Strange Bedfellows: How the Iran War Reshuffles German Foreign Policy

Six in ten. That is the share of Germans who told pollsters in March 2026 that they consider the US-led military strikes against Iran unjustified. The number alone is not remarkable for a country with deep pacifist currents. What makes it politically explosive is the gap it reveals: between a public that overwhelmingly rejects the war and a governing coalition that has lined up behind Washington. The last time Germany saw a split this wide between citizens and their government on a military question was February 2003, when roughly 80 percent opposed the Iraq invasion and Chancellor Schröder won an election by saying no.

This time, no chancellor is saying no. But the president is. And the people agreeing with him most loudly are the ones the political establishment least wants as allies.

The 60 Percent Problem

The ARD Deutschlandtrend, conducted by Infratest dimap, found in March 2026 that six out of ten Germans consider the military offensive against Iran unjustified. Three-quarters fear the conflict will spread to other countries. Eight out of ten worry about its effects on world trade. Seven out of ten express concern about the situation of people in Iran.

These numbers create a structural problem for the grand coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD under Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The coalition agreement, signed in May 2025 under the motto "Responsibility for Germany," committed the government to a close transatlantic partnership and solidarity with allies on security matters. When President Steinmeier called the strikes "völkerrechtswidrig" and the war "avoidable," he did not merely provoke a constitutional debate. He gave a voice to a majority that his own government has been trying to manage into silence.

For comparison: in February 2003, when the Iraq question dominated German politics, Forschungsgruppe Wahlen recorded 79 percent opposition to the invasion. Schröder turned that public sentiment into an election-winning platform. The difference in 2026 is that no major governing party is willing to convert public opposition into policy. The 60 percent has representation in the Bundestag, but it sits on the opposition benches.

When the AfD Agrees with the President

Alice Weidel and co-chair Tino Chrupalla responded to the outbreak of hostilities with a joint statement declaring that "the renewed destabilization of the Middle East is not in the German interest and must end." The AfD leadership called on "all parties to the conflict to exercise absolute restraint" and insisted that "international law and international humanitarian law must be fully respected."

The AfD's foreign policy spokesperson Markus Frohnmaier went further, supporting a diplomatic solution and insisting that the conflict should be resolved through negotiation rather than force. Weidel warned publicly that "if the Iranian conflict lasts much longer, the repercussions will be devastating. Supply chains for oil, natural gas, and chemical products will be disrupted. Raw material prices will skyrocket. Inflation will run rampant."

The party's 2025 federal election program contains explicit language on non-intervention, asserting that Germany should "adhere to the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of states." The AfD has consistently opposed German military deployments abroad, from Mali to the anti-ISIS coalition. Its foreign policy draws from a mix of national sovereignty arguments and skepticism toward the American-led international order. What changed with the Iran war is the context: for the first time, the AfD's long-standing anti-interventionism aligns with a statement by the head of state.

But the alignment has created internal strain. Rainer Kraft, an AfD Bundestag member, complained publicly: "If right-wing patriots sound exactly like Annalena Baerbock, then there is a chance that they are not right-wing patriots." The party's pro-American libertarian wing and its anti-US ethno-nationalist wing are pulling in opposite directions, with the Iran war forcing a choice that the AfD's carefully constructed ambiguity cannot survive.

Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW, polling at roughly 3 percent nationally, took the sharpest line. Wagenknecht called the attack "a flagrant violation of international law with completely unforeseeable consequences" and accused the United States of pursuing "geopolitically motivated regime change." She demanded that Chancellor Merz prohibit the use of German military bases and logistics for strikes against Iran.

Combined, AfD and BSW represent approximately 26 to 28 percent of the electorate in current polls. Add Die Linke's recovered 10 to 11 percent and the anti-war share of SPD and Green voters, and the arithmetic becomes uncomfortable for the coalition: a clear majority of the electorate disagrees with its foreign policy on the defining issue of the moment.

The Atlanticist Reflex

Friedrich Merz responded to the outbreak of war by denouncing the Iranian regime and expressing "relief that the mullah regime is coming to an end." He declared that Germany shared the US and Israeli aim of stopping Iran's "dangerous nuclear and ballistic armament." He did not describe the attacks as a violation of international law.

CDU/CSU parliamentary group leader Jens Spahn was blunter about Steinmeier: "The Bundespräsident should unite the country, not divide it by undermining our most important alliance."

