Merz Attacks Political Extremes for Fueling Division Amid Coalition Talks

Friedrich Merz stood before the Bundestag on Wednesday with a diagnosis and an accusation. Germany's chancellor warned that a widening chasm between generations threatened the country's future—younger people, he said, faced an unfair burden unless the government moved swiftly to reform pensions, care systems, and labor markets. But his real target was not demographic arithmetic. It was the political extremes he said were deliberately stoking division to gain power from chaos.

Merz named them directly: the far-right Alternative for Germany and the socialist Left Party. Both, he argued, were spreading disinformation, downplaying Russian aggression, and seeking to exploit legitimate grievances for their own advantage. "One gets the impression that you want chaos because you hope to gain political advantage from it," he told lawmakers. The chancellor acknowledged that extremist movements could draw real support from genuine dissatisfaction—but he framed the answer as constructive governance, not the destructive politics of exclusion he said the extremes embodied.

The timing of Merz's speech was pointed. In the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD had won a landslide in recent elections, an unlikely alliance was taking shape. The AfD and the BSW—a newer party mixing left-wing economics with right-wing populism on immigration and Russia—had joined forces to pass a motion calling for an end to arms deliveries to Ukraine and the lifting of sanctions against Russia. The motion itself carried no legal weight; such decisions rest with the federal government and the European Union. But observers read it as a signal of deeper cooperation between two parties from opposite ideological poles, united by opposition to Ukraine support.

Merz used his address to directly rebut this line of argument. He rejected accusations from both the far right and far left that aid to Ukraine was draining resources from social spending. "Not a single euro is missing from social spending," he told parliament. The government, he explained, was using an exemption from Germany's constitutional borrowing limits to finance defense and Ukraine assistance through additional credit, keeping welfare spending intact.

While Merz spoke in Berlin, coalition negotiations were quietly moving forward in the capital itself. Talks between the Left Party, the Greens, and the Social Democrats had stalled on Tuesday after the SPD and Greens raised concerns about the Left's commitment to an antisemitism charter the three parties had signed the previous week. The charter reaffirmed Israel's right to exist and opposition to antisemitism—preconditions the Greens and SPD had set before even beginning exploratory talks. The Left had won the Berlin state elections with 25.7 percent of the vote, making it the largest party, but its often critical stance toward Israel had created friction.

By Wednesday, the impasse had broken. Elif Eralp, the Left's parliamentary group leader, confirmed that her party would include the joint antisemitism declaration in any coalition agreement. "We met the Greens and SPD today and had a good and open conversation. We agreed that the misunderstandings between us have been cleared up," she said. The SPD's Steffen Krach confirmed the Left's leadership had reaffirmed its position. Exploratory talks were set to resume the following day to tackle what Eralp called "the central challenges of our wonderful city."

The contrast was stark: in the east, far-right and populist parties were coordinating against Ukraine. In Berlin, three parties with deep ideological differences were working through disagreement to build a governing coalition. Merz's speech seemed designed to frame the choice before German democracy—between those willing to govern across difference and those seeking to profit from division. Whether that framing would hold as the country moved toward its own federal coalition negotiations remained to be seen.