" CDU : Sehen Sie das auch ? (1)"

Sehen Sie das auch? — the question has finally found its answer Last sunday in Germany led to a catastrophic political decline of Germany’s CDU party and its leader, Friedrich Merz, following devastating regional election losses in September 2026. The text highlights a historic shift where the far-right AfD surged to dominance in Mecklembourg-Poméranie-Occidentale, while the radical left secured significant gains in Berlin. Analysts identify a profound leadership crisis and a lack of empathy as primary causes for Merz’s plummeting popularity and growing isolation within his own coalition. The fallout from these elections has paralyzed the party's internal structure and weakened Germany's diplomatic standing during critical European budget negotiations. Furthermore, the sources explore the broader threat to democratic stability, drawing parallels between Germany’s current fragmentation and the historical collapse of center-right parties in France. Despite calls for a new direction, the party remains in a state of strategic inertia with no clear successor willing to challenge the embattled chancellor. On September 7, Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote that the Federal Republic was no longer “immune” to the AfD. On September 22, the scale of that non-immunity can be measured precisely: an entire Land stripped of CDU representation for the first time since 1949, a federal capital turning left under a candidate who openly invokes Zohran Mamdani, and a chancellor reduced to promising, alone on a stage, “Rückgrat, Standhaftigkeit und Geduld” — a refrain he repeats for the sixth time that day without convincing anyone anymore. Berliner Morgenpost was right too early: it had already named the loser before the full bill had even been presented. What changed between the two elections, then, is not the diagnosis — the German press had already laid it out on September 6 — but the silence surrounding it. The “shadow republic” network, which had been whispering “Sehen Sie das auch?” backstage while dutifully awaiting the verdict of the 20th, has had its answer: yes, everyone sees the same thing. But seeing is not enough to act — and that may be the most striking lesson of this whole sequence: neither Söder, nor Prien, nor the state premiers gathered until midnight at the Rhineland-Palatinate representation have, at this stage, turned recognition into movement. “Es springt eben niemand,” sums up one participant in the weekend’s discussions — no one is willing to jump. It is perhaps there, more than in the results themselves, that what comes next will be decided: caught between Berthold Kohler’s warning of a shift even more “brown” than “blue,” and the CDU’s manifest inability to produce so much as a successor, Germany seems suspended between two vertigos — that of an advancing AfD, and that of a center that can no longer find the strength to reconstitute itself. One last question remains, which this piece leaves deliberately open for the sequel, “Fluctuat et mergitur”: if Germany discovers itself this vulnerable to its extremes, is France — whose electoral system concentrates far more power in the hands of a single man or woman — really any better protected?