The federal elections in Germany are over, and the preliminary count is in. The CDU/CSU have narrowly avoided the Kenyapocalypse, as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht failed to meet the 5% hurdle for representation in the Bundestag by a mere 13,435 votes. In consequence, the Social Democrats and the Union parties together will command a thin but workable parliamentary majority of 328 seats. In all likelihood, we will have a black-red government under CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz – a not-so-grand coalition of the kind we grew used to under Angela Merkel.
Here is a district-by-district map of the election results, with each district coloured according to the winning party. Black is CDU/CSU, blue is AfD, red is SPD and green is Green:
The preliminary results of each party compared to the last elections in 2021 reveal last night’s losers clearly enough:
This vote was as poignant a rejection of Olaf Scholz’s parodically bad traffic light coalition as anyone could imagine. Everybody has improved at the expense of red-green-yellow, but it is interesting to observe who has done the worst.
The Greens dominated the traffic light, and voters have dealt them the lightest punishment of all. Imagine how crazy you have to be ever to enter a government with this toxic party: They get their way on all major political issues and you get punished for it. Even so, the Greens did much worse than I thought they would. Almost everybody beyond their hardcore devotees has abandoned them, and Green Chancellor Candidate Robert Habeck (who also lost his direct mandate in Flensburg-Schleswig) has announced he will never again seek a leading role in the party. We have finally rid ourselves of his Majesty the Sun Chancellor, the champion of speech crime charges, and that alone is worth a stiff celebratory scotch.
The FDP lost far harder than the Greens. Last night was their worst showing of all time – worse even than the last time they were chased out of the Bundestag in 2013. Party chief Christian Lindner will resign and withdraw from politics, and he should. The FDP stood idly by and waved through ruinous Green policies like the building heating ordinances, all the time pleading that things would be even worse if the FDP weren’t in government. After the constitutional court in Karlsruhe killed the budgetary schemes of the traffic light, the FDP could have left the coalition, but they subjected all of us to another year of Scholzian incompetence and insanity. If there is any justice in the world the FDP will become a minor West German party that nobody thinks about anymore.
The next biggest loser of the night was the Social Democrats, who likewise booked their worst electoral result in history, and also achieved the worst-ever electoral collapse of a chancellor party in the 80-year history of the Federal Republic. Olaf Scholz has said he will not participate in any future government or coalition negotiations, and party co-chair Lars Klingbeil spoke last night of a “caesura” in the history of the SPD, promising substantial changes in party leadership. The first such change happened almost immediately, with the resignation of SPD faction leader Rolf Mützenich. Klingbeil will replace him. Many expect that Klingbeil’s co-chair, Saskia Esken, will also be forced out before long, although she is clinging to her job for the moment.
In aggregate, more Germans have abandoned the four-party cartel system than ever before, such that the new Bundestag will have a bifurcated opposition, consisting of the hard socialists in the Left party and the right-populists of the AfD. This has never happened before.
Die Linke have been hailed as the biggest winners of the election, but here one should not exaggerate. Their performance was simply the most unexpected. They increased their 2021 vote by 3.9 percentage points – a shift they achieved overwhelmingly with the votes of younger females together with former Green and SPD supporters. The left characteristically reacts to electoral failures not by moderation, but by radicalisation, and many of those who supported the traffic light parties in 2021 (1.36 million of them, to be precise) have shifted their allegiances to the hard-left opposition.
Many with unreasonable expectations are disappointed that Alternative für Deutschland achieved only 20.8% of the vote. We must remember that their absolute ceiling for this election was around 23%. In fact the AfD did very well. They were by far the biggest winners of the night, more than doubling their vote share since 2021. The only bitter pill here, is that they will not quite have 25% of the seats in the Bundestag – a threshold that confers powerful opposition parties special rights and prerogatives. The AfD are so strong, and the firewall against them so ridiculous and overstressed, that they will place the CDU as chancellor party in an awkward position. The CDU and the SPD together will have only a very small majority of 13 seats, and there will be an ever-present danger that on crucial votes some representatives of one party or the other might defect, causing bills to pass with AfD support. There will be all kinds of awkward manoeuvring lest anyone displease the gods of democracy and accidentally resurrect Hitler in this way.
If we look at voter migration, we see that the AfD demonstrates signs of unusual strength:
AfD mobilised new voters (“Nichtwähler,” in grey at the bottom) like no other party. They pulled over one million votes from the CDU/CSU, almost 900,000 from the FDP, over 700,000 from the SPD, and even 100,000 Greens. Their losses to BSW – the alleged “AfD-killer” of dumb journaloid fantasy – have been minimal. The CDU and CSU, meanwhile, received even greater defections from the SPD and the Greens than they lost to AfD, as voters abandon the left via a two-step process – first to the socially acceptable Union parties, and then to the Evil Fascist Hitler party when they have really had enough.
The primary injustice of the firewall is that the AfD will be excluded from government for now, but the secondary injustice is that it will permit the disgraced SPD to punch far above their weight in the coalition negotiations to come. The SPD are in no hurry to make nice with the CDU, and Klingbeil has said “it is not certain” they will enter any government with the Union parties at all. Their leftoid activists are still bitter that Merz stepped over the firewall in January and many within the party are demanding that the SPD go into opposition. Realistically, this will not happen, and the sinecures that come of being in government will bring the recalcitrant around.
Merz has few options and so he will have to give the SPD most of what they want. And they will want a lot. The Social Democrats have shifted even further to the left than they were in 2021; the centrists have all but disappeared. Merz’s five-point plan to restrict migration is hardly likely to survive coalition negotiations, which is why he is suddenly saying, in contrast to his statements in January, that “none of us wants to close the borders.” Social welfare extravagances like the Bürgergeld will surely continue, because giving people free money is a central dogma of the SPD. Some noxious Green policies, however, may really be on the chopping block. The SPD, once the party of autoworkers, have no great love for the pending EU ban on internal combustion engines, for example, and I doubt they will care to keep the ruinous building heating ordinances around either.
In summary: A weak and directionless CDU/SPD coalition seems certain. Whether they will last a full term nobody can say, and their inevitable failures will continue to feed the opposition. The temptation to initiate proceedings to ban the AfD will grow in the coming years, and this will be a particularly dangerous period for the party. Among other things, a second round of dreaded state elections in East Germany are approaching in 2026. Sachsen-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will elect new state parliaments, and last night we got a preview of how that might go. Sachsen-Anhalt broke 37% for the AfD, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 35%. The firewall is on the verge of making the East ungovernable, and I doubt anyone believes it will survive the decade.