Germany has voted, and the entire political landscape has been turned on its head. Friedrich Merz’s center-right CDU/CSU emerged victorious in the general election, securing 28.6% of the vote. However, this is a weak result given the failings of the previous Green- and Social Democrat-led government (in a three-way coalition with the free-market FDP, which failed to exert any influence). This marks the second-worst election result in the history of the Christian Democrats, with only an 8% lead over the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), which garnered 20.8% of the vote.
Friedrich Merz had promised to cut the AfD’s share of the vote in half. Instead, the party’s support doubled compared to 2021, increasing from 10.4% to 20.8%, while Merz’s party gained just 4.4%. Merz has paid the price for failing to distance himself sooner and more decisively from the legacy of Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor from 2005 to 2021. In policy terms, Merz has gradually reshaped the Christian Democrats’ stance on a range of issues, particularly migration.
But every time the CDU/CSU criticized Germany’s migration policy, the AfD was able to reply: “But it was the CDU/CSU who started all this under Merkel in 2015.” The most interesting statistic from election night revealed that, when asked who was responsible for so many immigrants and asylum seekers coming to Germany, 54% of voters blamed the CDU/CSU.
A similar picture emerged on other issues. Merz criticized the closure of nuclear power plants, and the AfD countered: “It was the CDU who decided to phase out nuclear power under Merkel’s leadership.” Similarly, when Merz voiced concerns about the ban on cars with combustion engines, the AfD simply responded: “But wasn’t it the CDU’s Ursula von der Leyen who spearheaded the ban on combustion engines in the EU?”
In order to signal a new political direction, Merz should have distanced himself from Merkel’s policies much earlier and more resolutely, and proactively dealt with his party’s past. But Merz was afraid to do so because he knows that his party is divided between moderate conservatives like himself and party loyalists who are still aligned with the policies of the former chancellor Angela Merkel. Publicly renouncing Merkel’s legacy, while absolutely necessary, would have provoked division within his party. Merz only realized a few weeks before the election that he needed to acknowledge the CDU/CSU’s responsibility for many of the problems facing Germany (migration, energy policy, etc.). But by then it was already too late.
Merz also struggled to explain convincingly how he planned to implement the radical changes in migration and economic policy he was promising. After all, he had ruled out a coalition with the AfD and committed himself to the SPD or the Greens as coalition partners, the very parties responsible for the disastrous migration and economic policies of the past three years.
In all likelihood, Merz will form a coalition with the SPD. The radical political shift that Germany so urgently needs after the Merkel era will not happen. What Germany really needs is a Chancellor who drastically cuts taxes, radically deregulates, puts a stop to the energy and mobility transitions, and implements a migration policy similar to Denmark, the Netherlands, or Poland. But all of this is difficult to imagine in partnership with the Social Democrats. However, if the radical turnaround fails to materialize, there is a risk that more and more voters will switch to the AfD.
Should Merz consider forming a coalition with the AfD? First, he has promised thousands of times he will not do so. Second, it would tear his party apart. Third, the AfD itself is doing a lot to prevent this from happening. Unlike right-wing parties in Italy and France, for example, which have become more moderate, the AfD has become so radicalized that even its former right-wing sister parties in other European countries no longer want to work with it in the European Parliament. Just recently, party chairwoman Alice Weidel said that she could imagine Björn Höcke, the far-right politician from Thuringia known for his national socialist views, as a government minister. This is in stark contrast to Weidel’s previous stance of advocating Höcke’s expulsion from the party. Today she praises him and apologizes for her past “mistake.” Yet, in many respects, huge ideological differences remain between Weidel’s free-market positions and the views held by Höcke and large parts of the party. The biggest problem with the AfD, however, is its close alignment with the Kremlin: co-chairman Tino Chrupalla’s speeches in the Bundestag sound as if they were written in Moscow.
Weidel, a sensible politician in terms of economic policy, also put forward a number of crude theories—such as when she described Germany as a vassal state of the USA. If that really were true, Trump and Musk would now be dictating a coalition with the AfD to their purported Governor Merz.
The Social Democrats experienced their worst election result in 150 years, winning only 16.4% of the vote. Past SPD leaders, such as Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Gerhard Schröder, achieved results well above 40%, with Brandt gaining almost 46%. That was a long time ago.
The far-left Die Linke (the former communist party SED, which ruled East Germany and has changed its name several times since the fall of the Berlin Wall), experienced a late and remarkable surge in support. Despite polling a mere 3% in recent months, Die Linke managed to secure 8.8%, and even came first in the capital Berlin with 19.9% of the vote. With far-left slogans about class warfare, demands for open borders, and calls for a Germany without billionaires, Die Linke struck a chord with voters, particularly among voters aged 18 to 24, where they led with 25%, closely followed by the AfD on 21%.
In the last general elections in 2021, the Greens and the free-market FDP were the top picks among young voters. Back then, 21% of young voters supported the FDP; this time it was just 5%, a 16-point drop. Nationally, the FDP won 4.3% of the vote, falling short of the 5% threshold to enter parliament, which means they are excluded from the next Bundestag. Voters who supported the FDP in 2021 would have liked a more right-wing FDP: the FDP lost 2.1 million voters to the CDU/CSU and AfD. Voters punished the FDP for its role in a coalition that oversaw the ban on combustion engines, the nuclear power phase-out, and the introduction of a new “self-determination law,” which allows every German to change their gender once a year.
The FDP now faces a choice: either reinvent itself as an unambiguously libertarian party that aligns itself with politicians like Javier Milei, or risk fading into irrelevance. Following Christian Lindner’s resignation as party chairman, Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, who belongs to the left wing, and Wolfgang Kubicki, a libertarian, have announced their potential candidacies to succeed him.
Despite the grim outlook on election evening, one positive outcome was the narrow defeat of Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW alliance, which secured only 4.9% of the vote. Sahra Wagenknecht, for many years an admirer of the socialist Hugo Chávez, a radical anti-American, and a Putin-apologist, had won big in European and state elections in Germany’s eastern states. This time, however, BSW lost because of their leader, a thoroughbred troublemaker who provokes controversy wherever she goes.
