Merz has spent recent months trying to lock in reform agreements within his coalition ahead of parliament’s summer recess, beginning Friday — and ahead of September’s state elections in eastern Germany, where the AfD is close to capturing at least one state parliament. The goal is to show German voters that his ideologically-divided coalition of conservatives and center-left Social Democrats is dynamic enough to make the hard choices needed to turn things around.
“Time and again, I hear the accusation that the political center isn’t delivering, that it only obstructs and blocks its own progress,” Merz said during a speech in Germany’s Bundestag on Thursday. “Let me respond in no uncertain terms: The center does deliver,” he added.
“The answers offered by radical parties — whether from the left or the right — may sound tempting, but they do not build, they destroy,” Merz went on. “They divide our country and, should they assume political responsibility in Germany, would lead it into the abyss.”
By some measures, the chancellor has been notably successful. Coalition leaders have in recent weeks struck agreements on a series of overhauls to the pension, tax and health insurance schemes meant in large part to bring down costs for employees, reforms business leaders have long demanded to make the country more economically competitive.
Many of the changes represent the kind of grinding overhauls previous governments have avoided because they involve unpopular measures like increasing the retirement age and cutting some health insurance benefits, and in that sense, they are arguably the stuff of mundane, responsible governance.
But to many voters and some business leaders, the measures come across as incremental and anemic — hardly the kind of soaring promise of change that would stop the far right, which, unburdened by the realities of governing, is promising to bring political revolution to Germany.