The Answer He Owed

I. The sentence

On 9 September 2026, in the first reading of the 2027 federal budget, three days after the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, the Chancellor said something remarkable. He defended the coalition's reform course against the opposition, condemned the „remigration“ propagated by the AfD as ethnic cleansing by origin and skin colour — and then conceded that on the question of what these reforms were for, the coalition and he himself had „perhaps most of all remained in debt“.

The sentence is remarkable because it is true. And because it comes sixteen months late.

II. The result

On 6 September, Saxony-Anhalt elected its ninth state parliament.

The AfD took the highest share any single party has ever won in this state. The CDU halved itself and fell to second place. The FDP failed to clear the threshold.

And one figure stands apart from all the others: turnout was 77.8 per cent. That is the highest ever recorded in a free state election in Saxony-Anhalt; the previous record of 71.5 per cent, set in 1998, was clearly surpassed.

This was not an election of the indifferent.

At federal level in early September the AfD polls between 27 and 29 per cent, the CDU/CSU between 19.5 and 21. At the federal election of February 2025 the CDU/CSU took 28.5 per cent. Sixteen per cent of respondents are satisfied with the Chancellor's work and 81 per cent dissatisfied, by the weighted average of the polling institutes — the lowest figure recorded for a sitting Chancellor since these surveys began in 1998.

On 20 September, Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern vote.

III. The bill and the clerk at the counter

The obvious defence runs: none of it is his doing. What is being charged to him now is not his conduct in office but a bill falling due. Thirty years of municipal substance consumed. An industrial model resting on cheap energy. A system of political selection that for decades has rewarded compatibility rather than results. He stands at the counter where the bill is presented, and he did not write it.

That is correct, and we wrote it down ourselves in February: a German Chancellor is not a ruler but a moderator, bound by coalition, Bundesrat, bureaucracy, European law. The question is not whether he is a good Chancellor, but whether anyone can be a good Chancellor in this system.

But that argument has a weak point, and it belongs here, or else we are writing a licence. If no one is responsible because everyone is merely an executor of the structure, then there is nothing left to criticise. Structural analysis then becomes what it criticises in others: a reading that obliges no one to anything.

IV. Two readings, neither refutable

This becomes visible in a figure who turns up these days in every second conversation: the predecessor.

The first reading: for twenty years she did everything to keep this man away from power, and now even the last hold-out can see it — she was right. The second: precisely because she kept him away, he could never prove himself; she blocked the man who might have saved the situation and at the same time deprived him of every experience he would have needed for it.

Both readings are irrefutable. Every failure feeds one as well as the other. Where two opposite interpretations of the same facts are equally well nourished, neither explains anything — they merely sort out who already disliked whom. It is the same mechanism we observed after the election, this time applied to the past.

What has a true core in the second reading is not the attribution of blame but the finding. The man entered the Chancellery without a single day of executive government experience. No ministry, no state chancellery, no administration. Leading a parliamentary group is parliamentary work, not operational. Supervisory boards ask questions and nod things through; they do not lead.

But that was not one woman's doing. In 2009 he left of his own accord, for business. In December 2018 and again in January 2021 he was beaten by party congress delegates. And the decisive observation is a different one: in none of those years did anyone raise the absence of administrative experience as an objection. It was not a criterion. It still is not.

In January we found an image for this which has since become more accurate than we would have liked: it is as if one made the sports journalist the national coach. He knows every player, every statistic, every tactical system. He has written shrewd commentary for decades. He knows exactly what others are doing wrong. But he never stood on the pitch himself.

The sentence that closed that text ran: Merz is not the problem, Merz is the symptom. Eight months later the symptom-bearer has 43.8 per cent for the AfD and 16 per cent for himself.

V. The tragedy, correctly cut

It is tempting to make a tragedy of this: the hero kept from his work for decades by an evil power, and when at last he arrives at the top he cannot do it, because he was never allowed to learn.

But the witch belongs in the fairy tale. In Greek tragedy the hero does not fall to an external power but to what he brings with him. Oedipus is undone by his own drive to know, not by Teiresias. Whoever wants the tragedy must do without the witch.

And then the figure holds. The hamartia lies not in a person but in a selection procedure that for twenty years asks no one whether he has ever run anything. Such a procedure reliably promotes, in the end, someone who has never run anything — and, this is the genuinely tragic part, someone who did not himself know that anything was missing. How could he. No one ever asked him.

We have named the four criteria of this procedure elsewhere: presence, compatibility, belonging, time. Administrative capability is not among them. The predecessor passed through the same sieve. She is no witch; she is a predecessor in the same apparatus.

VI. What was not blocked

That leaves the question of what he is liable for.

Not for energy prices, not for the social insurance funds, not for municipal finances, not for the condition of the party system. But there is one thing that neither the coalition agreement nor the Bundesrat nor Brussels could take out of his hands: to say what it is all for.

In February we wrote down what a Chancellor in this system could still do, given how little he can do: say honestly what is not possible. Set priorities instead of promising everything at once. Say no. Think beyond his own term.

Sixteen months later he says himself that this is exactly what he remained in debt for.

That is no proof of our cleverness. It is proof that the diagnosis was not difficult. It was merely without consequence.

VII. Too late

In tragedy the moment in which the hero recognises is called anagnorisis. It has one fixed property: it comes too late. The recognition changes nothing; it only makes what has happened legible.

Three days after 43.8 per cent, sixteen months after taking office, in the first reading of a budget still to be fought over, the Chancellor says he remained in debt for the justification. It is the most honest sentence of his term.

We write this on 13 September. A week has passed since the election, four days since the sentence. This coming Sunday, Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern vote.

Eleven days lie between the recognition and the next set of figures. A justification missing for sixteen months will not be supplied in eleven days. That is the whole property of anagnorisis: it makes legible what has happened, and it changes nothing about what happens next.