Yesterday, Germany went to the polls to elect the 630 members of the Bundestag following the demise of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government in December. It is an invitation to the cliché of Teutonic efficiency, but by early evening an exit poll suggested that the results were broadly in line with predictions. Now attention is focusing on the assembly of a governing coalition.
Those results have been dramatic. The centre-right Union, the alliance of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister, the Christian Social Union (CDU), won just under 30% of the vote and 208 seats. It gives the CDU leader Friedrich Merz first refusal on the post of federal chancellor, as everyone expected. But his party only gained 11 seats compared to the last election.
The outgoing government was severely punished by a disappointed electorate. Scholz’s Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) managed only 16% of the popular vote, losing a third of its support, and only has 120 seats in the Bundestag. The last time the SPD, Europe’s oldest social democratic party, fell below 20% was the ill-fated election of 1933, which confirmed Adolf Hitler’s grip on power; and it is the SPD’s lowest share of the vote since 1887.
The undoubted beneficiary of the election was the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). After a campaign in which it was endorsed by Elon Musk and US Vice President JD Vance chose to meet its co-leader, Alice Weidel, rather than the sitting chancellor, the AfD doubled its support, winning nearly 21% of the vote and 152 seats. For a party which has only been represented in the federal parliament since 2017, it is an historic achievement.
The Greens, the junior partner in the outgoing coalition, have been reduced to 85 seats, while the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), previously the government’s third element, failed to pass the 5% threshold for representation; it is out of the Bundestag altogether, as it had been between 2013 and 2017. Finally, there was a last-minute surge by the left-wing socialist party Die Linke, which has 64 seats.
How does this translate into constructing a new coalition? The German system is designed on a presumption against single-party government (although the CDU/CSU held power alone 1960-61), but no party will work with the AfD, which is in second place. Mainstream parties have traditionally maintained a ‘firewall’, the so-called Brandmauer, to keep any far-right groups excluded. Friedrich Merz has reiterated that a right-wing coalition between the CDU/CSU and the AfD, which would have 360 seats for a comfortable majority, is out of the question.
Merz, to the Right of his predecessors Armin Laschet and Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, and cut from very different ideological cloth from former chancellor Angela Merkel, made controlling illegal migration his main focus in the election campaign. He condemned Merkel’s 2015 decision to open Germany’s borders, and said his first action as chancellor would be to stop all attempts at illegal entry without exception. Merz also wants stronger powers of detention and deportation.
After a string of high-profile mass killings by immigrants, the German electorate needs no persuasion that there is a crisis, which explains much of the rise in support for the AfD. If Merz regards the AfD as out of bounds, however, his only option to form a viable coalition is to look to the defeated SPD and Greens.
A ‘grand coalition’ (Große Koalition, ‘Groko’) between the two traditional main groups, the CDU/CSU and the SPD, would have a small but workable majority. But the SPD has rejected Merz’s policies and rhetoric on immigration, and it would be a hard sell with its remaining voters to support the uncompromising stance Merz both wants and, electorally, needs.
The Greens, meanwhile, cannot help Merz. Their 85 seats would not create a majority in the Bundestag, and differences over immigration and nuclear power make an alliance all but impossible.
The parliamentary arithmetic is a strange, almost insoluble puzzle. Although a CDU/CSU/SPD ‘Groko’ is unlikely and difficult, it remains almost inevitable as long as an alliance with the AfD is impossible. Merz has rightly pointed out that the Union has different policies from the AfD on foreign policy, the EU and Nato, adding ‘You want the opposite of what we want, so there will be no cooperation’.
Merz hopes to have a government in place by Easter. Alice Weidel, the AfD’s co-leader, knows the strength of her position. If her party is locked out by the Brandmauer, it plays to its narrative of being an insurgent, anti-establishment party. She has also been publicly sceptical of the likelihood of Merz making meaningful changes to immigration policy if he is forced into coalition with the SPD.
A new government which effectively maintains the status quo on immigration is doomed in the long run. A cursory examination of the shifts in voting proves that. Merz also wants stronger support for Ukraine, more free-market economic policies and reform of the welfare system, but these all sit in the shadow of immigration. His best chance, so long as the Brandmauer holds, is in persuading the SPD that it must listen to the electorate after a substantial defeat: in his terms, its leaders must choose between clinging to rejected policies and the preservation of Germany’s democratic mainstream.
Merz may win a few months’ grace, perhaps a year. But the voters want change. If the Union looks like it cannot deliver that, they will look elsewhere. Perhaps Merz, naturally abrasive and hard-edged, can be emollient enough to convince the mainstream it has no option but to follow him. The clock is ticking.
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