Germany's coalition politics strained as compromise becomes a dirty word

The German word Koalitionsverhandlungen, coalition negotiations, used to appear in headlines with the regularity of a heartbeat. It signalled a system working as designed: mainstream parties hammering out agreements, committees scrutinising detail, cabinets balancing competing priorities, and courts standing ready to restrain overreach. That architecture of restraint has underpinned the Federal Republic since 1949. Today it is treated by many as a defect.

A new coalition, old habits

Friedrich Merz took office as chancellor in 2025 after the February general election punished the three parties of Olaf Scholz's traffic light coalition. The Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens had spent years in public combat: the SPD pursuing welfare expansion, the FDP guarding the purse strings, the Greens isolated on climate and social policy. The rupture came when Scholz dismissed his finance minister, Christian Lindner, with what one observer called ostentatious acrimony. Voters delivered a verdict that cleared the way for a two-party CDU-SPD administration.

Yet the culture of disputatiousness survived the change of personnel. Before Merz had even settled into the chancellery, he was being undermined from all sides, including his own parliamentary group. In July, several CDU members of the Bundestag signalled they would vote against a moderately liberal nominee to the Federal Constitutional Court, an unprecedented break with protocol, after a far-right campaign portrayed her as dangerously left-wing. The vote was postponed; the candidate withdrew. The episode suggested a Rubicon had been crossed: the court, long treated as above partisan warfare, had become a target.

The Constitutional Court episode

The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has historically been insulated from daily politics. Judges are elected by a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag and Bundesrat, a requirement that forces consensus. The near-rebellion by CDU deputies in July 2025 broke that understanding. It was driven not by the nominee's qualifications but by a coordinated attack from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and its media allies, who branded her a radical. That a governing party's MPs would entertain blocking a judicial appointment under such pressure alarmed legal scholars and opposition figures alike. Both coalition parties subsequently vowed to behave more responsibly when parliament resumed in September. The test of that promise is ongoing.

Merz himself addressed the tension directly when challenged on television about watering down CDU election promises. "I am no longer the representative of the CDU. I am the representative of the government. And that government is a coalition of two parties," he said. The line was intended as a statement of constitutional realism. In the current climate it sounded to some like an admission of defeat.

Reform agenda drowned out by process stories

Merz promised an "autumn of reforms" and measures are being rolled out. On military service, both coalition partners agree in principle on reintroducing conscription in some form. The disagreement is over the mechanism if voluntary recruitment falls short: a lottery, a selective call-up, or another model. These are technical questions of the sort that once filled committee rooms quietly. Now they generate public rows between senior ministers. The same pattern repeats across policy areas: agreement on direction, argument over detail, and the argument becomes the story.

The shift is not merely stylistic. Social media rewards brevity and bombast. The patient, discreet work of parliamentary committees, once the route to influence, no longer builds a public profile. Politicians calculate that visibility comes from conflict, not compromise. The result is a feedback loop: negotiations are conducted in public, framed as battles, and the inevitable compromises are portrayed as betrayals by both sides. The oxygen required to explain what has actually been achieved is consumed by the spectacle of the fight.

The AfD shadow and the 2026 test

Looming over the coalition's difficulties is the Alternative for Germany. The party remains near its polling highs and faces five state elections in 2026. The most consequential may be in Saxony-Anhalt, where surveys suggest the AfD could win an outright majority, a first for the far right in a western German state since the war. Such an outcome would shatter the postwar taboo against far-right governance and force every other party into previously unthinkable coalition calculations.

The AfD's platform, mass deportations, withdrawal from European integration, dismissal of climate policy, represents a politics of simplification. Complex problems are reduced to single, punitive solutions. That approach finds an echo in the style of Donald Trump, whose return to the White House has reshaped expectations across the democratic world. In German talk shows and newspaper columns, the question is now openly asked: why can Merz not simply bulldoze his agenda, as Trump appears to do, rather than negotiate with the SPD over every line?

Trump's long shadow over Berlin

The comparison to Trump is not merely rhetorical. His first year back in office has demonstrated how quickly norms can collapse when a leader treats institutional constraints as optional. German conservatives who once warned of American excess now envy the speed of executive action across the Atlantic. That envy is dangerous for a system built on the opposite premise: that power must be fragmented, slowed, and shared. The Basic Law was written precisely to prevent the concentration of authority that enabled the catastrophe of the 1930s. Its checks and balances are not obstacles to effective government; they are the substance of democratic legitimacy.

Merz understands this. His career has been spent inside the CDU's institutional wing, not its populist fringe. But he leads a party whose base is drifting rightward, a coalition partner that insists on its own red lines, and an opposition that has no interest in making governance look successful. The "politics of reason" he invoked in his first major speech requires not just policy delivery but a constant, public defence of the method itself. That defence has barely begun.

What the numbers conceal

Beneath the headlines, the coalition has passed legislation. The 2025 budget was approved on schedule. A reform of the skilled immigration law entered force in June. The carbon pricing trajectory was extended. These are not trivial achievements. But they are reported as victories for one side or defeats for the other, never as the routine output of a functioning democracy. The media's frame, and the politicians' own messaging, has made compromise look like capitulation. That framing matters because it shapes what voters believe is possible. If the only legitimate outcome is total victory, coalition government becomes a contradiction in terms.

The Federal Returning Officer's data from the February election shows the CDU/CSU at 28.5 percent, the AfD at 20.8 percent, the SPD at 16.4 percent, the Greens at 11.6 percent, and the FDP below the five percent threshold. No two-party combination except CDU-AfD reaches a majority, and that alliance is ruled out by the CDU's own resolution. The arithmetic forces compromise. The culture increasingly rejects it.