The controversy began in May 2024, when Accurso announced a fundraiser for children in Gaza and other war zones. This prompted a wave of intense pro-Israel criticism that surprised and rattled her. But in a tearful video posted to Instagram, she reasoned that the public disapproval was a small price to pay for using her massive platforms to speak about the toll Israel’s offensive has taken on children.

Thereafter, Accurso’s social media feeds started to intersperse nursery rhymes with statistics on the rate of child death, amputation, and malnutrition in Gaza. For the last year, she has continued to post about the conditions Palestinian children face to an audience of fifteen million on YouTube and ten million across TikTok and Instagram. These posts, which appear alongside potty training tips and phonics lessons, eschew geopolitical opinion for universalist moral appeals like “We can’t let children starve. That’s not who we are” and “We all know not to bomb and kill and starve children.” It’s a stark indicator of our times that pro-Israel forces so strenuously disagree.

Accurso has defended her advocacy as an expression of concern for “all children, in every country. Not one is excluded” and has also addressed famine in Sudan. She told the Independent that her pathos was initially summoned by a video of a Palestinian child in shock after an Israeli air strike.

“The look in his eyes has stayed in my mind since I saw the video,” she said. “No child should experience that kind of fear, shock, and terror.” In response to the backlash, she told journalist Medhi Hasan, “It’s sad that people try to make it controversial when you speak out for children that are facing immeasurable suffering.”

Her stated ethical motivations haven’t stopped the Right from branding Ms Rachel a covert operative pushing a sinister ideological agenda. In March, the New York Post ran an article about Accurso in print titled “Woke Brainwasher.” Its online headline was “The left keeps coming after our kids — now via YouTube’s Ms. Rachel,” deploying the Right’s tactic du jour: implicitly or explicitly draw an analogy between ideas it opposes and “grooming” or child predation. The Post proceeded to paranoically allege that Accurso’s content “sneaks in political themes — invariably leftist ones,” and that she exposes the children of parents who “invite her into their homes” to “Hamas-aligned talking points.”

Pro-Israel organizations have taken the paranoia to even greater extremes. The organization StopAntisemitism penned an open letter to Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, calling for an investigation into Accurso for alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

“Given the vast sums of foreign funds that have been directed toward propagandizing our young people on college campuses, we suspect there is a similar dynamic in the online influencer space,” the group said. It demanded that the Trump administration allocate resources to “find out who is behind Ms. Rachel’s push to demonize the Jewish state.”

Several other Zionist groups echoed the allegations of Hamas funding. The group JewsInSchool stated:

Ms Rachel has used her popularity with minor children to indoctrinate and use them as cash cows to raise funds for Gaza via an organization (Save the Children) that claims Gaza is an “occupied territory” and undergoing genocide. This is training children to provide material support for terror. We agree an investigation is in order.

When the New York Times asked Accurso whether she is funded by Hamas, she responded, “This accusation is not only absurd, it’s patently false.”

But you never know which child content creators are rolling in Hamas cash, which is why you have to sleep with one eye open. Or, in other words, stay woke.

Conspiracy theories aside, Accurso has naturally been accused ad nauseam of antisemitism. Her decision to speak out can’t possibly come down to the fact that Gaza has the highest child casualty rate on earth. It can’t possibly be inspired by endless horrific stories like that of Rahaf, a three-year-old from Gaza who lost both her legs in an Israeli air strike, whom Accurso featured on her social media channels. (“Thank you for seeing our children as human,” Rahaf’s mother told Ms Rachel.) It can only be proof of anti-Jewish animus.

Accurso’s critics have tried every play in the cancel culture book, from declaring certain opinions inadmissible by claiming they’ll harm whole communities, to scouring her archives for potential microaggressions, to leveling accusations of bigotry by omission, to weaponizing emotional appeals to shut down debate entirely.

This isn’t Ms Rachel’s first cancel-culture rodeo. Before she stood accused of hating Jews, Accurso stood accused of offending Christians. Two years ago, Christian influencers tried to cancel Ms Rachel for stating that dinosaurs existed millions of years ago and having a cast member who uses gender-neutral pronouns. Then, last year, shortly after the backlash to her initial Gaza fundraiser, Accurso wished her followers a happy Pride Month, sending Christian conservatives into a fit of hyperventilation.

