Life After Merkel - the 2021 Federal Elections and Germany’s Changing Party System
| Author | Charles Lees |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/20419058211022930 |
4 POLITICAL INSIGHT • JUNE 2021
Angela Merkel has been the
most influential political figure
in the political life of Germany
over the last two decades.
Germany’s eighth and to date only female
Chancellor, referred to by friends and
foes alike as Mutti or ‘Mother’, has seen
off all her political rivals. Since 2015, she
has been the architect of four successive
Federal election victories for the electoral
alliance between her Christian Democratic
CDU and its Bavarian sister party the CSU.
Merkel’s successful strategy of ‘asymmetric
demobilisation’, in which the CDU-CSU
moved on to political terrain that had
previously been associated with the centre-
left, starved the Social Democratic SPD of
political oxygen and hastened its decline,
particularly during the periods of Grand
Coalition government between 2005-2009,
2013-2017 and 2017 to the present. It is
only in the last few years that the centre-
left opposition has begun to mount a
serious electoral challenge to the CDU-CSU,
but it is the Greens rather than the SPD that
are leading the charge towards election
day on 26 September.
Merkel also became the dominant figure
in European politics and, during the Trump
years, was lauded by many as the last hope
As Angela Merkel steps down, Charles Lees surveys the German
political scene and finds a party system in a state of flux with
everything to play for ahead of September’s key elections.
Life After
Merkel – the
2021 Federal
Elections and
Germany’s
Changing
Party System
of the liberal rules-based international
order. Yet, in her final months in office,
Merkel’s achievements appear surprisingly
impermanent. The election of Joe Biden as
US President has reasserted Washington’s
leadership on the global stage and Biden’s
brave and ambitious domestic reform
package has, for many observers, starkly
exposed the anaemic conservatism and
timidity of the European political class over
which Merkel has held such sway. At home,
Germany’s initially impressive response to
the COVID pandemic has been tarnished
by muddle and confusion earlier this
year, particularly around the AstraZeneca
vaccine and the vaccine roll-out more
generally. The CDU-CSU are struggling in
the polls and their chosen candidate for
Chancellor, Armin Laschet, has, so far, failed
to cut through with the electorate ahead
© HANNIBAL HANSCHKE / Alamy Stock Photo
Political Insight June 2021 BU.indd 4Political Insight June 2021 BU.indd 4 12/05/2021 15:3312/05/2021 15:33
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