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German voters turned out to vote en masse on Sunday and gave Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative CDU/CSU bloc, a mandate to succeed Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
But this mandate is far from enthusiastic: the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has also doubled its contingent of lawmakers since the previous elections in 2021, and the far left has experienced a late surge by appealing to younger voters.
This will complicate Merz’s task, especially if he seeks to loosen the constitutional debt brake to fund defence spending, a plan these two insurgent parties have said they would oppose.
Here are the main takeaways of Germany’s legislative elections:
Germany’s ‘people’s parties’ continue their decline
The elections have highlighted the steady erosion in support for the so-called people’s parties — the CDU and the SPD — that have dominated Germany’s political life since 1949.
Merz was aiming to secure at least 30 per cent of the vote for the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, CSU, in order to form a stable coalition. Instead, the German conservatives have won the election with a 28.5 per cent vote share, the second lowest tally in their history and only four points more than their worst outcome in 2021. The result is also lower than the 32.9 per cent vote share Merz’s party rival Angela Merkel secured in 2017.
With 16.4 per cent of the vote, the SPD has suffered its worst defeat since 1887. The main reason was deep discontent with Scholz’s bickering coalition with the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP). Scholz’s government has presided over a stagnating economy in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ending in acrimony over a budget dispute in November.
Christian Lindner’s FDP did not secure enough votes to enter parliament, while the Greens — led by economy minister Robert Habeck — also lost support, albeit to a lesser extent than its other coalition partners.
Return of the ‘Grand Coalition’
The fact that the FDP and the BSW, the “leftwing conservative” party of Sahra Wagenknecht, missed out on the 5 per cent vote threshold to enter the Bundestag (the latter by 0.03 percentage points) means that the larger parties are left with more seats, giving Merz the option of a two-party coalition with the SPD.
This would mark the return of the so-called “Grand Coalition”, except that with a combined 328 seats, their 13-seat majority would not be large.
Non-voters mobilised for the far-right AfD
The highest turnout since reunification — 82.5 per cent — has largely benefited the AfD.
The far right’s surge came at the expense of all the other parties, but its greatest success was in mobilising non-voters: about 40 per cent of the 4.4mn voters the AfD gained were citizens who did not vote in 2021, according to exit polling by Infratest dimap for the broadcaster ARD.
The AfD gained 910,000 voters from the CDU/CSU, but lost about 1mn to them. This suggests that Merz’s gambit to campaign on tougher immigration laws — and break a German taboo by relying on the AfD votes to pass a migration motion in parliament — has been slightly positive, on a net basis.
AfD wins big in east and advances in poorest parts of the west
The AfD, co-led by chancellor candidate Alice Weidel, has become the largest political force in the eastern German states, where it won the most direct mandates.
While it failed to win its first direct constituency in the west, the AfD did top the party list vote — a second vote that determines the share of seats in parliament for each party — in the western city of Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr valley, an SPD stronghold that has suffered deindustrialisation.
The far-right party also came first in Kaiserslautern, in the south-west.
Younger voters turned out for the far left
The far-left Die Linke made surprise gains — it secured 8.8 per cent of the vote — by mobilising the youngest voters. It has become the largest party among 18-24 year olds.
The AfD came second however, which means that nearly half of Germany’s youngest cohorts supported a party at both extremes of the political spectrum, up sharply from 2021.
“Many recent articles said that young voters were going to the radical right. But the biggest party [among the youth] is Die Linke,” said Anna-Sophie Heinze, a political scientist at the University of Trier.
Heinze said that Die Linke had engaged in “very successful mobilisation of young people”, including via TikTok — once seen as the domain of the AfD. It had been helped, she added, by the “star” quality of its candidate for chancellor, Heidi Reichinnek, whose distinctive style includes a blunt fringe, red lipstick and a heavily tattooed left arm.
The AfD was the number-one choice for 25-44 year olds, however, with one in four saying they voted for the far-right party.
Explore results across the country:
Additional reporting by Laura Pitel