“She is accepting this sin by promoting gay pride,” lamented Monica Cole, the director of the organization One Million Moms, which is primarily devoted to spotting microaggressions — sorry, lapses in conservative family values — in television commercials. Cole continued, “The Bible tells us that God made us male and female and that holy marriage is between one man and one woman. God gives us these boundaries because He knows what’s best for us.”

Conservatives called for a boycott of Ms Rachel’s content, condemning her Pride Month message as “vastly evil and inappropriate” and declaring, “This woman is sick. This is who your kids love to watch and look up to.” Again, Accurso responded to the backlash by appealing to simple universalist values of solidarity and inclusion, saying, “I love all of my neighbors, and that excludes no one.” She grounded this message in her own Christian faith, citing neighborly love as a value expressed in the Bible.

One conservative Christian publication saw this expression of universal love as itself nefarious, saying, “It is a genius of Satan to weaponize virtue, moving mankind to subvert the Truth while at the same time making him feel very good about his actions, whispering, see how loving you are!” Translation: basic prosocial values like kindness, inclusion, care, and love across lines of difference are a dirty, devilish trick. Keep your head on a swivel.

Right-wing media personality Charlie Kirk did not take kindly to Accurso invoking the Bible for wicked purposes. “Satan quoted scripture plenty,” he quipped, adding, “By the way, Ms Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours.” Kirk then quoted a verse from the Bible condemning homosexuals to death by stoning, calling this “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”

Kirk has complained relentlessly about the (in his own words) “virtue-signaling, high horse, moral sanctimonious people” known as the woke left. But as far as preening self-righteousness is concerned, it’s hard to top Kirk and the woke right.

The Right’s response to both Accurso’s anodyne Pride messaging and her morally grounded but otherwise apolitical opposition to child suffering in Palestine has been exhaustingly theatrical. Using hyperbole to render ideological opponents’ viewpoints unutterable, overstating the harm of words and ideas, appealing to authorities to cut the mic — it all makes one wonder who’s really infected by the “woke mind virus” these days.

If the Right is taking over from the Left as our culture’s most insufferable tongue-cluckers and finger-waggers, it’s only a reversion to form. A politics of pious indignation, paranoid thought, and language policing, righteous claims of moral transgression, and magnification of injury was their province to begin with.

In the 1970s culture war, it was the right-wing evangelicals who were considered puritanical and touchy, while the gays and their progressive allies were the witty and irreverent taboo-breakers. A 1977 Washington Post article about a Johnny Carson monologue mocking antigay culture war crusader Anita Bryant summed up the popular reaction to her brand of right-wing huffiness: “Carson and other comedians have turned her into a new symbolic stock comic figure . . . a prudish, self-righteous fanatic.”

That characterization aptly describes the Right that has risen up to denounce Ms Rachel as a nefarious mastermind of woke brainwashing and a source of profound harm.

Moral sanctimony and amplified grievance are political losers. The Right is welcome to reclaim them as their own. Meanwhile, the Left should strive to emulate Ms Rachel by being unafraid of big feelings and steadfast in our universal values.

After Virtue and MacIntyre’s later works deserve serious questioning. Philosophers have criticized his historical argument — claiming, for instance, that many of the moral concepts inherited by modern Europeans were not as dependent on Aristotelian teleology as MacIntyre alleges. More generally, it is doubtful that MacIntyre has a convincing argument for why there could not be, in principle, a secular justification of morality that might secure wide assent. To my mind, the influential contractualist approach defended by T. M. Scanlon in What We Owe to Each Other (1998), which defines moral obligation in terms of principles that fairly balance individuals’ objectively defined interests, is a promising direction.

When it comes to the thinker’s positive views, we might worry that a return to a tradition-based virtue ethics would, in practical terms, stifle individual liberty. MacIntyre himself has disavowed contemporary political conservatism. But it is not entirely coincidental that his work has been cited by “postliberal” right-wingers like Patrick Deneen to argue for a return to restrictive sexual and social mores, opposing gay marriage and advocating for making it harder for married couples to divorce.

Many on the political left could agree with MacIntyre’s criticism of the corrosive effects of capitalism and its attendant hyper-individualism, and on the need for the recovery of a notion of common goods. But socialists are likely to find his practical proposals, such as they are, wanting. In this later work, inspired by Catholic social teaching, he seems to advocate for a localist defense of community life, noncommodified practices, and cooperative enterprise. Yet the prospects of isolated, local efforts at successfully resisting the encroachment of global capitalism look very bleak. Worker-owned co-ops, for instance, struggle to thrive in the context of privately controlled finance and in the face of competition from capitalist firms. And addressing crises like climate change requires economic transformation on a much larger scale.

