Why We’re Rooting for Germany’s Conservative Chancellor

The Alternative for Germany, a far-right political party, is among the world’s most extreme major parties. It echoes Nazi messaging. It has ties to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and it traffics in anti-Muslim and antisemitic language. The party — known as the AfD, an abbreviation of Alternative für Deutschland — is so extreme that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far right, broke with it.

The AfD is also alarmingly popular. It finished second in this year’s parliamentary elections and first among voters younger than 45. As many Germans have become frustrated with their country’s direction, especially its struggling economy and surging immigration, they have blamed the mainstream parties that have been in charge for decades. These voters have looked for an alternative, and the AfD’s very name appeals to their discontent.

For all these reasons, we are rooting for the success of Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz. He is a 69-year-old lawyer who leads Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats, the only group to finish ahead of the AfD in the February elections. Mr. Merz has a tough job ahead of him. He sits atop an unwieldy governing coalition that includes the center-left Social Democratic Party, which finished third. The necessity of that grand coalition reflects the AfD’s popularity: It won so many votes that neither the center-right nor the center-left could form a government without the other.

The coalition’s breadth has the potential to be its undoing. If it cannot agree on policies and slides into dysfunction, it will give voters more reason to reject mainstream parties in favor of the AfD. Mr. Merz already suffered an embarrassing symbolic setback this month when he failed to win enough support in Parliament to become chancellor on the first vote. About 18 members of his 328-member coalition initially voted against him in a secret ballot, and he needed a second vote to win. The reasons for the anonymous protest votes are unknown, but they highlight the ideological tensions within Mr. Merz’s coalition.

We hope that Germany’s elected leaders display a greater understanding of the stakes now that they have taken power. They have a vital opportunity: to show the world how the center-right and center-left can focus on their shared values — above all, support for liberal democracy — and work together to be a bulwark against extremism. Success would offer a model for the rest of Europe, as well as the United States. And success depends on delivering results to German voters. Democracy is already retreating or threatened in much of the world. It would be devastating if the AfD won power in Germany.

Mr. Merz seems to grasp the importance of his chancellorship. He has described it as a last chance for the political establishment to marginalize the AfD. “In the next four years we must solve two big problems for this country: migration and the economy,” he said in the campaign’s final debate. Otherwise, he added, “we will definitively slide into right-wing populism.”