On Sunday evening Friedrich Merz sounded a little like Frank Drebbin, the hapless Naked Gun police detective.
The 69-year-old chancellor hoped to use his first summer television interview as German leader to showcase his coalition’s energetic first 10 weeks in office.
Instead, just as Drebbin insisted people keep moving and ignore the spectacular explosions behind him, Merz insisted for 15 minutes that his coalition was “not in crisis” after its second Bundestag vote disaster in two months.
In May Merz became the first postwar chancellor to stumble into power on the second vote when he failed to secure an absolute majority of Bundestag MPs in a first round secret ballot.
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Merz attributed his fumbled chancellor vote to nerves and inexperienced coalition party whips, but last Friday was another matter.
Conservative members of Merz’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) refused to follow the party line to back as constitutional court judge a nominee of their centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) coalition partners.
“It wasn’t nice on Friday, but it’s not a crisis of democracy or a crisis of the government,” said Merz on Sunday evening. “The whole thing is undramatic.”
Please keep moving, nothing to see here.
Unfortunate, then, how, an hour earlier, federal president Frank Walter Steinmeier – on a rival television network – argued “the coalition has damaged itself”. Other political veterans in Berlin are more blunt, warning of far-reaching consequences for German democracy.
[ Alternative for Germany tries to tone down to cut further into mainstreamOpens in new window ]
By withholding support for the SPD nominee, the chancellor’s own party has called into question seven decades of consensus on legal appointments.
Unlike the US supreme court nomination spectacle, German political parties previously sounded each other out on potential candidates in discreet backroom negotiations. They only proceeded to the obligatory parliamentary vote as a final formality.
It’s an approach that has helped keep Germany’s highest legal instance above the political fray as its most trusted public institution, populated by justices who are respected but obscure figures.
No longer. Until a fortnight ago, few outside legal circles had ever heard of the SPD nominee Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf.
Now the Potsdam law professor has reportedly received online death threats after conservative CDU politicians criticised her pro-choice views and flagged plagiarism claims surrounding her work, the latter dismissed as quickly as they emerged.
On Friday morning, hours before the planned vote, SPD leaders heard that the CDU parliamentary party could not guarantee full support for Brosius-Gersdorf – days after promising just that.
In response, the SPD pulled the plug on the entire vote and, instead of choosing three new constitutional court justices before the summer break, MPs chose none.
After a weekend taking soundings, SPD parliamentary party leader Matthias Miersch said it was an unprecedented breach of trust to watch CDU politicians effectively join forces with online trolls.
“We stand by Prof Brosius-Gersdorf, we are not changing our candidate just because of vile propaganda,” said Miersch on Monday. “If the right-wing mob gets away with this, then we are making a huge mistake.”
His concerns are shared even by well-known CDU grandees. Former CDU state premier Peter Müller, also a retired constitutional court judge, described the standoff as part of the growing struggle to reach mainstream political consensus.
“The political centre in Germany has now only a limited capacity to act – something I view as dramatic,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily.
With no vote now likely until September, the row carries echoes of the unpopular last coalition and has handed the far-right opposition Alternative for Germany (AfD) another political stick.
According to AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, no stranger to hyperbole, Germany “has never had such an unstable government or so weak a chancellor”.