MacIntyre’s localism is bound up with his rejection of Marxism. In After Virtue, he accused the Marxist tradition of failing to overcome the liberal individualism of the broader culture; when they needed to take explicit moral stances, Marxists fell back on (to his mind) bankrupt utilitarian and Kantian theories.

In Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, MacIntyre charged more concretely that Marxists had failed to articulate a vision of the transition beyond capitalism that would avoid the tyranny associated with actually-existing socialist states and explain “how from their starting point they could arrive at what was . . . most needed, a series of genuinely local political initiatives through which the possibilities of a grassroots distribution and sharing of power and property could be achieved.” He claimed, too, that the Marxist focus on the working class as the agent of social change was misplaced, since capitalism undermines the ability of all people to flourish.

These criticisms are not convincing. To the last point: it may be that even the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world would be better off, in some ways, in a more egalitarian, less commodified society. But it is the (by comparison) extreme material injustices and deprivation suffered by workers — as well as their numerical strength and their economic power at the point of production — that is why Marxists believe the working class is the social agent with both the interest in overcoming capitalism and the capacity to do so.

The other questions — about the moral foundations of Marxist theory and the nature of the transition to socialism — are more compelling. Marxists have paid inadequate attention to the normative basis of their theory, and developing a worked-out account of our moral principles remains a key task. The same goes for our vision of the transition to a just democratic-socialist society. A big part of such a vision, though, must be worked out in practice by socialists and fellow travelers attempting to organize at the grassroots in workplaces and local communities as well as contending for state power at the ballot box.

Still, MacIntyre’s major preoccupations — the moral depredations of capitalist modernity and its individualist ethos, and the need for a different ethical framework to support an alternative form of social organization — are among the most pressing questions for intellectuals today. And MacIntyre left us a substantial, fascinating, and provocative body of work to help us grapple with them.

There was a time when pop stars could oppose horrifying campaigns of mass murder without facing an orchestrated backlash. In 1995, U2 released one of their best songs, “Miss Sarajevo,” a collaboration with Brian Eno and Luciano Pavarotti that was intended to draw people’s attention to the destruction of Bosnia by Serb nationalist forces. The lyrics began with a set of rhetorical questions:

Is there a time for keeping your distance?

A time to turn your eyes away?

Is there a time for keeping your head down?

For getting on with your day?

What might Bono have said about a globally popular musician who went to Belgrade to receive an award from Slobodan Milošević while Sarajevo was still under siege? Would that have been morally worse than “keeping your head down” or “getting on with your day”?

The U2 singer made a trip of his own to Washington in January this year so that Joe Biden could give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the dying days of his administration. The relationship between Biden and the Israeli forces responsible for mass killing in Palestine was, if anything, more intimate and legally actionable than the relationship between Milošević and the Republika Srpska forces responsible for mass killing in Bosnia. That did not deter Ireland’s most famous rockstar from accepting Biden’s endorsement.

In an article for the Atlantic to mark the occasion, Bono briefly referred to “an obscene leveling of civilian life” in Gaza — a strange choice of verb, more commonly associated with the destruction of buildings than the death of human beings, and without the straightforward legal implications of “killing,” let alone “murdering.” Having identified “Vladimir Putin’s guns and bombs” as the menace facing the people of Ukraine, Bono’s article refrained from mentioning the US-made guns and bombs that Israel’s military has been using to “level” Palestinians for the best part of two years. In any case, there was no talk of Gaza, however imprecise, when he received his bauble in the White House.

In 1995, the author of “Miss Sarajevo” would probably have found it hard to imagine a UK tour involving a Serbian musician who had recently performed for his countrymen taking part in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia. The Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood did his best to deliver a contemporary equivalent by arranging a series of concerts with the Israeli singer Dudu Tassa. In December 2023, when there was no room for doubt about the deliberate mass killing of civilians in Gaza, Tassa played to Israeli soldiers to help boost their morale before they returned to Gaza for another bout of war crimes.

When British venues canceled the Greenwood–Tassa gigs under pressure from Palestine solidarity activists, the two musicians put out a statement presenting themselves as victims of “censorship and silencing,” displaying the kind of all-encompassing narcissism that might swallow a planet whole. Unsurprisingly, the Guardian reported on their complaints without bothering to mention Tassa’s service as a busker for genocide.

