• Login
  • Register
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Premium
  • Donate
  • Log In
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result

Merz Once Promised to Cut AfD Support in Half. He Has Doubled it Instead

by Eugyppius
22 April 2025 7:00 PM

Many years ago – in 2018, to be precise – a man named Friedrich Merz was in the running to succeed Merkel as chairman of the CDU.

Merz said many interesting things back then. On November 14th 2018, for example, he gave an interview to BILD, in which he denounced Alternative für Deutschland as a party “that does not distance itself from the Right” and said that “this makes it unsuitable for any coalition”. Merz pledged to win back all the CDU voters who had defected to the AfD over the years. “In the short term,” he said, “it will probably be impossible to get rid of the AfD,” but if he were chosen to succeed Merkel, he pledged that he could “cut their support in half”.

The very next day he tweeted the exact same thing – promising to lead the CDU back to 40% in the polls and to “halve the AfD”.

At a regional CDU conference around this time, Merz yet again promised to “cut the AfD in half”, adding that “this really is possible”. If I looked harder, I could probably find even more examples of Merz repeating this exact same promise. He made it such a core component of his campaign for the party chairmanship that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed in retrospect: “The whole idea of Merz as party chairman was based on the notion that he would win back votes that Angela Merkel had lost.”

While Merz was making all of these lofty promises, the AfD was polling around 13%, at least according to Forsa:

Half of 13 is 6.5, and so we can say that in 2018, Merz was promising to make the AfD a 6.5% party. Alas, Merz was not elected chairman of the CDU in 2018, so nobody quite got around to halving the AfD. The office went first to the absurdly named if otherwise forgettable Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. The AfD indeed took a hit on Kramp-Karrenbauer’s watch, but that had everything to do with Covid and nothing to do with this particular pinched woman. Next to the chairmanship came the plump and ineffectual Armin Laschet, who likewise failed to make the AfD a 6.5% party, although the man did have a hand in halving support for his own party, which is something I guess.

Anyway, since late 2021 Merz has been the CDU Chairman, and I have noticed a funny thing about his statements in this period. For some reason Merz has altogether ceased pledging to cut AfD support in half. All of those words from 2018 – they are just totally forgotten now. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the more German voters learn about Merz, the further Merz slips from his goal of driving the AfD into that promised irrelevance.

Today, Germany achieved a significant milestone in this regard. After six weeks in which Merz has trashed every last campaign promise he made while also promising to make everything vastly more expensive in hopes of slightly altering the composition of atmospheric gases, the AfD polled not at half of their 2018 numbers, but at double them.

The latest Forsa poll (conducted for RTL and ntv) has Alternative für Deutschland at a cool 26%. That is its best result in history, and it makes it the strongest party in the Federal Republic. This is the second such poll that places AfD in first place, following an Ipsos survey from April 9th that pegged it at 25%.

Bild

Merz has indeed done something to AfD support involving the operand of two. It’s just not exactly what he imagined.

Now all of that rhetoric we one once heard from the cartel parties – about the importance of dealing with the AfD on the issues and of making convincing appeals to the “democratically inclined” among AfD voters – has become yesteryear’s pablum. Nobody cares about that anymore. Because they can’t beat AfD on the issues and AfD voters are never coming back, they’re going to try to ban the AfD now instead. A lot of these people truly believe that Germans shouldn’t be allowed to cast their votes beyond the narrow confines of the political cartel that runs the Federal Republic, so they’ll try to try to remove the opposition from the board entirely, via legal trickery.

It’s coming, and I’ll write more about that tomorrow.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.

Tags: AfDDemocracyFriedrich MerzGermanyMass immigration

Donate

We depend on your donations to keep this site going. Please give what you can.

Donate Today

Comment on this Article

You’ll need to set up an account to comment if you don’t already have one. We ask for a minimum donation of £5 if you'd like to make a comment or post in our Forums.

Sign Up
Previous Post

Reeves Cannot Blame Trump for British Growth Downgrade, Says IMF

Next Post

News Round-Up

Subscribe
Login
Notify of
Please log in to comment

To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.

Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.

8 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

NEWSLETTER

View today’s newsletter

To receive our latest news in the form of a daily email, enter your details here:

DONATE

PODCAST

Episode 36 of the Sceptic: Karl Williams on Starmer’s Phoney Immigration Crackdown, Dan Hitchens on the Assisted Suicide Bill and Tom Jones on Reform’s Local Council Challenge

by Richard Eldred
16 May 2025
0

LISTED ARTICLES

  • Most Read
  • Most Commented
  • Editor’s Picks

Chinese ‘Kill Switches’ Found in US Solar Farms

15 May 2025
by Will Jones

News Round-Up

16 May 2025
by Richard Eldred

Spy Agency Report on the Alleged “Extremism” of AfD Turns Out to Be So Stupid That it Destroys all Momentum for Banning the Party

16 May 2025
by Eugyppius

The Folly of Solar – a Dot on the Horizon Versus a Blight on the Land

16 May 2025
by Ben Pile

Civil Servants Threaten to Strike Over Trans Ban in Women’s Lavatories

16 May 2025
by Will Jones

The Folly of Solar – a Dot on the Horizon Versus a Blight on the Land

29

Civil Servants Threaten to Strike Over Trans Ban in Women’s Lavatories

25

Spy Agency Report on the Alleged “Extremism” of AfD Turns Out to Be So Stupid That it Destroys all Momentum for Banning the Party

19

News Round-Up

18

Chinese ‘Kill Switches’ Found in US Solar Farms

27

Trump’s Lesson in Remedial Education

16 May 2025
by Dr James Allan

Spy Agency Report on the Alleged “Extremism” of AfD Turns Out to Be So Stupid That it Destroys all Momentum for Banning the Party

16 May 2025
by Eugyppius

The Folly of Solar – a Dot on the Horizon Versus a Blight on the Land

16 May 2025
by Ben Pile

Renaud Camus on the Destruction of Western Education

15 May 2025
by Dr Nicholas Tate

‘Why Can’t We Talk About This?’

15 May 2025
by Richard Eldred

POSTS BY DATE

April 2025
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930  
« Mar   May »

SOCIAL LINKS

Free Speech Union
  • Home
  • About us
  • Donate
  • Privacy Policy

Facebook

  • X

Instagram

RSS

Subscribe to our newsletter

© Skeptics Ltd.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Premium
  • Donate
  • Log In

© Skeptics Ltd.

wpDiscuz
You are going to send email to

Move Comment
Perfecty
Do you wish to receive notifications of new articles?
Notifications preferences