The cabinet reshuffle has barely begun, yet it is already a disaster. As matters stand, the game of musical chairs centers on Chancellery chief Thorsten Frei, who is expected to replace Jens Spahn as leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group.
Health Minister Nina Warken is to succeed Frei at the Chancellery. Philipp Amthor, until now a parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization, will also move to the Chancellery to coordinate cooperation between the federal government and the states.
Carsten Linnemann, currently secretary-general of the CDU, is slated to become health minister. Franziska Hoppermann, a CDU lawmaker from Hamburg, is reportedly being considered to succeed him in the party post.
According to several reports, Federal Transport Minister Patrick Schnieder was also expected to lose his job in the cabinet reshuffle. For several hours, financial policy specialist Fritz Güntzler was touted as a possible successor. At 4 a.m., however, he turned the chancellor down by text message.
A chancellor dismissing a minister without first securing the consent of his designated and publicly touted successor may illustrate the chaos of Merz’s leadership better than anything else. Unsurprisingly, the appointment was not confirmed at Merz’s Friday morning press conference.
But the debacle did not end there. Schnieder had already told ministry staff that he was leaving, only to remain in office because no replacement had been found.
On Sunday evening, the publicly humiliated minister finally brought the episode to an end himself. In a post on X, he announced that he had asked the chancellor to prepare his dismissal.
Schnieder said he was drawing the necessary conclusions from the events of recent days while also seeking to end an undignified situation that had made serious work impossible.
Steffen Bilger is now set to become transport minister. He previously served as a parliamentary state secretary at the Transport Ministry.
It was an exceptionally poor start for Friedrich Merz. Instead of the desired sense of renewal, the reshuffle has produced a fiasco within his own cabinet.
The Spahn Fallout
In principle, Jens Spahn’s resignation as parliamentary group leader should have required only one personnel decision: the appointment of his successor.
A fresh face would certainly have been welcome. At the same time, proven competence in managing a parliamentary group as complex as the joint CDU/CSU parliamentary group would have been useful.
Effective parliamentary group leaders were once described as disciplinarians. They were generally experienced, assertive political figures capable of controlling their own ranks and enforcing order.
Their task is to secure parliamentary majorities for the head of government so that votes in the Bundestag do not produce unpleasant surprises. They must also warn the Chancellery in time when proposals cannot command the group’s support.
Political fires must be extinguished before they grow beyond the size of a campfire.
Spahn failed repeatedly in this role. That he has only now been brought down by a debate over surrogacy and forced to resign shows how much leniency he had previously been granted.
He had misjudged the level of support even during the election of the chancellor. Friedrich Merz needed two rounds of voting in the Bundestag to be elected because he failed to secure enough votes from within the CDU/CSU’s own ranks or from its new coalition partner, the SPD.
It was a humiliation from the outset.
Then, last summer, when the Bundestag was due to elect new judges to the Federal Constitutional Court, Spahn failed to grasp the opposition within his own parliamentary group, particularly to the progressive candidate Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, until it was effectively too late to salvage the nomination.
The group ultimately defied its own leader and blocked her appointment.
During the dispute over pension reform and the disproportionate burden placed on younger citizens, opposition led mainly by younger CDU lawmakers had already erupted into a public conflict before it was laboriously contained.
In every case, Spahn cut a pitiful figure at the helm of the CDU/CSU faction.
A parliamentary leader must not discover only on the day of a vote that his lawmakers will refuse to support him. Yet instead of presenting a fresh face for the role, Merz is rearranging his cabinet in a minor castling maneuver.
Never Change a Winning Team
The question remains: If the government has supposedly been as successful as the chancellor recently claimed, why reshuffle the cabinet? After all, the saying goes, “Never change a winning team”.
In reality, the reshuffle amounts to an admission of failure across the board.
Neither the promised “autumn of reforms” last year nor this year’s “spring of reforms” has taken place. The economy is mired in its worst structural crisis in decades. The welfare system has been drained by uncontrolled migration, which is also driving a surge in crime on German streets.
The transformation of intelligence services into secret police forces and the expansion of an informer system through generous funding for left-wing nongovernmental organizations and their reporting centers are increasingly poisoning the social climate.
The energy crisis, with the threat of natural gas shortages next winter and soaring fuel prices, is strangling businesses and households alike.
An unprecedented sense of hopelessness is driving emigration to record levels. Those leaving are mostly young, successful and productive people.
The failure of the Merz government is reflected in opinion polls and public sentiment. Yet instead of prompting a change in policy, it has merely left the chancellor visibly ill-tempered and prone to insulting citizens in interviews.
Merz Moves the Pieces
Merz is now moving a small number of people to new squares rather than attempting a decisive break with the past.
Labor Minister Bärbel Bas, for example, has appeared overwhelmed by the job from her first day in office, yet she is being allowed to remain. The same is true of every SPD minister.
