The Duran Podcast - Germany Merz election trouble. SPD collapse

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Germany Merz election trouble. SPD collapseThe Duran: Episode 2485

All right, Alexander, let's talk about some recent local elections in Germany. Did not go well for Mertz, his party, his CDU, in an area in West Germany that is the home of Portia, right? No, absolutely. Yeah, they're not doing well either. Last I read about their financial report, their profits, not doing well. So what's going on with Mertz? So the region we're talking about is Baden-Wiltenberg, which is one of the richest regions in Germany, and it has been dominated historically by the CDU.

I think the CDU, which is, of course, Mouthis Party, the Christian Democratic Union, has held power in Barden-Weltenberg, almost uninterrupted throughout practically the entire history of the Federal Republic of Germany until fairly recently. And over the last few, I think the previous election cycle, 2021, in 2021, the CDU fell and the Greens rose. And the CDU in Bardon has been in a rather uneasy coalition with the Greens, there have been the ruling party as a result in Baden-Veltenberg, which is unusual, as I said, it's contrary to the tradition of the state, which is, as has always been on the conservative side.

But it's perhaps also what you might expect, might have expected in 2021. This is the time when Merkel's government was because, very unpopular, when Merkel was starting to lose the scene, when the CDU were starting to lose support, the Greens were rising, there was even a brief time in the summer of 2021, where it was thought that they might have become the major party, the biggest party in the Bundestag, in which case, by the way, the Chancellor would have become Annalina Berbock, just saying, But anyway, 2021 was a good year for the Greens, a bad year for the CDU. So we've now had a new election in Barden-Weltenberg, and Mertz and the CDU expected that they would regain control of the state.

And in fact, if you look at the overall vote in Barden-Wortembourg, there has been a major swing to the right. However, the beneficiaries of that swing overwhelmingly, or at least decisively, have not been the CDU. It has been the IFDA. The IFDA previously was polling at around 9%. That was what they got, I think, in 2021. It's now leapt to over 18%. So in this kind of West German state, that, That is an extraordinary breakthrough.

So the CDU vote did increase, or at least the proportion of their votes, did increase, but they still came second because what you're starting to see is that in places like Barden-Wurttemberg, there's a polarisation of votes. Votes on the right are starting to go to the IFD. On the left, they're going to whichever party of the left looks most likely to resist, to be able to counter the IFDA. And of course, in Baden-Weltenberg, it was the Greens, who again came first. So this is a deeply disappointing result for maths.

It shows a significant loss of momentum. And of course, his coalition partner, the SPD has collapsed. This is the historic party of Germany, the oldest party in Germany, the historic party of the left, at least in Western Germany. It has a history going way back to the 1880s, I believe, or even the 1870s. So it's a very old, well-established party. It's the party of German republicanism. It was the party of Helmut Schmidt and Willy Brandt and Gerhard Schroeder.

And it is now undoubtedly in what I would say is obviously terminal decline. So we're having polarization in Germany. There's the left. In some parts of Germany, the left is the linker, which is now established in eastern Germany and in other places in Germany. in more sort of working class areas of Germany, as the party of the left in other places sometimes. It's the Greens, but the rising force is the IFTA. And Merts' party must start to worry that they're also going to be very soon affected by the squeeze.

The big story in Baden-Weltenberg was the breakthrough by the eye of death. What connection do the Greens have with this affluent area, this affluent constituency? What is the connection there with the Greens? I mean, okay, the German Greens, we're talking Annalina Berbach and Robert Hobbach, so maybe that's the connection. They're more neoliberal neo-Kans than what people picture when they hear the Green Party. This is exactly the sort of place where the Greens would be most likely to do well, I would suggest. I mean, the sort of people who are attracted to the Greens in Germany, and by the way, in Britain as well, are not working class voters or poorer voters.

They are sort of affluent, middle class, progressive voters with progressive social ideas, exactly the sort of people who you tend to find increasingly in the suburbs of affluent cities. they are more concerned about the kind of things that they identify more with the Greens, lifestyle issues and things of that kind. They're not so keen on high taxes, by the way, which working class voters seem to be more willing to accept because, of course, they're working class voters. Higher way, higher taxes tend to be redistributive. And middle class voters who vote green, obviously are not into that kind of redistribution. And of course, the Greens are rigidly Atlanticist, which is what affluent middle-class voters in a place like Baden-Weltenberg, or, by the way, North London also are.

They support NATO, they support the EU, they're hostile to Russia. It's exactly the kind of place, Baden-Vortenberg is exactly the sort of place he'd expect the Greens to do well. So they did. That's why in this region, they are the big beneficiaries on the left. In other regions, in Berlin, for example, it's more likely to be DeLincoln. Would it be fair to say that CDU is getting hit from both sides? Yes. They're losing voters to the Greens, but they're also losing voters support to Avede as well? Yes, they are losing votes.

