Germany has voted.
As the voters flocked to the polling stations to cast their ballots on the (only) fourth snap elections since WWII, excitement and anxiety was flying high.
Yet, the results of the largest German turnout (82.5 percent) in decades mostly met the expectations.
Sunday’s election proved (again) what has been known for a while: voters switched affiliations. Mostly away from the current coalition.
The losers are all from those parties: the SPD, the Greens and the FDP.
The Socialists not only recorded their worst results in federal elections since the World War, but suffered a predictable, but still humiliating loss of 9.3 percent of their voters. Outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz summed up the results as ‘a bitter defeat’, adding that he bore responsibility for the results.
Die Grüne (The Greens) didn’t fare much better, losing about 3.1 percent of their previous share and ending up with 11.6 percent of the overall ballot. To make the loss even worse, they lost the youth of Germany, who were once their most trustworthy electorate. Now those very same voters led a hard-left revival, awarding the Left Party with 8.8 percent of the vote. That will transform into more than 60 seats in the Bundestag.
The FDP is projected to lose all 91 seats it had in the Bundestag, because it failed to meet the 5 percent threshold. Party leader Christian Lindner immediately announced his withdrawal from active politics.
The big winner is, without doubt, the AfD, which nearly doubled its previous results and ended up with 20.8 percent of the votes.
That’s the nationwide result – in the former eastern parts of the country, it became the strongest force. In Thuringia, the home of party-heavyweight Björn Höcke, the AfD received more than 38 percent of the vote.
But, for the first time, the party has also gained a foothold in the former West part, winning in Gelsenkirchen and Kaiserslautern.
This will give the party 152 seats in the new Bundestag.
Though the conservative CDU/CSU won the elections, and with that earned the mandate to try to form the new government with party-chief Friedrich Merz as chancellor-candidate, with only they fell short of securing enough votes to form a government on their own. If the Socialists had their worst results since 1949, the conservatives had their second worst.
Thus, arch-conservative Merz might want to ‘govern Germany reliably’ or to ‘step by step, … really achieve independence from the United States’, he’ll need coalition partners to do that. Back in October, he asked the electorate for a ‘strong mandate to form a clear-cut coalition’.
As the CDU/CSU has ruled out a coalition with both the AfD and Die Grüne, this leaves the Socialists as most likely candidates, returning to the ‘traditional’ two-party governments that has led Germany for most of its modern history. Their combined 328 seats would give Merz a mostly comfortable position.
Brace for lengthy coalition talks, though.
The likely partners need to reconcile a wide array of contrasting proposals on how to revitalize Germany’s ailing economy. Merz’s promises to peel back regulations and reduce taxes are a big, fat, no for Socialists, the more so with The Left Party’s surge.
The more so if the winning parties continue to ignore the new reality: one in every five voters vouched for the AfD, demanding a radical change in migration politics and the curbing of the soaring prices.
Merz dismissed the rise of the party with saying ‘the party only exists because there have been problems that haven’t been solved’ – it is up to him to meet the challenge and take the steps voters have been demanding for years.