Merz has no authority over them within his own cabinet.
It is an unwritten rule in German coalition governments that neither side chooses who heads the other party’s ministries. Only Lars Klingbeil could have the incompetent labor minister replaced, but doing so could immediately cost him his own position within the party.
Bas enjoys considerably stronger support there than Klingbeil himself.
Whether Thorsten Frei will prove more effective at managing the parliamentary group than he was at running the Chancellery remains an open question. His tenure there was marked by a series of organizational and communication failures.
Frei is respected by his colleagues. He previously served as the parliamentary group’s chief whip, is considered relatively conservative and has distinguished himself mainly through hard-line positions on migration, including a call to abolish the individual right to asylum.
Above all, however, he is regarded as a close confidant of Merz – something Jens Spahn never was.
Nina Warken, who had only just begun to find her feet as health minister and had managed to push through a difficult health care reform, must now leave her post after her first success to run the Chancellery.
It is unclear what qualifies her to run the Chancellery. Instead, attention has focused on the fact that she will be the first woman in the history of the Federal Republic to hold the position.
At least another woman has been promoted.
Carsten Linnemann, her successor at the Health Ministry, possesses considerable expertise in economic policy and was recently involved in the health policy section of the coalition negotiations. He does not, however, have extensive professional experience in health care or nursing policy.
A little more free-market thinking will certainly do the system no harm, but it is no substitute for the expertise required at a time when Germany’s health care system is threatening to implode.
The hospital sector is under enormous pressure as a result of the announced reforms, and numerous hospitals are facing insolvency.
By moving to a ministry, Linnemann will leave an enormous gap in his current role as CDU secretary-general. There is hardly another man in the party who is as respected and popular or who has done as much to hold the internally divided CDU together.
A Little-Known Successor for Linnemann
Franziska Hoppermann, the designated successor to Linnemann as CDU secretary-general, currently represents the Hamburg-Wandsbek constituency in the Bundestag.
Linnemann is exceptionally well connected within the party. He succeeded in keeping the CDU united behind Merz. Unlike the parliamentary group, the party itself functioned.
Given the conflicts between the CDU’s eastern and western regional organizations, particularly over the party’s approach to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), it remains to be seen whether Merz has made a colossal mistake by removing his strongest figure from the party organization.
With Linnemann set to leave, rebellious CDU organizations, particularly in eastern Germany, may now feel free to challenge the party leadership.
Handing the crucial post of secretary-general to a loyal party soldier who has barely developed a national political profile of her own and whose rise has been based primarily on internal party work is, at the very least, a risk.
Hoppermann previously served as the CDU’s federal treasurer and chairs Parliament’s toothless inquiry commission on the coronavirus pandemic. She belongs to the party’s more left-wing section.
Her regional organization, the Hamburg CDU, is more notable for taking part in Pride events than for pursuing distinctly Christian Democratic policies.
Hoppermann has also campaigned actively to raise the profile of queer issues within the CDU and believes that everyone should attend a Pride event at least once in their life.
Merz is therefore consolidating the party’s drift to the left, which he once promised to reverse. The CDU’s eastern organizations are unlikely to regard her as any kind of authority.
A Rebuff for the Chancellor
That leaves the transport minister. Few positions in the cabinet are less attractive.
Germany’s rail system has become synonymous with chaos. Punctuality is an alien concept on German tracks. The shift toward electric mobility, driven by the ban on combustion engines, is as disastrous as the country’s transport infrastructure as a whole.
Merz is said to have been dissatisfied with the current transport minister because, despite billions in new debt earmarked for investment, he had failed to make any visible progress in tackling the country’s infrastructure problems.
Whoever ultimately takes over the ministry will face a near-impossible task.
The problems confronting any transport minister could, of course, be addressed if he could rely on a head of government with the courage and strength to carry out genuine reforms. Güntzler’s decision to turn the chancellor down is therefore understandable.
The crisis at the Transport Ministry reflects the wider failure of the Merz government. The same is true across the cabinet.
Apart from record debt and minor reforms that make matters worse rather than better, this government has achieved nothing.
A Party Running Out of Talent
The restructuring of the cabinet, the parliamentary group leadership and the party is therefore revealed for what it truly is: a minor castling maneuver by a chancellor who feels threatened, is closing ranks further and will consequently continue to offer little in the way of direction or hope.
Merz once boldly proclaimed that “the left is finished”. Yet he simply lacks the strength and courage to make the decisive break that would be required.
The chancellor may not even have suitable personnel at his disposal in a party that was stripped of its Christian Democratic identity during Angela Merkel’s nearly 19 years as party leader.
The autumn storm gathering over Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD may win elections or even secure outright majorities, could bring the hastily assembled party and government structure in Berlin crashing down like a house of cards.