Strong center-right parties play important role in democracies because they integrate forces that could potentially contest democratic order such as social conservatives or populist nationalists and encourage their cooperation with more moderate factions. Recently, however, a number of once powerful European center-right parties suffered losses at the ballot box and became exposed to increasing pressure from the populist radical right. A historical defeat of German Christian Democrats at the 2021 Bundestag election demonstrates that even most successful center-right parties are affected by the symptoms of crisis. Drawing on Gidron and Ziblatt (2019: 29) it may be concluded that the general cause of the problems experienced currently by the center-right is “unbundling” of conservative attitudes. The mechanism explaining this process has, however, not been examined in detail so far. The comparison of survey data from the German 2021 federal election with data from federal elections conducted in 2017, 2013 and 2009 can clarify this puzzle. This study argues for the central role of tensions between religiosity and other indicators of “mainstream conservatism” on the one hand and attitudes towards migration on the other. Two other factors played however also an important role and further accelerated segmentation of center-right. The first was diminishing size of the most devoted section of traditional Christian-Democratic electorate due to secularization. The second was moderation of positions of mainstream center-right parties which came as a response to social change.