The CDU/CSU reaction follows a pattern so consistent it functions as political muscle memory. Since Konrad Adenauer anchored West Germany in the Western alliance in the 1950s, the Union has defined its foreign policy identity through transatlantic loyalty. When Helmut Kohl supported NATO's Pershing missile deployment against massive public protest in the early 1980s, the calculation was the same: alliance reliability trumps domestic opinion. When Angela Merkel, then opposition leader, published an op-ed in the Washington Post in February 2003 criticizing Schröder's opposition to the Iraq war and traveled to Washington to signal CDU support for the invasion, the logic was identical.

The record is strikingly one-sided. In over seven decades, the CDU/CSU has broken with Washington on a significant military question exactly once: Germany's abstention on the 2011 Libya intervention at the UN Security Council. That decision, widely criticized in foreign policy circles as an aberration, was promptly walked back through quiet military support and intelligence sharing. The lesson the Union drew was not that independence was viable, but that even the appearance of distance from Washington was politically costly within the party.

Merz, a former BlackRock Germany chairman with deep American corporate connections, has made transatlantic commitment the centerpiece of his foreign policy. The Iran war tests whether that commitment can survive contact with a hostile electorate. His initial enthusiasm for the strikes has already softened; within days he retreated from his most expansive statements, leaving the government without a clear and consistent position.

SPD, Grüne, and the Coalition Squeeze

The SPD finds itself in the most awkward position. Steinmeier rose through SPD ranks, served as SPD chancellor candidate in 2009, and was nominated for president by the SPD. When he speaks on foreign policy, his party's DNA is audible.

Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, the SPD's co-chairman, told the RND newspaper network he had "serious doubts that this war is legitimate under international law," while stressing that Germany would not take part in the conflict. SPD foreign policy spokesman Adis Ahmetovic went further: "Neither the US attack on Venezuela nor the war against Iran comply with international law." Former SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich called the government's approach "ill-conceived" and criticized it for failing to provide its own legal assessment.

The SPD's parliamentary caucus is split between skeptics and loyalists, with the loyalist wing concentrated in the leadership and the skeptics strongest among backbenchers. Coalition discipline prevents an open break, but the tension is audible in every carefully hedged statement.

The Greens have undergone the most dramatic transformation. The party that was founded in the 1980s peace movement, that nearly split over Joschka Fischer's support for the Kosovo intervention in 1999, has become a reliable voice for Western security policy. Former Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who served from 2021 to 2025, championed a "values-based foreign policy" that increasingly aligned with American strategic interests. She now serves as President of the UN General Assembly, far from Berlin's coalition politics. The current Green leadership in the Bundestag has called for proportionality while stopping short of opposing the military action itself.

The FDP, which failed to clear the 5 percent threshold in the February 2025 federal election with just 4.3 percent and lost all its Bundestag seats, operates from outside parliament entirely. New party chairman Christian Dürr, elected in May 2025 to replace the resigned Christian Lindner, has called for a diplomatic resolution but lacks any parliamentary platform.

Die Linke, which has staged a remarkable recovery to 10 to 11 percent in current polls, and BSW together provide the most consistent opposition from the Bundestag floor. The real question is not what the opposition says but whether the coalition's internal tensions become unmanageable.

The Price Tag of Loyalty

Numbers make opinions. When the Iran conflict disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz beginning in late February 2026, German consumers felt it before any polling institute could ask about it. Brent crude, which had traded around 65 dollars per barrel in late 2025, surged past 100 dollars by mid-March. On March 18, it briefly touched nearly 110 dollars. On March 19, after Iranian strikes on Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG facility, Brent spiked to 119 dollars before falling back. By late March it oscillated between 100 and 112 dollars, a roughly 60 to 70 percent increase from pre-conflict levels.

The TTF natural gas benchmark told an even more dramatic story. From around 32 euros per megawatt-hour in late February, Dutch TTF gas futures rose 86 percent to nearly 60 euros by March 21. The Qatar LNG strikes drove a further spike to 74 euros per megawatt-hour, the highest level since January 2023.

