No winners in Germany
No party met their own expectations, but a Grand Coalition might not work this time
The faces in many party headquarters in Germany betrayed disappointment, hidden by clapping and smiling, when the results came in on Sunday. This was especially true for the CDU, the centre-right party and supposed winner of the German snap elections. They won 28.5 per cent of the vote, a far cry from their hope of reaching 30 per cent. That’s a mere 4 per cent more than their disastrous loss in 2021 and less than they got at any point under Angela Merkel. Even that might not have been possible if older voters hadn’t come out in droves to save them, with an unusually high turnout of 84 per cent.
Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU and future chancellor, will likely form a Grand Coalition or “GroKo” with the centre-left SPD, since the CDU don’t have a majority alone. It could be seen as a tried and tested co-operation, which worked three times under Merkel, but Germany has changed over the last decade. The CDU campaigned against the SPD’s policies on immigration, welfare, and energy; so any agreement will compromise their drive for reform. To deliver on that right-wing agenda, it would make more sense to go into coalition with the AfD. Nonetheless the GroKo is the most popular coalition, with 43 per cent of the electorate supporting it.
Merz has already abandoned his election promise to close the border for people without papers
Join Britain’s most civilised publication.
![]()
Subscribe NowChallenge the consensus. Access rigorous analysis.
There are three possible answers to that: the vote of the over-60s, media bias, and the other parties. It’s no secret that many older people went out in droves to vote for secure pensions. This is what the SPD and CDU promise their voters, after all. Apparently both parties are unaware or willfully ignorant of the demographic changes and low birth rates in Germany since the 1970s.
The second part of the problem is that the over-60s are also the biggest consumers of public TV, which is staggeringly anti-AfD. One blatant example was the Green party member who was planted in the audience of a debate show, to ask the AfD’s leader Alice Weidel, who is a lesbian, if she would send gay people to concentration camps. Such an idea is ludicrous but by making the AfD debate such topics, it makes them look like extremists rather than typical European populists.
The final answer is that the “firewall”, in which all the main parties agree not to work with the AfD, means that the CDU are under pressure not to form a coalition with them. Although often presented in moral terms, it is very convenient for parties of the left that no right-wing coalition can be formed.
The AfD themselves fell short of their hopes to reach 22 per cent or even 25 per cent. Even with the terrible performance of the last government and the support of JD Vance and Elon Musk, the media hysteria, after the CDU allowed the AfD to vote with them on an anti-immigration motion, seems to have capped their support. However, they won the working class vote from the SPD, won districts in the heartland of the Ruhrgebiet in West Germany, won over gay people and young men in the age group 18-24, and mobilised many prior non-voters. They are now the de-facto opposition and the bigger they grow, the harder it will be to maintain the firewall.
With the AfD at his neck, Merz will be under pressure to deliver on the economy, migration and reducing state bureaucracy, and improving the energy situation. It is therefore not a good sign that Merz is already abandoning his election promise to close the border for people who arrive without papers. Nor will it be in the interest of the country to abandon its transatlanticism and to question NATO in its current form when the military is in such a poor state. A “weiter so”, or to carry on the same way, in government will lead to his agenda for reform collapsing, leaving him a failed chancellor like Olaf Scholz. If so, Merz’s critics will be proven right that he and the CDU are not the solution to the problem but the problem in German politics itself.