Unlike Bono or Greenwood, the members of Kneecap have not acquired vast personal fortunes from their time in the music industry, and the chances are they never will. The internet has transformed the economics of the business beyond recognition since the release of mega-selling albums like Achtung Baby and OK Computer. Besides, the market for an Irish-language hip-hop group with a sharp political edge is always going to be more limited than the audience for Anglophone stadium rock was during the 1980s and ’90s.

In other words, they have much more to lose if they’re prevented from touring and building on their (relatively modest) success to date. Those considerations didn’t stop the group from projecting the following message on a big screen during their set at the Coachella festival a month ago:

Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people: It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes.

Fuck Israel. Free Palestine.

The response they have faced on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in a police investigation, is an attempt to punish them for stating the facts about Israel’s conduct in Gaza with the appropriate degree of anger.

In the wake of the Coachella display, supporters of Israel combed through Kneecap’s back catalogue of performances in search of something they could use to attack the band without having to acknowledge the charge of genocide, against which there is no credible defense. London’s Metropolitan Police have now accused Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who goes by the name “Mo Chara” (“my friend”) when performing, of waving a Hezbollah flag during a gig last November “in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a supporter of a proscribed organisation.”

The members of the band have vowed to contest the charge in court: “We deny this ‘offense’ and will vehemently defend ourselves.” As such, they need to choose their words carefully and deal with the law as it is and not as they would like it to be. Others can speak more bluntly and point out that the entire premise of the case is a travesty. The British state has no moral standing to put anyone on trial for “supporting terrorism.”

It shouldn’t matter if Ó hAnnaidh had expressed clear, enthusiastic support for Hezbollah, speaking at length in a way that left no room for misunderstanding. There should be no legal consequences whatsoever for speech of that kind, let alone for waving a flag. In the lexicon of British politics, “terrorist” is a playground insult with no objective meaning. It certainly has nothing to do with violence against noncombatants, since British governments have been happy to entertain Israeli politicians who are responsible for the mass killing of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

The people of West Belfast, the community that produced Kneecap, repeatedly elected Gerry Adams as their MP at a time when the British establishment considered him to be the physical embodiment of terrorism. During the same period, Britain’s state security forces were systematically collaborating with loyalist paramilitaries responsible for hundreds of sectarian killings.

Government ministers like the current Northern Ireland secretary Hilary Benn are still fighting to prevent the truth about state collusion from coming out, long after the Irish Republican Army ended its campaign and Adams became a regular guest at Downing Street and the White House. When British politicians and media commentators engage in strident moralizing about the evils of terrorism, the response of most people in West Belfast is to roll their eyes in contempt.

The week before the Metropolitan Police charged Ó hAnnaidh, London’s British Museum hosted a private party to celebrate the seventy-seventh anniversary of Israel’s foundation. The guests included Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage of Reform UK, and the Labour politician Maria Eagle, who was there to represent Keir Starmer’s government.

Eagle boasted that the Royal Air Force has been running surveillance flights over Gaza to assist the Israeli military. She claimed that this was “in support of hostage rescue efforts,” knowing perfectly well that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government couldn’t care less about the hostages in Gaza.

The keynote speech at the event came from Netanyahu’s ambassador Tzipi Hotovely. Hotovely is a boorish racist with no diplomatic skills whatsoever who has always denied the right of Palestine to exist. She once told an interviewer that Israel would have to destroy “every school, every mosque, every second house” in Gaza. If a normal country had appointed her as its representative, it would have been a public relations catastrophe.

But this is Israel we are talking about, so the British political class has continued to fawn over her, no matter how many times she lashes out abusively at its own members. Her most recent gaffe was to accuse the London mayor Sadiq Khan of “spouting Hamas propaganda” when he noted that more than fifty thousand Palestinians have now been killed in Gaza. Khan did not even point the finger directly at the guilty parties, but his reference to “the appalling suffering and killing that continues in Sudan and Palestine” was too much for Hotovely to bear.

This would have been the clumsiest intervention of the month from Israel’s local auxiliaries were it not for the comments of Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, who claimed that starving the people of Gaza might be an act of kindness that leads to reduced obesity levels. Turner, whose group took legal action against the Starmer government when it imposed partial limitations on the supply of weapons to Israel, will certainly not be investigated by the Metropolitan Police for “supporting terrorism.”

