Changing Chancellors

I. The Question

Friedrich Merz has been in office a good year, and in Berlin people are already asking who comes after him. The chancellor's approval ratings have fallen to the lowest level ever measured; the AfD leads the Union in the polls; and in the CDU's senior bodies, according to several media reports, a change still within this legislative period is being weighed in confidential rounds. The favourite is the North Rhine-Westphalian minister-president Hendrik Wüst.

One could now do what the political business always does in such situations: play through the personnel table, weigh the probabilities, estimate the timing. We will not. For “Who comes after Merz, and when?” is the wrong question — and that it is being asked at all, after a single year, is already the answer to another, more important one.

II. The Gallery

We have portrayed the actors one by one over months, and only together do they form a picture. It is always the same picture.

The predecessor: Olaf Scholz, the “demented Scholzomat” — the automaton that neutralises every question without answering it. In 2003 with the sentence “That is the party's position,” two decades later, before the Cum-Ex committee, with the sentence “I cannot remember.” The same structure, different content. An automaton without memory cannot lie — and whoever remembers nothing is responsible for nothing.

The incumbent: Friedrich Merz, whose powerlessness behind the power we have described, as we have the supervisory board chairman in the Chancellery — the long-time BlackRock man who oversees a country instead of leading it. His government address was the speech of an administrator, a programme without a compass: four points into the void. The power he appears to have, he does not have; what he has is an office whose decisions have long been taken elsewhere.

The successors, in so far as they have contour: Jens Spahn, “the end product” of a system that permits ascent without substance — the hollowed-out politician in the hollowed-out state. And Markus Söder, the self-promoter, whom we have described twice: a man who could be many things and has decided to be performance.

Five figures, one pattern. Scholz forgets, Merz oversees, Spahn rises without substance, Söder performs. Not a shaper among them. This is no accident of personnel selection. It is its result.

III. The Missing Colour

That leaves the favourite about whom we have so far written nothing: Hendrik Wüst. And here the pen falters, for there is remarkably little to write. A solid regional father, moderate, calm, strategic; ahead of the chancellor in the popularity rankings, which in the present situation is no high bar. A man without edges, without a programme, without any discernible intention beyond being the next.

One could read this as a gap in our findings. It is the opposite. That almost nothing can be said about the most likely next chancellor is the sharpest statement of all. Colourlessness here is not the deficiency but the qualification.

An apparatus that tolerates no contradiction promotes not the one who wants something but the one who does not give offence. The sieve through which the political class falls does not let the shaper through; it lets through the administrator who replaces the administrator.

Wüst is the favourite not despite his pallor. He is the favourite because of it.

IV. The Artificial Heartbeat

The change that is pending is thus, in truth, no change at all. Scholz, Merz, Wüst — that is not a succession of directions but the swapping of a worn part for a fresh one. The machine runs on; it merely changes the face at its top, the way one replaces a spent component without altering the construction.

We coined this image in “The Artificial Heartbeat”: the teleological certainty of victory of a rigid system is its artificial heartbeat — a beat that sustains the form, not the life. The chancellor-rotation is of the same kind. It simulates political dynamism — look, something is moving, a new man! — while nothing that matters moves. The heartbeat goes on. The heart stands still.

And just as at the European level five leaders hold the levers and none pulls, so in miniature it holds for the Chancellery: it is a matter of indifference who holds the post, because the post no longer contains the power its applicants believe they are striving for. Whoever comes after Merz inherits the same apparatus, the same coalition fetters, the same dependency, the same innovation desert, the same AfD pressure. The change the party can imagine moves entirely within what the problem is.

V. The Forbidden Question

There is therefore a question the whole succession business carefully does not ask, because answering it would end the business. It is not: who comes, and when? It is: can the one who comes still act at all — or only administer?

The who-question is the monstrance of the political business. It is held aloft and venerated, it fills broadcasts and headlines, precisely because it replaces the other question — the question of the what, of the content, of who actually governs, behind the interchangeable faces, for whose benefit. As long as the personnel is disputed, the structure need not be discussed. That is the real function of the personnel debate: it is the busy surface over a standstill.

So someone will come after Merz; perhaps Wüst, perhaps another, sooner or later. It is a matter of indifference. The machine has long since decided not who comes but what comes: an administrator replacing an administrator.

A change of chancellor is not a change of policy. It is the proof that politics can no longer bring one about.

Several of the essays linked above are available in German only; those links lead to the German originals.