fine, to have a more defined Conservative Party, but it isn’t the one of old. And the most important conclusion of this episode is that, having flown this kite, Merz may - as Chancellor - feel emboldened to do it again.

German politics are changing fast, but they’re merely catching up with everywhere else where the extreme is being mainstreamed. These are dramatic elections and there are more pieces and broadcast interviews to come. My website tracks them; plus I post them here and on Bluesky.

Then I’ll go back to mixing it up with commentaries from around the world. Promise!

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You know that Christian democracy is in trouble when the churches condemn it.

Over the past week, much of Germany’s attention has been focused on huge protests against Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party leader Friedrich Merz for his flirtation with the far right, and former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s pointed criticisms of her abrasive successor.

However, less was made of a joint statement released by the Protestant and Catholic leadership attacking the language in Merz’s controversial legislative plan. The religious leaders warned the proposal was “likely to defame all migrants living in Germany, to stir up prejudices and, in our opinion, not contribute to solving the real issues.”

Religious denunciations matter in a country where citizens must make considerable effort to opt out of paying an obligatory church tax, and for a party that’s dominated postwar politics and has strong religious links. (The clue is in the name.)

And that very party, the CDU of former chancellors Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Merkel — as well as much of the country — was deeply shaken by Merz’s decision to try and convince the parliament (twice) to back stringent measures against immigration. Measures he knew had little chance of success without the support of the extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Despite the fury, Merz has stood firm, with most of his party standing by him. And as the febrile campaign hurtles toward the finish line on Feb. 23, the initial soundings are that his core vote remains behind him. Indeed, according to a post-crisis poll released Thursday, his personal popularity rating and party position are slightly up. More polls are expected imminently, but whether they confirm this trend or not, it’s a different party that Merz is now leading. The death knell for traditional Christian democracy has been sounded.

And Germany’s merely following a worldwide trend that’s seen established conservative parties shed their traditional identities.

The Republicans in the United States may still have their name, but under President Donald Trump, they’ve severed their relationship with past administrations. Even former presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush wouldn’t recognize their own party.

In the U.K., today’s post-Brexit Conservatives bear no resemblance to the party that based itself in a patrician conservation of tradition after the war. Yes, during the 1980s, then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher shook that tree vigorously, but even she broadly adhered to the postwar consensus. That has long gone. Tories now see their very existence as under threat and are trying to emulate Reform UK — the party to their right. Likely, they’ll eventually either form a coalition with Nigel Farage’s party or be subsumed by it.

Meanwhile, across European countries with proportional voting systems, it has become commonplace for center-right parties to jump into bed with the far right (other centrist and leftist groupings have sometimes joined them too). Following this pattern, just this month, Belgium joined, inter alia, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Croatia and Slovakia. Austria is around the corner, and the Czech Republic not far behind.

Of course, administrations have always come and gone, but what’s now indisputable is that the extreme and fringe has gone mainstream. The cordon sanitaire is disintegrating.Even in places where centrists, or purported centrists, dominate, they’ve adopted much of the language and many of the practices of populists. In France, for example, the remarks by Prime Minister François Bayrou on how people are feeling “submerged” by immigration were hailed by the far-right National Rally, taken as evidence it had “won the ideological battle.”

This is about far more than just coalitions and deals. It is the death of one political tradition and replacement by another. Some might argue this is inevitable — after all, eight decades might be considered a respectably long innings. Some might even see it as desirable that the social mores that defined a previous era are being discarded.

The irony with Merz is that he hails from the Sauerland, a region of central Germany that epitomizes the bürgerlich stolidity of old — the three Ks of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). He also regularly attends mass, so the churches’ criticism will have stung.

But it’s not just social norms that are being culled, it’s also other principles that underpinned the postwar consensus — such as rule of law and the authority of international institutions, which Germans hold dear more than any other — that are being torn asunder.

Perhaps the most important of these axioms was economic: the confidence that each generation would be more financially secure than the previous one. The 2007–2008 financial crisis was a shock to this system, but crashes had happened before. More enduring, and more politically damaging, was the economic system’s inability to recover — or at least to deliver for most voters.

None of the emergent new parties have much convincing to say about the economy, though. Indeed, they’re divided between small-state neoliberalism (of the Brexiteer “Singapore-on-the-Thames” variety) and statist market interventions (like the national socialism, pun intended, of Germany’s far-right-meets-far-left Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht). Trump is looking both ways at once.

Merz’s “Agenda 2030” firmly belongs in the former school of thought. After two years of seemingly immutable recession in Germany, the CDU leader promised to lower taxes for companies and households, “dismantle” bureaucracy and foster investment in research and development. His party program also involves unpicking green regulations and cutting welfare benefits introduced by the current coalition.

From the moment he took over the party in 2022 — after a decade of waiting — Merz had promised to be radical. Aged 69, he firmly belongs to the postwar baby-boomer generation of Germans who saw dogged stability as a mechanism for survival, and as epitomizing their country’s new brand. But he decided to dispense with that.

Even though it’s unclear what will follow — Merz will still have to form a coalition with other more centrist parties — old-school conservatism is over. Now that he’s started, does anyone really believe he really won’t work with the AfD in the future?

The name, Christian Democrats, may stay the same. But the takeover is well underway.