Meanwhile, a coalition of human rights organizations has brought a case before the High Court in London to challenge the ongoing transfer of British-made components for F-35 warplanes that Israel is using to drop bombs on Gaza. Government lawyers claimed to have seen no evidence that Israeli forces were deliberately targeting civilians.

The court has heard testimony from Mark Perlmutter, a US doctor who volunteered in Gaza. Perlmutter reported having seen many dead or injured children whose wounds indicated that Israeli soldiers had carefully picked them out as targets:

For example, I evaluated two children that were snipered twice each. Both received central chest wounds and side of the head wounds which meant the child was shot a second time after they died and probably were already on the ground. These two children were shot so perfectly in the chest that I couldn’t have put my stethoscope over their hearts more accurately.

This is the “war” that the British state has been supporting with every tool in its kit, including the criminalization of domestic dissenters.

The legal move against Kneecap came just days after the BBC shunted Gary Lineker out of his job as a TV presenter because he was too outspoken about the slaughter in Gaza. Lineker’s experience speaks volumes about the state of British public discourse when it comes to Israel, for two main reasons.

First of all, Lineker is the most congenial front man you could possibly imagine for a pro-Palestinian viewpoint. Those unfamiliar with his role in British culture might care to picture a cross between Tom Hanks and Michael Jordan. He famously went through his entire career as one of England’s greatest soccer players without acquiring a single booking for disciplinary infractions. After retirement, he became the jovial face of BBC sports coverage for the best part of thirty years.

Before Lineker started talking about Palestine, the most controversial incident in his whole career was probably the time when he honored a pledge to present Match of the Day in his underwear after Leicester City’s unlikely Premier League victory in 2016. None of this sufficed to protect him from sustained vilification as he made the abrupt shift from national treasure to hate figure of the right-wing press.

Secondly, Lineker is a useful case study because he is a liberal who does not make his living from the world of politics. Of course, Britain is full of people like that, but most of them do not have a national profile that brings their perspective to the attention of millions. Politicians, newspaper columnists, and the like tend to prefer the argument of power to the power of argument, so they are extremely reluctant to apply basic liberal principles to Israel’s track record for fear that it would lead them to the same conclusions as Lineker.

The pretext that BBC managers used for finally ousting Lineker would not even qualify as a fig leaf in a more serious public sphere. On his Instagram account, he shared a post that featured a short video of Canadian-Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu explaining what the Zionist state-building project has entailed for Palestinians. There was nothing remotely objectionable in what Buttu said. The account that reposted the video had placed a small emoji of a rodent outside the frame — it was easy to miss, even if the intention behind it was to conjure up old antisemitic imagery depicting Jews as rats, which was far from clear.

Lineker faced a barrage of criticism from detractors who accused him of circulating Nazi-style propaganda. He deleted the post and recorded a video apologizing for it, explaining that he had not seen the offending emoji, which was far more than he needed to do under the circumstances. As we have seen in so many similar cases, from Ilhan Omar to Jeremy Corbyn, Lineker’s critics merely banked the apology as a confession of guilt to the most extravagant charges while continuing to attack him.

There was a palpable sense of relief among senior BBC officials that they could now speed up Lineker’s departure while generating headlines that contained the term “antisemitism.” Articles discussing the end of Lineker’s BBC career studiously avoided mentioning the actual reason for it, which was understood by all. A sleazy, mendacious hit job from the BBC’s own media editor inadvertently stumbled upon the truth as it sought to present Lineker as the author of his own downfall: “He could not keep quiet. In the end, it brought him down.”

While pontificating about the urgent need for “impartiality,” even on the part of sports presenters as they speak in a personal capacity, the people who run the BBC have inflicted lasting damage on its reputation for producing serious journalism. Managers have given a single, egregiously partisan editor license to micromanage stories about Palestine for the world’s most popular news website.

Of course, the real issue here is not the bias of one person — it is the organizational structure that has allowed them to become so influential. At time of writing, the BBC is still refusing to broadcast a film it commissioned about the experience of medical workers in Gaza. Other British broadcasters have followed in the BBC’s footsteps, taking their line from a political class that has provided material support for genocide.

After Starmer issued his joint statement with Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney earlier this week, Netanyahu responded with a typically petulant and deceitful whine: “When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice.” It was a telling point, though not in the way that Netanyahu intended.

Since October 2023, he has unleashed a gang of sadistic killers on the people of Gaza, inciting them to commit horrific crimes. The main “concrete action” Western leaders should be discussing at this point in time is how to bring the Israeli leader to justice and ensure that he spends the rest of his life in a prison cell.