The Ifo Institute's Spring 2026 forecast modeled two scenarios. Under de-escalation, with a quick end to the conflict and temporary energy price increases, Germany would grow 0.8 percent in 2026. Under escalation, with a longer conflict and sharper energy price rises, growth would drop to just 0.6 percent. The DIW was marginally more optimistic, forecasting 1.0 percent growth with energy costs dampening recovery and inflation reaching 2.4 percent. Energy-intensive industries, from chemicals to manufacturing, face cost increases of 30 to 40 billion euros if current prices hold.

The defense budget adds another layer. Germany's 100 billion euro Sondervermögen for military modernization, approved in 2022, is nearly exhausted and expected to run out by the end of 2026. The 2026 defense budget totals approximately 83 billion euros; combined with the remaining special fund, total defense spending reaches 108 billion euros. Germany met NATO's 2 percent GDP target for the first time since 1991 in 2024, when defense spending reached 88.5 billion dollars, making it the world's fourth-largest military spender. If the Iran conflict triggers demands for 2.5 or 3 percent, the fiscal pressure on a government already managing an energy price shock becomes acute.

Eight out of ten Germans worry the war will affect world trade. Opposition to the war and economic anxiety reinforce each other in a feedback loop that no government spokesperson can break with appeals to alliance solidarity.

The Horseshoe Revisited

Germany's foreign policy horseshoe is older than the Federal Republic. In the early Cold War, neutralist currents ran through both the radical left and the nationalist right. The peace movement of the 1980s drew participants from SPD, Greens, church groups, and a small but vocal contingent of conservative nationalists who opposed American missile deployment on sovereignty grounds. During Iraq 2003, PDS voters in the east and conservative Catholics in the south found themselves on the same side.

The current horseshoe has sharper edges. The AfD's anti-interventionism is rooted in a worldview that rejects the liberal international order as a whole. Its voters are disproportionately male, eastern German, and economically anxious, a demographic profile that tracks closely with anti-war sentiment across all parties. BSW draws from a different well, combining left-economic policy with foreign policy realism and an explicit rejection of what Wagenknecht calls American-led geopolitical wars.

Yet the Iran war has also exposed a fault line within the AfD itself. Chrupalla attacked Trump directly in a television interview, saying "Donald Trump started off as a peace president. He will end up as a president of war." This broke sharply with the party's previous alignment with the MAGA movement. JD Vance's high-profile meeting with Weidel in February 2025 and Elon Musk's public endorsements of the AfD now look like relics from a different era. The Iran war forced European populists to choose between ideological alignment with Washington and opposition to American military interventionism, a choice that the AfD's leadership made decisively but that its base has not uniformly accepted.

Combined, AfD, BSW, and Die Linke hold roughly 36 to 39 percent in national polls. Their anti-war position is shared by a pool of voters that reaches well beyond their own electorates. This creates what political scientists call a "representation gap." The median German voter opposes the Iran war and worries about its economic costs. The median Bundestag majority member supports the transatlantic line and worries about alliance credibility. The gap between the two medians is where political instability grows.

What Happens Next

Three pressure points matter. The first was already visible on March 22, 2026, when Rhineland-Palatinate held its state election. The AfD doubled its vote share to 19.5 percent, its best result ever in a western German state. The SPD lost nearly ten points, dropping to 25.9 percent. The CDU won with 31 percent, but the AfD's surge rewarded the party for its anti-war positioning and sent a signal to Berlin that foreign policy has domestic electoral consequences.

The second pressure point is the EU Foreign Affairs Council, where unanimity rules mean Germany holds a veto on any EU statement regarding the Iran conflict. The coalition's internal tensions risk producing paralysis, making Germany the blocking vote that prevents European consensus, an ironic outcome for a government that campaigned on European leadership.

The third is the NATO summit scheduled for summer 2026, where the 2 percent spending target will be revisited. Early signals from Washington suggest the Trump administration may push for 2.5 or even 3 percent. For Germany, that would mean an additional 15 to 30 billion euros per year in defense spending, proposed to a public that already believes the Iran war is costing them too much.

The number to watch is TTF gas. In late March 2026, it fluctuated between 59 and 74 euros per megawatt-hour, up from 32 euros a month earlier. If it stays above 60 euros into summer, the Ifo Institute's escalation scenario becomes the baseline: 0.6 percent growth, rising inflation, and an electorate in which economic pain and foreign policy dissent become inseparable. The Atlanticist consensus that has held since 1949 has weathered many storms. Whether it can survive this one depends less on what happens in Tehran than on what Germans see when they open their energy bills.