Merz courts the AfD voter he spent his career refusing to court

Friedrich Merz opened the campaign season in Saxony-Anhalt and North Rhine-Westphalia the way every chancellor opens a campaign season: with promises, with poll-tested adjectives, and with a wink at voters he spent two decades trying to keep out of his coalition mathematics. On 16 July 2026, Reuters reported that Germany's chancellor is courting former supporters of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) ahead of two regional elections that will redraw the country's electoral map before the federal term is half over.

The move is a confession. Merz's Christian Democratic Union built its post-Merkel identity on a firewall against the AfD, a stance that held through two elections and a brief, fractious coalition experiment with the Greens and the Free Democrats. That firewall is now described as flexible.

The incentives driving the swing are not subtle. On 15 July, Merz publicly stated that US tariffs had "badly damaged" the German economy, a rare admission from a sitting chancellor that the transatlantic relationship has become a cost rather than a cushion. Germany's export-led growth model, built around automotive, chemicals, and capital goods, is taking direct fire from a White House that has spent two years rewriting the terms of trade. Reaching into the AfD's reservoir of disaffected small-business owners, mid-skilled workers, and eastern voters means reaching into the same demographic that has absorbed the tariff shock first and loudest.

The geometry of the regional vote

Saxony-Anhalt and North Rhine-Westphalia are not interchangeable. Saxony-Anhalt is eastern, small, and historically the AfD's friendliest terrain in the old Länder; the party has polled in the high twenties there for years. North Rhine-Westphalia is the largest state by population, industrial heartland, and the kind of place where a CDU campaign traditionally leans on competent administration rather than culture-war signalling. Merz has to win, or at least not collapse, in both. Reuters' reporting frames the AfD appeal as the central tactical variable in both contests.

The implication is straightforward. A CDU that needs AfD-adjacent votes cannot govern with a cordon sanitaire in the Bundestag. Either the firewall returns as soon as the regional votes are counted, exposing the courtship as pure instrumentalism, or it erodes permanently and German coalition arithmetic shifts for a generation. There is no third option that survives contact with voters who remember the promises.

The tariff shock that broke the consensus

For decades the German political class treated the US relationship as exogenous: a given, like gravity. US troops stationed in Germany, US intelligence sharing, US gas purchases, US customers for BMWs and BASF intermediates, all wrapped in a security architecture that produced a quietly gigantic commercial surplus for Berlin. That consensus is no longer standing. Merz's own framing, that tariffs have done real damage, is the first time a CDU chancellor has publicly broken with the assumption that the bilateral relationship is a net positive under any Republican administration.

The numbers behind the rhetoric are doing the work. The German auto sector has lost pricing power in its largest export market. Chemical exports have rerouted around tariff walls at higher cost. The mid-cap industrial base, the Mittelstand that German chancellors of every party genuflect toward, is reporting order-book softness that maps directly onto the tariff timeline. None of this makes the AfD argument correct, but it makes it legible to voters who never read FAZ and never will.

What the opposition says, and what it doesn't

The AfD's response to Merz's overture has been, predictably, dismissive. The party has spent years branding the CDU as a tired establishment incapable of serious change, and a chancellor's pre-election pivot is exactly the kind of attention they were built to attract. That does not mean the votes are not there to be peeled. Germany's party system is now operating in a space where the centre-right's instinct for coalition discipline and the populist right's instinct for cultural grievance are both answering to the same disgruntled voter.

The left of the political spectrum, the SPD, the Greens, and the Linke, has a simpler story to tell: Merz is normalising a party with documented ties to networks that German courts and intelligence services have flagged. That story is electorally weaker in 2026 than it was in 2021. Voters who once found the AfD disqualifying on principle are now weighing principle against the price of diesel and the trajectory of their wages.

The structural read

What is happening in German politics this July is the domestic face of a wider rebalancing. The post-1990 settlement, in which Germany embedded its prosperity inside a US-led security and trade order and exported the returns, is being repriced. The repricing shows up in the Bundestag as a debate about whom to govern with, and in the chancery as a debate about how loudly to complain about Washington. Merz is doing both at once, which is why the contradictions feel unusually exposed.

The firewall question is, finally, a question about whether the German centre is willing to bear the cost of its own coherence. If it is, the AfD stays outside, the coalitions stay narrow, and the country's economic trajectory runs through whatever is left of the old trade relationship. If it is not, then the AfD enters the executive tier at state level first, federal level later, and a different Germany takes shape in the 2030s. Merz is not deciding that question alone. He is signalling which way he would prefer it to fall.

What remains genuinely uncertain is whether the AfD-adjacent voter trusts the courtship. German political memory of Wende conversions is long, and the party's base has been trained to treat CDU attention as a trap. The September state votes will produce a cleaner answer than any poll this summer can offer.

This piece treats the AfD as a domestic political actor competing inside a democratic system; the question at stake is coalition geometry, not regime legitimacy.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• http://reut.rs/4yqMLNf
• https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Saxony-Anhalt_state_election
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_North_Rhine-Westphalia_state_election