The Centre Holds for now: 
The 2025 German Federal Election

On 23 February 2025 Germany had an early federal election after the collapse of the coalition government led by Olaf Scholz. In this election, with the highest voter turnout since German reunification, the political fringes were the big gainers. However, there were still just enough seats for a coalition of the two traditional main parties, though they are hardly dominant the way they used to be. The new chancellor as of 6 May 2025 is Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democrats, and in an historical sense that is not surprising: in postwar Germany, the Christian Democrats have usually been the largest party; indeed, the 1998 and 2021 elections were the only times they lost in votes by more than one percent, though at other times they have been excluded from government due to different coalition alliances.

Germany has an electoral system of proportional representation, specifically a mixed-member system with deputies elected both in local constituencies and from compensatory regional lists. A central feature of the system is a threshold of five percent of the national vote (or three constituency victories) to win proportionate seats. The consequence of this rule, especially in recent elections, has been a significant amount of wasted votes cast for parties that fail to reach the five percent threshold.

In terms of parties in the Bundestag, the Federal Republic of Germany has always been a multiparty system. The party system was quite fragmented at the start in 1949, but afterwards concentrated so that by the 1961 election there were only three parties in parliament: Christian Democrats, Free Democrats, and Social Democrats. Of these three, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats were large, catch-all parties, what in German are called Volksparteien or “people’s parties”. The Greens entered the Bundestag in 1983, and then the 1990 reunification with the former East Germany would further change party politics.

Up until 2005 the standard government in Germany was a two-party coalition of one of the large parties with a smaller party (the Free Democrats or, later, the Greens). However, as of the 2005 election, political party system deconcentration and fragmentation mean that such a combination rarely yields a seat majority. Importantly, Germany has no tradition of post-election minority government, in part due to a required investiture vote (that is, a formal vote by the Bundestag on a would-be chancellor that must be won before taking office) that in the first two rounds requires an absolute majority of deputies to pass. Consequently, the options since 2005 have either been a “grand coalition” of the two main parties (which was in fact first done way back in 1966) or a three-party coalition.

As of the 2010s, the following German political parties were relevant (listed chronologically by year of founding):

• The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was founded in 1875, the only one of today’s parties with such a long unbroken history. Its postwar peak was in the late 1960s and 1970s under Chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. However, like other Western social democratic parties it has seen its support drop as its traditional working-class base has both declined in numbers and drifted to the populist right. This evolution was exacerbated for the SPD in the former East Germany, as they failed to re-establish roots there after reunification.

• The Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) was founded in what would be the postwar West German Länder (states) starting in 1945, with a national party only established in 1950 after it was in government. The regional and more conservative Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) remained separate. Though formally two separate parties, they are normally treated as one as they campaign together under a single chancellor-candidate, and caucus together in the Bundestag. The CDU was set up to provide a broad non-denominational centre-right pro-democratic party, something lacking in Weimar Germany. The electoral success of the Christian Democrats has been noted, and the CDU has had the three longest-serving postwar chancellors: in chronological order, Konrad Adenauer (1949 to 1963), Helmut Kohl (1982 to 1998), and Angela Merkel (2005 to 2021). In contrast, CSU chancellor-candidates in 1980 and 2002 were unsuccessful.

• German liberalism was traditionally divided between nationalistic liberal and left-liberal parties. In 1948, a single liberal party was formed, the Free Democratic Party (FDP). Always a niche party rather than a broad people’s party, its appeal was centred on educated, secular, urban professionals and white-collar workers. Though in the late 1960s reformist elements became dominant, leading to the FDP becoming the junior coalition partner of the SPD from 1969 to 1982. For the most part the FDP has leaned right, stressing free markets and lower taxes.

• At the national level the Greens were formed in 1980 and have been in almost all national parliaments since 1983. They finally entered the national government after the 1998 elections, as junior partners to the Social Democrats. Perhaps Europe’s best known Green party, and certainly the strongest such party of the main European countries, the German Greens have over time seen their more realist or pragmatic elements become central at the expense of their more fundamentalist ones (colloquially, “realos” triumphing over “fundis”). By 2021, the Greens had grown enough that they saw themselves as a potentially major party, proposing for the first time one of their own as chancellor.