Now, it's important to say again that they increased their percentage of the vote in this election as compared to 2021. But as I said, 2020 was a particularly bad year for the CDU. And the CDU was clearly in crisis because it was the end of Merkel and all of that. what we are seeing in this election is that this squeeze is now growing. They're losing votes, as you rightly say. I mean, they are probably losing some votes to the Greens. But they are failing to win as many votes from the right in this election as they should have done. the overall story of this election was of a clear swing to the right, which the CDU was still

unable to capitalize on. If they got less than 30% of the vote, 29% of the vote in Barton-Wiltenburg, which is historically a very bad result for them, especially at a time when there is an overall swing to the right. Now, given that the IFDA is now established as a strong political force in Baden-Weltenberg, it means that in a region like this, right-wing voters in Germany now have an alternative to vote for and they can to seriously consider in the future voting for the IFDA instead of the CDU. The people who probably, by the way, got most squeezed by the rise of the IFDA in Baden-Wurttemberg was, were the Social Democrats, the SPD.

The SPD's historic working class vote seems to be shifting completely over to the IFDA. Right. Olaf Schultz is SPD. He did a lot of damage to that. party, all the shorts. Yeah. Well, as I said, it is in terminal decline. I think it's been in terminal decline for a long time, actually.

It propped up Merkel for years, and I think that did an enormous amount of damage. They're now propping up meths, and the working-class voters do not like maths very much. So they are going to a party that... pitches itself towards working class voters that takes a strong line on immigration, by the way, and that sort of thing. And that, of course, that party in Germany at the present time is the IFD. Yeah. I mentioned Porsche and their financial results.

Things are not looking good in the car industry in Germany. And this is before everything that's happened in. in the Middle East. And the situation with oil and gas, and we're just at the beginning, things are going to get a lot worse. So what happens to Mertz? What happens to Germany? Now with everything unfolding in the Middle East, we already know that the EU and Mertz as well are not going to reopen Russian oil. They're not going to remove the sanctions even temporarily for Russian oil in order to remove some of the, the price pressures, the surge in in the price of oil, and gas is all going up. And that's going to affect every economy around the world. It's going to especially affect Europe. It's going to affect Germany, which is already undergoing the industrialization. And yet, Mertz and Ursula, also German, they have no reverse gear. They refuse to temporarily lift sanctions on Russia. now you have the conflict in Ukraine, the sanctions will remain, but probably add more sanctions as

well, that would be my guess. And now you have this catastrophe unfolding in the Middle East with the Strait of Hormuz. Where does Germany go? Well, where does Germany go? It goes straight on with Captain Mouths at the wheel, pressing the accelerator as it moves deeper and faster into deindustrialization and economic crisis and all of that. Because Merz is not going to change course. I mean, he is not somebody who has that kind of ability, that agility, that flexibility to change course. I mean, he's not just somebody who wants to move forward,

but like Ursula, he believes that the right thing for Germany is to go on moving forward. And certainly it's the right. thing for his friends, the people he knows, the various businesses and, you know, the sort of black rocks and law centers and all of that kind of thing, the kind of people that he knows, they want him to continue to move forward along these lines. So what is eventually going to happen? We are seeing in Germany exactly the same process that we're seeing in Britain. So in Britain, we see the establishment parties, the liberal, conservative labor, all fading and fading fast.

We've discussed this in Britain. And the same is now starting to happen in Germany. So a party that we didn't talk about, which is the Free Democrats, the Liberal Party in Germany, which was a absolute central part of the German political system. Again, since the start of the Federal Republic back in the late 40s, It is disappearing. Again, in Baden-Wurttemberg, in this election, where you would have once expected them to do well,

they did terribly. I'm not even sure whether they have a presence now in the regional parliament. So they are disappearing. The SPD is disappearing. It is in terminal decline. The CDU, because it is the establishment party, in Germany, when I say the establishment, because it has very deep roots in Western Germany. I mean, business communities, societies, all kinds of things, all the various networks

that are very much part of the way Germany works have historically been woven around the CDU, its decline is slower. But if it could not capitalize on a big swing to the right in a place like Baden-Vertemberg, at this time, then frankly, with a deeper crisis on its way, things are going to get much worse for it very soon. And one senses that before long, it's going to follow the other two establishment parties. The SB. and the FDP in terminal decline as well. I mean, it is astonishing how fast this is happening to anybody who knows Germany well. Germany, for obvious, historic reasons,

tends to want, Germans want stability. They tend to vote for stability. And again, if you had an understanding of how, of the kind of deep roots in German life that the CDU has had, a bit like the Conservative and Labour parties once upon a time in Britain, but the extent to which so much of German social life

revolves around the CDU, you would know how extraordinary this process is. Merz, Merz, Ursula, Schultz, Berbach, Khabek, the leadership, the present and past leadership they've taken Germany to this mess. But we can see that both in Germany and in Britain, and I've pointed out many times, that socially, these two countries are very similar. In both Germany and in Britain, there is a community of people, a significant one, which considers itself left, which adopts all the progressive agenda, if you like, which is fervidly pro-EU, and their natural home is the Greens. The Greens came out better from the collapse of the Schultz government than all of the other parties,

the SPD and the FDB FDP that formed part of it. And we see that they're still there even as all of the other establishment parties are fading away. Yeah. All right, we will end the video there at durand.orgas.com.

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