Germany’s centre-right Union alliance landed in first place in Sunday’s early parliamentary election. That makes Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the country’s likely next chancellor. He would replace Olaf Scholz, ending the centre-left Social Democrats’ (SPD) brief time in charge.
The SPD could return as a junior partner in the next coalition. That would give Germany its fourth so-called Grand Coalition in 20 years. That is not as “grand” as it seems, however, with the country’s largest post-war parties at or near all-time lows.
Gone are the days of winning as much as 40% of the vote. The CDU earned less than 29%, an improvement of little more than four points over its 2021 result. At barely more than 16%, the SPD lost more than nine points.
Instead, parties on the margins did well. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the socialist Left each roughly doubled their share of the vote. These are big wins for both, as the Left barely made it into the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, last time and the AfD is now the second-strongest party. Its result, around 20%, gives it the strongest far-right win in Germany since World War Two.
BSW, another extreme party that broke away from the Left and saw early success at state level last year, failed to reach the 5% threshold necessary to sit in the Bundestag. The same fate awaited the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP), which was part of the outgoing coalition. Its disagreement over budget issues collapsed the government and triggered the early vote.
Voter turnout was the highest in decades.
Merz now faces the challenge of delivering on what Scholz struggled with: a stagnating economy, migration concerns, ailing infrastructure and European solidarity under pressure from both American and Russian influence.
But first, he may face difficult coalition negotiations. Despite AfD efforts to show common cause with the CDU — and Merz’s recent collaboration with the far right on a migration vote — Merz has ruled out including the AfD in government. That leaves the SPD, and possibly the Greens. Both will likely try to drive a hard bargain to get a deal done.
To better understand the election result and get a glimpse of what might come next, The Parliament spoke with Simon Green, a politics professor at the University of Salford, in England.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do these election results translate into a coalition?
We are probably looking at a government between the CDU/CSU [a union between the nationwide Christian Democrats and Bavaria-only Christian Social Union] on the one hand and the SPD on the other because there is no alternative.
It’s very clear that the CSU does not want to go into coalition with the Greens under any circumstances. The Greens actually lost less than all the other governing parties, but they're the ones who ultimately will lose out.
There’s no alternative than a coalition between CDU/CSU and SPD, other than new elections. I don’t think the coalition is likely to fail any time soon, but you can already see a situation where three years down the line, CDU/CSU and SPD start running out of commonalities and, in particular, around things like public financing and taxes.
How long do you expect the coalition negotiations to go on for?
I'm actually quite optimistic that it'll work out sooner rather than later. The SPD look like they've had a terrible result, but if they play their cards right, they'll be back in government. And that's always better than not being in government.
The SPD will make compromises in order to achieve that. There'll be some changes in the composition in the people who are involved. What's very clear to me is that Scholz’s career is over. Boris Pistorius, the current defence minister, will now play an important role in the SPD and that will actually work quite well for the CDU. They would find it harder to live with Scholz.
Other German parties tried to beat the far-right AfD at their own game. Was this a bad strategy?
Migration is a long and complex issue in German politics, but the spate of recent attacks in Germany, for instance in Magdeburg and Aschaffenburg, have given this issue a particular salience in this election.
One in five voters voted for the far-right. It looks like that they scored particularly well amongst young voters. They're also the biggest party in the east of the country. But it’s quite clear that when a centrist party copies the far right, voters just say, ‘Well, I might as well vote for the far right because why bother going for the imitation?’
How much did the CDU suffer at the polls for working with the AfD last month?
The CDU probably did pay a price for that. I would suspect that the CDU will have won slightly fewer voters than they would otherwise have done from the centre parties.
It also meant that the Left party has actually done better as a result of this. On social media, the leader of the left party gave a very effective speech criticizing Merz's move to the right.
The AfD result, especially when seen together with BSW [Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht] and the Left party, means that Germany’s political centre has weakened significantly. This makes it harder to build stable governments of either the centre-right or the centre-left.
The Left, long assumed dead, did quite well. How does that impact the political situation?
In his final election rally, Merz really had an intemperate go at people on the left of the political spectrum, which might just have actually tipped a few more people to vote for the Left.
The Left is unlikely to be in any government, but their result helps to keep the BSW out, which looks likely, and will make it easier for the CDU to form a government. That's the key thing. This is now about how many parties end up being represented in the Bundestag. The more parties represented, the harder it will be to form a coalition.
The economy was also a top concern for voters. How will Merz address this?
The main issue will be around investments. Germany hasn't really invested very much now for quite some time. The big question will be what to do about the so-called debt break — the ‘Schuldenbremse.’ There are various proposals to loosen that so more money can be invested, because that's just not happening at the moment —whether it's in public infrastructure, in services or, for that matter, defence.
Merz is going to have to come up with some answers pretty quickly. It’s clear in all European countries that as long as economic growth is weak, there will be space for extreme parties both on the left and on the right. If the centrist parties want to take away the oxygen, the lifeblood for extreme right or extreme left parties, they’ve got to get economic growth going.
How does this election impact the EU?
With Olaf Scholz, you always got the impression he wasn't really keen on trying to make Europe work and do much foreign policy at all. I think Merz knows this, and I would expect him to be quite proactive in this regard.
Merz and [French President] Emmanuel Macon will have to find common cause together, in particular with the whole common European defence agenda, and move to completely different levels and really quickly. I think there's actually a strong momentum here, and Merz knows he has the opportunity now to make it work.