Economy, social, immigration: the German conservatives, favorites to win the February legislative elections, unveiled a resolutely right-wing program on Tuesday, presenting themselves as the antithesis of Chancellor Scholz’s social democrats.
“Our electoral program is the counter-project of the (outgoing, editor’s note) government which has failed,” said the leader of the German opposition, Friedrich Merz, president of the CDU since 2022 after a career as a business lawyer.
“Continuing like this is not an option,” he added, criticizing the policies of the former center-left coalition.
However, in view of the polls, the most likely government scenario is an alliance between the conservatives led by Mr. Merz, and the social democrats of Olaf Scholz who lost on Monday, as he expected, the confidence of the deputies , paving the way for an early vote on February 23.
If they want to jointly lead Europe’s largest economy, threatened with recession for the second year in a row, the two camps will have to soften their positions, otherwise they risk seeing their discussions to form a government drag on.
The task promises to be difficult: the measures presented by Mr. Merz and his Bavarian CSU ally, Markus Söder, mark a break with the centrist path followed by Angela Merkel, former head of the CDU, during her sixteen years at the head of Germany.
And for its part, the SPD of the very unpopular Olaf Scholz is making a turn to the left hoping to regain the favor of voters, by posing as the champion of a protective social state for the most vulnerable.
To revive the German economy, conservatives want to make “hard work worth it again”, promising tax cuts for those in work and those who earn the most.
– Against debt “magic potion” –
They want to unravel the citizens’ allowance (Bürgergeld), the flagship reform of the Scholz government benefiting the long-term unemployed, considered too costly and which would not encourage people to return to work.
The Social Democrats, for their part, promise to increase the minimum wage to 15 euros per hour, compared to 12.82 in 2025. They also want to make canteens free in all kindergartens and schools.
Clearly opposing a relaxation of debt rules advocated by Mr. Scholz to make investments to revive the economy, the conservatives warn: “debts are not a magic potion with which to solve problems” .
They plead for maintaining the debt brake, a mechanism anchored in the constitution which caps new debts, while the social democrats, on the other hand, want to reform it “moderately”.
If they are angry against the SPD, the conservatives are even more so against the environmentalists of the current Minister of the Economy Robert Habeck, candidate for the chancellery.
The Greens are going “even further on the path to high taxation and high debts,” asserted Mr. Merz. “This is not our policy,” he said, concluding that they were thus moving away “from any possibility of cooperation” with the conservative camp to govern the country.
– “It’s woke, it’s genre” –
On immigration, the CDU/CSU alliance takes a “hard line”, as Bavarian tenor Markus Söder underlined.
Promising a policy of “law and order”, which will be “neither left, nor woke, nor gendered”, Mr. Söder called on voters who would be tempted by the extreme right not to not vote for the AfD, currently credited with second place in the polls. “It’s not an alternative,” he said.
On energy, the conservatives want to keep the possibility of relaunching nuclear power, while the last atomic power plants in the country were closed in spring 2023 by the Scholz government.
It is on foreign policy that social democrats and conservatives could most easily come together: they advocate a lasting maintenance of defense spending at at least 2% of GDP, in accordance with NATO’s ambitions, and support for Ukraine for as long as necessary.
The SPD rejects the idea of delivering long-range Taurus missiles to kyiv, while the conservatives do not mention them in their program, even if Mr. Merz had previously said he was in favor of it.
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