The Scapegoat

I. The situation

On 20 September 2026 the CDU failed, with 4.9 per cent, to enter the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern — the first time in the history of the Federal Republic that the party has missed a state parliament altogether. The AfD took 38.2 per cent, more than doubling its 2021 result. In Berlin, on the same day, the CDU lost 9.5 points and finished third with 18.8 per cent, behind the Left Party. Two weeks earlier the AfD had come close to an absolute majority in Saxony-Anhalt.

Since then a debate has been running inside the Union that its own people have reduced to a formula: prop him up or bring him down. The chancellor has declared that he will stay in office and continue his reform programme. The opposition calls for his resignation, his own party discusses a change at the top, and the international press is already writing about the power vacuum that would follow.

The thesis of this text: a change of chancellor would now be the greatest mistake. Not because the chancellor is particularly good, but because he is not the problem.

II. What a scapegoat achieves

Leviticus describes how the high priest lays the sins of the people on the head of the goat and sends the animal into the wilderness. The people remain as they were, but they feel relieved. The rite is so old because it works: it shifts responsibility onto a creature that cannot carry it, and spares everyone else the examination of their own share.

That is exactly what toppling a chancellor achieves. Afterwards the pension gap is unchanged, energy prices are unchanged, the building code has not lost a chapter, and the number of approval steps for a wind turbine is the same. What has changed is a name.

III. The count

The Federal Republic is seventy-seven years old and has had ten chancellors. In the last five years the government has changed twice and there has been one early election. Anyone who regards a change of personnel as a remedy for structural problems would have to explain why the problems have grown with each change rather than shrunk.

Italy has run this experiment more thoroughly: some seventy governments since 1946. The country has not solved any of its structural problems that way; it has only learned to live without their solution.

IV. Where the causes lie

The election results in eastern Germany are not an answer to sixteen months of government. They are the bill for forty years, and it contains items no federal government caused on its own: regions without a doctor, without a shop, without a bus, where the state has withdrawn and people have noticed that nobody needs them. An industry whose business model rested on cheap energy and open markets, both of which are gone. An administration that deposits regulations like sediment, each with good reason, together a rock. And an experience built up over decades: that elections change names and nothing else.

Anyone who takes this seriously sees at once that an eleventh chancellor changes none of it as long as the conditions remain.

V. The crash course

Whoever enters this office brings with him what he has learned before. A parliamentary group leader learns to organise majorities. A supervisory board member learns to read balance sheets. A lawyer learns to argue a position. None of this prepares anyone to govern a country in which every decision has to be coordinated with sixteen states, two coalition partners, twenty-five other governments in Europe and an administration older than any government.

With this chancellor the distance between prior experience and office was greater than with any of his predecessors. For twelve years he was not in the Bundestag at all, but in business, on supervisory and advisory boards. When he returned he led a parliamentary group for three years, and then took over an office for which none of that had prepared him. None of his predecessors came from so far away.

The first months were therefore a series of corrections. The most visible: the debt brake, against whose loosening he had campaigned, was opened for defence and infrastructure a few weeks after the election. Those who call this a broken promise are right. Those who call it the insight that the situation differs from the slogan are also right.

This is where the readings part. One says: the man is unreliable, he says one thing before the election and does the opposite afterwards. The other says: in sixteen months he has learned what twelve years outside politics could not teach him — how little a chancellor can achieve alone, and how much of what he took from the outside for hesitancy is in truth complexity.

Both readings rest on the same events. The second, however, has a practical consequence the first does not: whoever has learned can apply what he learned.

VI. From the state chancellery to the federal one

The successors being discussed are minister-presidents. There are good reasons for that. Whoever has governed a state brings what an opposition leader lacks: he has run an administration, been responsible for budgets, managed crises and learned that years can pass between announcement and execution. Such a chancellor would indeed have better starting conditions than the present one had.

But what follows is not what is being assumed. More than one step lies between the two offices. A minister-president negotiates with the federal government and fifteen colleagues; a chancellor negotiates with Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Paris, Warsaw and Brussels — in a situation in which the European security order no longer holds, the most important ally has become unpredictable, and war is being waged on the Union’s eastern border. A minister-president can be wrong about foreign policy without consequences. A chancellor cannot.