When a man like Netanyahu has good reason to thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice and the wrong side of history. Starmer and his allies will never be able to wash away the stain of complicity after what they have done.

Much of Merz’s public reputation, particularly on the broad liberal and left-wing space, stems from this time out of the political spotlight. In particular, his role as chairman of the German division of BlackRock, the American asset management behemoth, is seen with a critical eye by most Germans. His close personal ties to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, as reported in a recent biography by Volker Resing, only add to the perception that Merz represents the financial elite more than the electorate.

Still, his advocates seek to reframe this association not as a liability but as a strength. His corporate entanglements are portrayed as proof of worldly competence, a business-minded sensibility absent from the typical career politician. “Through his many board positions,” write Jutta Falke-Ischinger and Daniel Goffart in their biography of Merz, “he gained a deep and novel insight into the economy.” Between 2007 and 2018, Merz served on at least nineteen corporate boards, from Commerzbank to BASF and the recycling giant Interseroh. Just as he was plotting his political comeback, his connections earned him millions and embedded him within Europe’s financial elite.

This fusion of economic power and political ambition has drawn intense scrutiny. Merz continued to serve in Germany’s parliament until 2009 despite having effectively exited politics two years earlier. He collected his full salary while delivering no parliamentary speeches in his final term. More controversial still were the board seats and advisory roles he received from industrial leaders with whom he shared personal histories.

One case involved Werner Müller, the former minister of economic affairs under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who awarded Merz a lucrative consulting role at Ruhrkohle AG. Müller later also helped secure him a board seat at Stadler Rail, a Swiss company that went public in 2019. This reportedly made Merz a multimillionaire. Resing, another Merz biographer, quotes one of Merz’s confidants describing this as “his real entry into the circle of the financial and business elite.” This entry came just a year after Merz announced his return to frontline politics.

His proponents have tried to downplay the potential for conflicts of interest. Resing cites a corporate attorney familiar with Merz’s legal work who insists that “the substantive work was always done by others.” Merz, the implication goes, was more of a figurehead than an operative.

When BlackRock executive Merz returned to the political spotlight in 2018, his image as Merkel’s adversary and a neoliberal hard-liner was already firmly established. But what has largely disappeared from the public eye is that Merkel herself was not always perceived as a non-ideological chancellor devoid of political dogmas. On the contrary: when she competed with Merz early in her career for the most important posts within the CDU power apparatus, she too was seen as a neoliberal “radical reformer.” The weekly Der Spiegel wrote at the time about Merkel: “She doesn’t just want to discard cornerstones of 16 years of CDU policy under Helmut Kohl. Merkel wants to overhaul the welfare systems so thoroughly that all concepts dating back to Chancellor Bismarck gradually disappear from the party’s program.”

This stance was especially evident at the CDU party congress in Leipzig in December 2003. At the time, the CDU was, according to Merkel and Merz biographer Resing, “almost radically hungry for renewal.” The policy resolution called for a flat tax, a comprehensive pension system reform, and a massive reduction in social spending. Merz was also present at the congress: “Today marks the beginning of the end of the Social Democratization of the Union,” he thrilled back then.

Yet when Merkel entered the 2005 election campaign, it became clear that this course did not convince a majority. Her economically neoliberal agenda did not resonate — and in fact the CDU lost voters. With 35.2 percent of the vote, she achieved exactly the same result as seven years earlier — the very result that had enabled Gerhard Schröder and the SPD to take power. This outcome would become pivotal for Merkel’s subsequent political strategy. As Resing, who published his first Merkel biography in 2009, writes, the lesson was clear for Merkel: “You can’t win elections with a hardline, economically liberal reform agenda.” Thus, Merkel became the pragmatist the world remembers her for today.

Could the same thing happen to Merz? In 2005, he understood that the Christian Democrats’ electoral victory actually exposed the weakness of Merkel and her program. In a newspaper column at the time, he pointed out that 2.6 million voters had given their first, local vote to the CDU but not their second, more decisive one. The piece bore the title: “Voters apparently don’t want Merkel.”

Back then, sixteen years of Helmut Kohl were followed by a brief SPD-led interlude, to which Merkel responded in 2005 with a radical reform agenda that fared modestly with voters but still brought her to the chancellorship — thanks to a coalition with the SPD.

