Some people have told me that a Merz government would nevertheless constitute an important correction towards the centre-right, so in conclusion I hope you will allow me to dash your hopes on the remorseless reefs of reality.
The CDU have been aping the AfD and railing against mass migration for months. They even proposed draft legislation “to limit the illegal influx of third-country nationals to Germany.” One of the last acts of the FDP before the government collapsed,
was to help shoot this legislation down in committee. Now, however, the FDP are in the opposition, and suddenly there is a theoretical majority for this law – if only the FDP joins the CDU, the AfD and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) in supporting it. Limiting migration is important, right? Strangely, though, the CDU have developed a mysterious anxiety about introducing any legislation until the elections,
because they don’t want to pass anything with votes from the AfD or the migration-sceptical BSW. The CDU are happy to oppose migration, in other words, as long as their opposition has no chance of producing any real, tangible laws that will do anything to stop migration in the real world.
Maybe the CDU will at least do something about climatism, though? Maybe they’ll wind back all the Green insanity we’ve had to endure since 2021, like
the building heating ordinances? Here again, hoping would be very foolish.
The CDU have now made it clear that they consider Green policies on this front to be “irreversible.” They’ve been in secret talks with the Greens for months, and they’ve even produced a draft resolution confirming their support for Green climate targets. They hope merely to shift the emphasis away from Green industrial subsidies and specific technology requirements towards carbon pricing and emissions trading instead. They will also surely plead that some of the worst schemes – like the approaching ban on internal combustion engines – are EU-level policies and out of their hands.
You may have noticed, at this point, that there is a very long list of things that the CDU cannot do. There are the things they cannot do because they would require AfD votes, there are the things they cannot do because they need the Greens for their parliamentary majority, and there are the things they cannot do because of the European Union and NATO and god knows what else. Germany has locked itself into a highly pernicious trap of its own making here, and it will be one hapless government into the buzzsaw after the other, until our politicians figure out how to govern again, or are replaced by literally anybody with a minimal capacity to act.