Outside the Beltway

German Election Dominated by Parties of the Right

But a centrist grand coalition will likely govern.

James Joyner · Monday, February 24, 2025 · 11 comments

NPR (“Center-right opposition wins German election, with the far right coming in 2nd“):

Germany’s conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz won a lackluster victory in a national election Sunday, while the Alternative for Germany doubled its support in the strongest showing for a far-right party since World War II, projections showed.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz conceded defeat for his center-left Social Democrats after what he called “a bitter election result.” Projections for ARD and ZDF public television showed his party finishing in third place with its worst postwar result in a national parliamentary election.

Merz said he hopes to put a coalition government together by Easter. But that’s likely to be challenging.

A discontented nation

The election took place seven months earlier than originally planned, after Scholz’s unpopular coalition collapsed in November, three years into a term that was increasingly marred by infighting. There was widespread discontent and not much enthusiasm for any of the candidates.

The campaign was dominated by worries about the years-long stagnation of Europe’s biggest economy and pressure to curb migration — something that caused friction after Merz pushed hard in recent weeks for a tougher approach. It took place against a background of growing uncertainty over the future of Ukraine and Europe’s alliance with the United States.

Germany is the most populous country in the 27-nation European Union and a leading member of NATO. It has been Ukraine’s second-biggest weapons supplier, after the U.S. It will be central to shaping the continent’s response to the challenges of the coming years, including the Trump administration’s confrontational foreign and trade policy.

The projections, based on exit polls and partial counting, put support for Merz’s Union bloc around 28.5% and the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, about 20.5% — roughly double its result from 2021.

They put support for Scholz’s Social Democrats at just over 16%, far lower than in the last election and below their previous postwar low of 20.5% from 2017. The environmentalist Greens, their remaining partners in the outgoing government, were on about 12%.

Out of three smaller parties, one — the hard-left Left Party — strengthened its position, winning up to 9% of the vote after a remarkable comeback. The pro-business Free Democrats, who were the third party in the collapsed government, looked likely to lose their seats in parliament with about 4.5%. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, was hovering around the 5% threshold needed to win seats.

A difficult task for the winner

Whether Merz will have a majority to form a coalition with Scholz’s Social Democrats or need a second partner too, which would realistically have to be the Greens, will depend on whether the BSW gets into parliament. The conservative leader said that “the most important thing is to re-establish a viable government in Germany as quickly as possible.”

“I am aware of the responsibility,” Merz said. “I am also aware of the scale of the task that now lies ahead of us. I approach it with the utmost respect, and I know that it will not be easy.”

“The world out there isn’t waiting for us, and it isn’t waiting for long-drawn-out coalition talks and negotiations,” he told cheering supporters.

The Greens’ candidate for chancellor, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, said that Merz would do well to moderate his tone after a hard-fought campaign.

“We have seen the center is weakened overall, and everyone should look at themselves and ask whether they didn’t contribute to that,” said Habeck. “Now he must see that he acts like a chancellor.”

The Greens were the party that suffered least from participating in Scholz’s unpopular government. The Social Democrats’ general secretary, Matthias Miersch, suggested that their defeat was no surprise — “this election wasn’t lost in the last eight weeks.”

A delighted far-right party doesn’t have a partner

AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla told cheering supporters that “we have achieved something historic today.”

“We are now the political center and we have left the fringes behind us,” he said. The party’s strongest previous showing was 12.6% in 2017, when it first entered the national parliament.

The party’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, said it is “open for coalition negotiations” with Merz’s party, and that “otherwise, no change of policy is possible in Germany.” Merz has repeatedly ruled out working with AfD, as have other mainstream parties — and did so again in a televised post-election exchange with Weidel and other leaders.

Weidel suggested AfD wouldn’t have to make many concessions to secure a theoretical coalition, arguing that the Union largely copied its program and deriding its “Pyrrhic victory.”

“It won’t be able to implement it with left-wing parties,” she said. If Merz ends up forming an alliance with the Social Democrats and Greens, “it will be an unstable government that doesn’t last four years, there will be an interim Chancellor Friedrich Merz and in the coming years we will overtake the Union.”

Merz dismissed the idea that voters wanted a coalition with AfD. “We have fundamentally different views, for example on foreign policy, on security policy, in many other areas, regarding Europe, the euro, NATO,” he said.

The German electoral system is interesting, balancing party-list proportional representation with a 5 percent floor designed too keep fringe parties out of government. It simultaneously allows for more parties, representing a far wider range of views, for voters and forces consensus building to forge a governing coalition. It also makes it nearly impossible for a far-left or far-right party to form a government.

While the center-right CDU/CSU “Union” received a plurality of the votes, it only totaled 28.5% and will thus have to form a coalition with one or more other parties to form a government. WaPo has a good breakdown of the possibilities:

Note that the seemingly natural ideological partner, second-place AfD, which got 20.8%, is not even on the list.

Given that Merz has refused a Union-AfD coalition, the most obvious path to governing is a grand coalition between Union and SPD. This will naturally be infuriating to both those who rebuked SPD—which had its worst showing in the history of the Federal Republic—and to those who backed AfD. But a centrist coalition is far more acceptable to the vast majority of Germans than one where the far right calls the shots. So, the party that just got its ass handed to it, finishing in a distant and embarrassing third place, will have enormous bargaining power.

Elsewhere:

• NYT, “5 Takeaways From Germany’s Election“
• AP, “The biggest takeaways from Germany’s election, which will bring change to the EU’s leading power“
• BBC, “Five key takeaways from the German election“