Now, sixteen years of Merkel have been followed by an even shorter SPD-led interlude, and Merz has responded with a radical reform program that has fared even worse with voters — but will still make him chancellor, again thanks to a SPD willing to cooperate for a little bit of power within ministries.

In their coalition agreement, the two parties prioritize stricter immigration controls and corporate tax relief, while officially preserving key social democratic achievements such as the independent Minimum Wage Commission. Notably, the SPD has managed to prevent major rollbacks of welfare policies, even as the CDU secures business-friendly reforms like accelerated depreciation and a lower corporate tax rate. It’s a playbook known from Merkel’s time. In a more surprising shift, both parties also committed to easing the so-called “debt brake,” a constitutional constraint that has long hampered public investment since its enactment by Merkel’s government in 2009.

So, the parallels have limits. Today’s SPD is weaker than ever, and the CDU is also diminished — the resulting coalition is hardly comparable to Merkel’s power-saturated grand coalitions. These altered dynamics will also have their effect on Merz.

There is no doubt that Merz has presented himself as a radical candidate for the chancellorship. In previous years, he primarily attracted media attention when he overstepped rhetorical boundaries, for example, when he accused Ukrainian refugees of “welfare tourism,” referred to migrant children as “little pashas,” or falsely claimed that asylum seekers were getting free dental work in German clinics.

In 2020, when asked whether he could imagine a gay chancellor for Germany, he replied: “Let me put it this way: the question of sexual orientation is none of the public’s business. As long as it remains within the bounds of the law and doesn’t involve children — and at that point I draw an absolute line — it’s not a matter for public debate.” That this statement placed him “on the borderline of homophobia,” as Sievert writes in her book, is perhaps the most charitable interpretation.

But despite his reliance on provocative topics, Merz may no longer be genuinely interested in escalating them. In the biography by Falke-Ischinger and Goffart, Merz is quoted as saying: “I’m not the conservative fossil my opponents like to make me out to be.” The authors describe how he has become more cautious. He had come to realize that his brash demeanor and outdated rhetoric from pre-1989 West Germany had repeatedly tripped him up. He has since accepted, they write, “that the world can’t simply be rolled back to where it was 16 years before Merkel.”

Even though he is celebrated in the more conservative factions of his party for his aggressive stance, it has become evident that this approach cannot replicate past electoral successes. Public sensitivity has increased, as clearly demonstrated by the wave of outrage over the taboo-breaking joint vote with the AfD on a Bundestag motion this January.

Merz long saw himself as the antithesis of Merkel, but he may end up becoming her political reincarnation. The fact that — just like Merkel before him — he is now entering a grand coalition is further evidence that he intends to govern not as a radical reformer, but as a pragmatic administrator of what he would like to be a hyper-stable Republic.

But it is questionable whether even this opportunistic governing style will work under present conditions. The political and economic prerequisites have fundamentally changed since Merkel’s era. Her chancellorship benefited from a phase of global economic growth that especially favored Germany as an export nation. That model no longer functions. Merz, on the other hand, is unlikely to be compelled — given the absence of pressure from the Left — to sustainably boost domestic demand. There will likely be investments in bridges sturdy enough for tanks. But wage increases that might allow a young generation to afford a new car again? Hardly. Merkel’s stability-focused course had an expiry date — and that date has long since passed.

To be Merkel’s true successor, Merz would have to tackle the many unresolved issues she left behind, notably crippling infrastructure deficits and the failing model of an export-led economy that relied on cheap energy and low labor costs and now faces immense challenges in the context of global supply chain disruptions. But he lacks not only the political finesse, but also the power base to do so.

When Merkel first governed with the SPD, she had a comfortable majority of seats in the Bundestag. The grand coalition Merz now leads is the weakest in history with merely 52 percent of seats. Moreover, the political pressures on the CDU have shifted fundamentally. While Merkel governed during a global upsurge of left-liberalism, with majorities in Germany in favor of legalizing gay marriages, the transition to clean energy and, initially, even the opening of borders, Merz faces a reversed dynamic. Today, the pressure is coming from the Right, articulated by the AfD with a vehemence that no party had the basis to match during Merkel’s time.

Under these conditions, it will be difficult for Merz to stabilize and capitalize on the “center” that Merkel cultivated. He has already distanced himself from his economic radicalism in the hope of reassembling Merkel’s broad voter base. But it is likely that the consensus model she cultivated will not survive his chancellorship.