Chancellor Merz Learns the Lesson of Lot’s Wife

Either Chancellor Friedrich Merz is a gifted actor, or he truly didn’t see the shellacking of his party coming in Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt state election. Alternative für Deutschland took nearly 44 percent of the vote, finishing more than 25 points ahead of Mr. Merz’s Christian Democratic Union, which collapsed to its worst state result in the party’s postwar history. Mr. Merz called the defeat a shock that shook his party “to its very foundations.”No one watching German politics, the German economy, or German streets over the last decade was as shocked as he was. In 2024 the AfD won large shares of the vote in eastern state elections and came in second in European Parliament elections. The rightist party was the second-highest vote-getter in the 2025 federal elections and has won popularity in western states as well. Turnout in Saxony-Anhalt topped 74 percent, the highest for a state election there in decades. Fifty-two percent of young men in the region voted for AfD. Germans were showing up to say something that they have been trying to say for some time and Mr. Merz hasn’t been hearing. They want what AfD is promising: Major reversals in migration policy, a loosening of ties with Brussels, and an end to the climate regime’s control over German economic growth.Mr. Merz delivered a speech in March about returning 80 percent of the country’s Syrians to their homeland, Then he backtracked when his Syrian “partners” balked at the proposal. In 2025 Germany’s federal government spent an estimated $26.5 billion on migrants and refugees. When state and local bills are included, the total approaches $42.5 billion.Chancellor Merz watched as the climate-regulation cult increased energy prices and deindustrialized Germany. Volkswagen cut tens of thousands of German jobs and is planning to stop production at four domestic plants. Chemical giant BASF is increasing investments in Communist China, and Dow is closing locations in the east. National crude steel production has decreased. In a speech last November Mr. Merz said, Germany “stands by national and European climate targets.”The chancellor is a smart man with a big blind spot. He likely missed the AfD wave right in front of him because he is still looking back, fixated on Germany’s past. Shame and guilt over the horrors of World War II and the ideology that produced them have fashioned a generation of German leaders who govern as though they are in a perpetual state of atonement. Their suicidal policy choices are framed as collective redemptive acts, and they make Nazis of those who refuse to play along.That hasn’t worked. Mr. Merz, and many others, have pointed to comments by AfD members that criticize the centrality of Holocaust remembrance as a national psychological burden, and to other comments that minimize the responsibility of members of the Nazi-era SS. One AfD state leader has twice been convicted for using the banned Nazi slogan “Alles für Deutschland,” or “Everything for Germany.”Yet, even as questions about the failure of some AfD members to fully distance themselves from the rhetoric of the Nazi era persist, they don’t seem to be getting in the AfD’s way. A younger generation of Germans seems responsive to the AfD’s framing of its messaging as a rejection of the idea of generational guilt and shame, Mr. Merz has learned. AfD’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, is also a gay woman raising children with a Sri Lankan-born partner. It’s hard to attach her to Hitler and his racial purity laws. Calling her party’s opposition to unfettered migration xenophobic rather than rational looks very 1945 in the eyes of today’s 25-year-old German voter who can’t walk safely through certain areas of town at night. Rejecting all nationalist impulses as gateway drugs to National Socialism is a trauma response, not a reasonable reaction. Mr. Merz has understood none of this. Like the wife of Lot, who, in Genesis, was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked backward at the destruction of her city rather than forward at her future. One doesn’t need to take the metaphor too far. Just that Mr. Merz has been gazing in the wrong direction. As he dwells on what was, Germans are looking for leadership that focuses on what’s next.The chancellor may not be that guy. Mr. Merz refuses to resign and supports a coalition “firewall” against AfD that would prevent it from governing. A fellow CDU minister, Hendrik Wüst, floated the idea of a “working group” to explore banning the AfD outright. Who would be shocked if a European nation used anti-democratic tactics to “protect democracy” from a party that has been branded the new Third Reich?

Chancellor Merz Learns the Lesson of Lot’s Wife

Chancellor Merz Learns the Lesson of Lot’s Wife

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