German elections tend to be characterised by a plodding certainty, with polls accurately predicting frontrunners – who invariably fail to win outright parliamentary majorities, leading to coalition-building periods.
Sunday’s high-stakes national elections, which will see a new government running Europe’s economic powerhouse, was no exception.
Germany’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) led by Friedrich Merz won the election, with early results putting his bloc in the lead – as predicted by the polls.
But the 2025 vote to elect 639 members to the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, did yield a first in Germany’s postwar history.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party came second, scoring between 19 to 20 percent of the vote, according to early results.
AfD’s 46-year-old leader, Alice Weidel, had every reason to rejoice on Sunday night. "We have achieved a historic result," she told party supporters cheering and waving the German national flag at an election night party in Berlin. “We have become the second-strongest force" in German politics, she noted.
For many German citizens and the mainstream politicians, it was an anticipated but still shocking result, sounding the death knell for the notion that the country, still seeking to atone for the Holocaust, was immune to a far right-wing revival.
The AfD is “open for coalition negotiations” with the centre-right CDU, Weidel told supporters in Berlin.
That is unlikely to happen. A historic “firewall” prevents mainstream German parties from forming alliances with the far right.
Germans are still dealing with the problem that largely went away 80 years ago while ignoring the hordes of invaders of the past ten years. Can there be any hope for Germany?
Merz sparked an uproar last month when he tabled a non-binding motion in parliament, which passed with AfD support. But on the campaign trail, Merz ruled out any coalition with the AfD. He reiterated it Sunday night, when he categorically stated, “I always said there was no question of a coalition with the AfD.”
The taboo may be holding, but the political signals of the latest vote were nonetheless disturbing, according to Werner Krause from the University of Potsdam. “Even if the AfD isn't part of the coalition, it's an historic result for them. It’s nearly double their 2021 result,” he said, referring to the far-right party’s 10 percent score in the previous parliamentary elections.
“Clearly this has been coming, they’ll have a spring in their step,” said Ed Turner, a German politics expert at Aston University. “But it looks most unlikely that they’ll have 25 percent of the seats in the Bundestag, which would have enabled them to make some mischief with parliamentary procedure.”
Scholz’s party suffers a defeat
There were other historic firsts on Sunday night. With a turnout of more than 83 percent, the 2025 elections had the highest turnout in a country known for its high voter turnout rates.
“The historical turnout is a result of this election being very polarising, meaning more people than before thought it was important to speak out their mind by voting,” said Jan Philipp Thomeczek from the University of Potsdam. “Germany has experienced a very polarised campaign – particularly around the issue of immigration – which tends to push voters to vote in greater numbers to defend their position,” he added.
Yes, Germans defend their position while the country goes to Hell in a handbasket.
In the polls, German voters delivered a categorical verdict on Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which led the country for three years until its collapse in a no-confidence vote in December.
“The SPD, for the first time in its history, is no longer one of the two major political forces,” said Krause.
A flagging economy and high inflation, boosted by high energy bills, saw the ruling SPD drop in popularity, a downturn that was seized by Merz on the campaign trail, when he called the Scholz-led period “the three lost years” for Germany.
Complex coalition arithmetic
Scholz took the reins following Angela Merkel’s 16 years as chancellor, leading a “traffic light” coalition with the Greens and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).
In the world of Germany’s coalition politics, an alliance between the two major parties, the CDU and SPD, is called “the grand coalition” and is considered the most stable government.
But a grand coalition would depend on the final results for Germany’s smaller parties in the complex parliamentary arithmetic of the Bundestag, said Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based journalist and author of several books, including “Berlin Calling”.
“The easiest and the most expected coalition is going to be between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. But we don't know that for sure, simply because the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats do not have enough to put together a majority if these smaller parties get in,” explained Hockenos.
The end of the ‘Merkel era’
One of the big surprises of Sunday night was the unexpectedly strong showing of the far-left Der Linke party, which appeared to be heading for at least 8.5 percent of the vote.
“Just a couple of months ago, anybody would have said that Die Linke, the left party, had no more chance to get in, probably less of a chance even, than some of the other smaller parties,” said Hockenos. “I think many of them probably came from the Greens, who were dissatisfied with the more conservative, pragmatic Green [agenda] that Robert Habeck put forward.”
Habeck, the Greens' candidate for chancellor, has said the results of Sunday’s vote showed a rise in the popularity of extremist parties from the far right and far left.
“We have seen the centre is weakened overall, and everyone should look at themselves and ask whether they didn't contribute to that,” said Habeck.
The Greens leader, who serves as Germany’s vice chancellor in Scholz’s “traffic light” coalition, called on Merz to moderate his tone after a hard-fought campaign.
“Now he must see that he acts like a chancellor,” said Habeck.
As the country’s expected new chancellor – whatever the coalition configuration – Merz, who has no previous experience in office, is set to lead Europe's largest economy at a turning point in the continent’s history as Europe is caught between a confrontational US under President Donald Trump and an assertive Russia.
After three years of leftist governance, Germany is set to be ruled, once again, by the CDU.
But Merz is unlike Germany’s last CDU chancellor, Merkel, according to Hockenos.
“Merz is a very different kind of politician. He's neoliberal. He's as conservative as the far right on migration. And he also has no governance experience – he’s never led a state or a country, he's never even been mayor. He's also different from Merkel: he's not a dispassionate, always level-headed kind of politician.”
That could mark the biggest change in a country known for its stability. “Olaf Scholz, although he was a Social Democrat, was much more like Merkel. ... You could actually say that the era of Merkel is coming to an end now, so different is Friedrich Merz from both Merkel and Scholz.”
(FRANCE 24's Sebastien Seibt contributed to this report.)
If Merz needs a third or even a fourth party to form a coalition, it will have to come from the far-left and it means he will get little or nothing done on the migrant file. The disastrous effects of Islamization will continue to increase in Germany.
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