Germany’s Biggest Loser

Merkel’s Christian Democrats lost their bearings, and voters.

WSJ EDITORIAL   Sept. 28, 2021 6:52 pm ET

It’s hard to say whether Germany’s muddled election Sunday had a winner, but it definitely had a loser. The center-right Christian Democrats of departing Chancellor Angela Merkel, in power for 16 years, crashed to their worst electoral result ever. Something more than simple exhaustion with the party’s long tenure is at work.

Not only did Ms. Merkel’s CDU and Bavarian sister party CSU come second with a combined 24.1% vote share behind the Social Democrats (SPD) at 25.7%. The CDU/CSU lost nearly nine percentage points from the last election in 2017. This is a bigger drubbing than the CDU suffered in 1998 when voters ousted Helmut Kohl after 16 years in power. The party’s vote share fell by 6.4 points then, and that was against the backdrop of economic turmoil following reunification.

Germany’s major parties have been shedding support for years, yet the SPD gained more than five percentage points over what had been its own worst-ever outcome in 2017. Some 1.3 million voters appear to have switched their preference from the CDU/CSU in 2017 to the SPD this year rather than migrating to more energetic small parties, so something beyond a rebellion against the mainstream is afoot.

Ms. Merkel deserves much of the blame politically and intellectually. Her attempts to stage-manage her succession created disorder rather than averting it. Her preferred successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, fizzled after she was elected party leader in 2018. That led to another leadership contest in January, less than a year before the election, which elevated Armin Laschet. Whatever Mr. Laschet’s political talents in his home state of populous North Rhine-Westphalia, he struggled to connect with voters.

The CDU as a whole failed to excite the electorate because it didn’t present distinctive policy ideas. Under Ms. Merkel the Christian Democrats took on a strong environmentalist bent and that’s popular in Germany. But the Green party inevitably brought more conviction to the issue and appears to have wooed some 900,000 former CDU/CSU voters—almost one-third of those who left the conservative camp.

The CDU/CSU historically has been a political home for the middle class and small business, but after 16 years without major tax or regulatory reform, another 300,000 voters fled to the unabashedly pro-entrepreneurship Free Democrats. Vague messages about continuity and social protection were no help against an SPD chancellor candidate, Olaf Scholz, who was serving finance minister and whose party sounded more believable on support for subsidies for house-building and the like.

With apologies to Tolstoy, every country’s political parties are unhappy in their own ways. But there are warnings for right-of-center parties elsewhere from the CDU’s decline. A record of boring competence isn’t enough to keep voters on side. They want ideas about meeting the challenges of the day. And those ideas had better be distinct from the opposition rather than pale imitations.