Could Angela Merkel’s return to public life swing the German election?

In any other year, a German general election campaign, still more one in which passions are running as high as they are now, would be attracting a lot more international attention than this one currently is.

For all its recent upsets, Germany remains the biggest, richest country in the European Union, and the complexion of its next government will not only influence the outcome of Europe’s first state-to-state war since 1945, but do much to decide the future course of the continent.

Two weeks before the 23 February vote, however, Europe, like much of the world, is straining to gauge the implications of the stream of orders and policy zigzags emanating from Donald Trump’s White House.

The German political scene was already febrile because of the circumstances in which the election was called. But Germany is now being buffeted as well by the shocks reverberating across the Atlantic, and the outcome of its election now looks considerably less certain than when it was called by chancellor Olaf Scholz in what now seem like the distant days before Christmas.

2025 was always going to be an election year in Germany, but it was scheduled for the autumn. Setbacks for the German economy and the fragility of Scholz’s centre-left coalition government dictated otherwise, however. The coalition collapsed after the finance minister, also head of the free-market FDP party, refused to sign off on the proposed Budget, forcing a no-confidence vote in the Bundestag. As a consequence, the election is taking place more than half a year early, and in the slipstream of Trump’s return to the US presidency.

The dissension that led to the government’s collapse was thought to be opening the way for the opposition centre-right CDU to top the polls and form a new coalition. That may still be the outcome, and it would allow the CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, a veteran politician (and wealthy former corporate lawyer), to realise his longstanding ambition to become chancellor. But his campaign has not been plain sailing, and now – with just two weeks before the vote, and with the first of two televised debates set to take place tonight – the gap has started to narrow.

This is partly because the dynamics of this election are more complex than the rather bland centre-left/centre-right contests that German general elections habitually become. Some of this was foreshadowed in the regional elections held in several eastern regions last autumn, which illustrated the appeal of two non-mainstream parties – the hard-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) and a recently formed party led by Sahra Wagenknecht (the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW), which crosses the left-right divide, broadly combining left-wing economics with right-wing politics.

Both of these parties want far tougher curbs on immigration, and have gained support in the wake of periodic acts of violence committed by recent migrants. But this is not the only source of their appeal. As emerged from the campaigns in the autumn, an almost equal concern among voters is the war in Ukraine, which brings together a number of strands: opposition to the scale of Germany’s financial and military support for Ukraine; calls for Germany to revive its economic links with Russia (in the hope that energy prices would come down); and fears that the conflict could escalate, with risks to peace in the rest of Europe.

A big question in this general election campaign is how far these concerns are replicated in the rest of Germany – in other words, how distinct the eastern constituencies might be from those in the former West Germany, where the electorate has been inclined to eschew extremes.

That Merz and his centre-right CDU have been veering to the right on migration – to the point where they made common cause with the AfD in a recent Bundestag vote, controversially breaking the mainstream “firewall” designed to keep the AfD from power – suggests that they see the further-right as a real threat to their hopes of victory. On the other hand, it could also suggest that they are preparing for the AfD to run them a close second, or even overtake them on the day. And then what?

To have two parties running on an anti-migration, anti-war platform could yet divide the vote and see the centrist parties prevail. The “safe” scenario would be a “grand coalition” between the CDU and Scholz’s centre-left SPD, of the sort that has governed Germany in the recent past. But a really strong showing by the AfD that was not translated into even a share of power could lead to accusations that democracy had been traduced. And there may be an argument that the AfD plus the BSW could be even more dangerous in opposition than when bearing some of the responsibilities of power. A spell of power has, after all, been the undoing of some far-right parties in the past, as their true colours, and capabilities, are exposed.

In recent days, however, the dynamic of the campaign has been upset by a series of interventions that seem not to have been anticipated by anyone, and could work in favour of the outgoing chancellor.

Enter – or rather, re-enter – former chancellor Angela Merkel.

In the years following her retirement from politics (before the 2021 election that brought Scholz and his centre-left coalition into government), Merkel withdrew almost entirely from public life – in part, as she explained, for the solitude she needed to write her memoir. But it was also because Germans themselves seemed to have written her, with almost indecent haste, out of their script. In so far as they mentioned her at all, it was to blame her for years of stagnation and for cosying up to the Russians. Her memoir, a 700-page defence of her policies, titled Freedom, appeared late last year, but her public appearances were still few and far between.

That changed 10 days ago, however, when Merz won a vote on strengthening Germany’s borders with the help of the AfD. In perhaps her most courageous and significant political act since competing for the CDU leadership 25 years ago, Merkel issued a statement condemning Merz’s decision in no uncertain terms, saying that she could not remain silent. In a subsequent interview, she insisted that, “even under difficult conditions”, working with the AfD to win a majority should not be an option.

There has never been any love lost between Merkel and Merz. Disappointed when Merkel won the CDU leadership, Merz chose to bide his time, occasionally sniping from the sidelines, before making his comeback on her departure. But now Merkel is back, and her sudden interjection in this campaign could well remind Germans of better times – times when the economy was solid, when Germany had a presence on the world stage, and there was no costly war on its doorstep. A time, what is more, when no dark clouds of protectionist tariffs threatened from the other side of the Atlantic, or demands for a full 5 per cent of GDP to be spent on defence.

These are all reasons why this election may be more closely fought than it seemed at the outset. Thanks to Trump’s bombastic start at the White House, it will be about even bigger issues – of geopolitics, war and peace, and the nature of Europe – than it might otherwise have been. But it is also shaping up to be about some small things, including unfinished business between the eminences of the CDU, Merkel and Merz.

One way or another, Germans have a lot to think about in the days of campaigning that remain, and they could end up with a government not dissimilar to the one that collapsed so precipitately in what now seems like quite a different age.