German history offers examples both ways. Helmut Kohl came from Mainz and became the chancellor of unification. Kurt Georg Kiesinger came from Stuttgart and remained an episode. A good minister-president does not automatically become a good chancellor.

The calculation therefore looks different from the way the debate presents it. On one side stands someone who has the crash course behind him. On the other, someone who would have better starting conditions but the same course still ahead of him, and with less time. Whoever believes that a change brings a finished chancellor confuses experience in a state chancellery with experience in the office.

VII. The streetlight

In “Under the Streetlight” we described why a state searches where the light is: the angry citizen posting under his real name is easy to find, the methodical opponent stays below the threshold. The same holds for the search for those to blame for the country’s condition. The chancellor is brightly lit, has a face and a name, and can be removed. The causes lie in the dark, are numerous and have no address.

That is why he is found. Not because he is the cause, but because he is findable. He carries his share like many others; for decades he has belonged to the political class whose omissions this text describes. The only difference is that he now carries his share visibly, while the others shift theirs onto him.

VIII. Everyone optimises for himself

In “The Legal Expropriation” we showed how an outcome arises that nobody wanted, because every participant did the sensible thing for himself. The present process follows the same mechanism. For a state party leader the chancellor is an explanation for his own poor result. For a successor-in-waiting the crisis is the opportunity he has been waiting years for. For the coalition partner a weakened chancellor is leverage. For the opposition his resignation is a success that costs nothing. And for the press his fall is a better story than the pension formula.

None of these actors is behaving unreasonably. Together they produce an outcome that benefits each of them and the country not at all.

IX. What a change actually costs

Three things that are not matters of opinion. Time: electing a chancellor, forming a government and settling in cost months — the very months still available for governing before the next federal election. Burden of proof: if a chancellor falls because his party lost state elections, a standard has been set; every successor then governs subject to the next state election. Confirmation: the party profiting from the situation receives proof that its pressure works, without having taken responsibility anywhere.

The third weighs heaviest. An AfD that has brought down a chancellor without governing itself is stronger than one that has not managed it.

X. What speaks against this argument

There are serious objections, and they should not be swept aside.

Any change of course can be read as learning and any broken promise as insight. That is precisely what makes the argument in section V dangerous: it can be applied to any office-holder and cannot be refuted as long as no standard is named. The standard is simple: learning shows itself when someone names his revision and gives reasons for it instead of denying it. Whoever silently does the opposite of what he promised has not learned; he has merely changed direction.

Second, the chancellor has made mistakes for which he alone is responsible. Whoever squanders trust does not win it back through policy. The charge that his person has itself become an obstacle is not absurd.

Third, “the system is to blame” is an argument that can be used for anything. If no one can be removed for failure any more, responsibility disappears. Whoever declares changes of personnel pointless in principle ends up defending every office-holder.

Fourth, clinging to office can do damage too. If a government only administers because its head no longer carries, that prolongs the very condition one wanted to end.

The thesis is therefore not that the chancellor is irreplaceable. It is that the timing and the occasion are wrong. Whoever topples him now does so not because a better course stands ready, but because someone is to atone for election results.

XI. How this essay could be refuted

The thesis would be refuted if someone could name a successor who stands for a different course and has a majority for it. So far no such candidate is visible; the debate is about persons, not directions. It would be weakened if it could be shown that changes of government in comparable situations led to measurable changes of course. And it would fall if the chancellor were making the same mistakes in substance today as a year ago, for then the crash course would have achieved nothing.

XII. What would have to be done

The question is not who governs, but whether governing happens at all. Three test cases by which one can tell in twelve months whether anything has changed: is the number of regulations falling or rising? Is the time a business needs from idea to permit getting shorter? Is anything returning to the abandoned regions that had disappeared from them — a doctor, a shop, a bus line?

None of these questions has anything to do with the person at the top. That is precisely why the talk is about the person.

The goat is sent into the wilderness, the people breathe easier, and next year another goat will be needed.