• For its part, East Germany had been governed by the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which was created in 1946 as a forced merger of the eastern SPD with the communists. In early 1990, with reunification on the horizon, this party renamed itself the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). In 2007, a merger with a small party saw the PDS modify into simply Die Linke (“The Left”). The party has remained outside the scope of acceptable coalition parties at the national level, though it has been included in Eastern German state governments. In 2024, deputy Sahra Wagenknecht led populist elements out of The Left to form the eponymous Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which combines left-wing economics with anti-immigration and anti-environmentalism views and a pro-Putin position regarding Ukraine.

• Lastly, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) was founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic party, specifically against the euro currency (neo-liberal academics opposed to the 2010 European Union bailout of Greece were central to its founding). After the influx of refugees in 2015, however, the AfD became explicitly nationalist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Islamic. It entered the Bundestag as the third largest party in 2017 but then fell back slightly in 2021.

Despite the wide range of German parties, governing the country remained relatively stable as long as Angela Merkel was chancellor. She kept the CDU/CSU above 30 percent of the votes, and was able to form stable coalitions with either the SPD or the FDP depending on seat numbers. However, after her departure Christian Democratic support dropped, as almost a third of their voters were voting more for her than for the party. The CDU chancellor-candidate in 2021, North Rhine-Westphalia premier Armin Laschet, made various mistakes, and the SPD came first in that election more due to a process of elimination than to its own strength. Still, what resulted was the first three-party coalition at the national level, combining the SPD, the Greens, and the FDP.

This coalition would prove rather unstable given the different ideological leanings of the parties, and their policy differences increased once Russia invaded Ukraine. The Greens and the FDP were often at loggerheads, and more generally FDP leader Christian Lindner, who was finance minister, would resist various spending initiatives. Finally, in late 2024, Scholz fired Lindner, leading to early elections in which each of the hitherto governing parties lost support, most notably the SPD, which dropped by over nine percent, and the FDP which dropped by seven percent and was eliminated from the Bundestag. Beyond the gridlock of the former government coalition, opposition to immigration levels and a general sense of economic uncertainty led to the governing parties collectively losing some 20 percent of the vote.

Regarding its election defeat, the SPD lost votes both to its left and to its right, though more to its right reflecting the overall shift in the electorate’s mindset. Beyond short-term issues, the longer-term problems for the SPD can be seen as a consequence of the free market policies of SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the early 2000s – policies which were not popular with the party’s working-class base. What the SPD has retained of working-class (less educated) voters are those who are baby boomers or older; while the younger less educated increasingly favour the AfD.

For his part, Friedrich Merz became the Christian Democratic chancellor-candidate in 2024. Merz was the internal rival, indeed nemesis, of Chancellor Angela Merkel, conservative where she was centrist, and opposing many of her policies including shutting down nuclear power and accepting the million refugees from Syria. Merz left elected politics for a decade from 2009 until Merkel announced her retirement, spending the interim as a corporate lawyer. It would then take Merz three tries to become the leader of the CDU. As leader, Merz shifted the party clearly to the right, especially on the issue of immigration. Interestingly, whereas in the past CDU leaders were willing to support the free-market FDP to keep it in the parliament as a coalition partner via “loaned votes” (strategic voting of Christian Democrats to keep the FDP above five percent), in 2025 Merz publicly called on FDP voters to vote for the CDU so their votes would not be lost if the FDP failed to reach the five percent threshold.

The election provided to be only somewhat successful for the Christian Democrats and Merz. Yes, their vote went up and Merz became chancellor, but the vote increase was not as much as the opinion polls had been suggesting a few months earlier and they only received 28.5 percent of the vote, their second worst total ever. The real winner in terms of vote gains was the AfD, which basically doubled its support. The AfD swept the former East Germany and made strong inroads in working class areas of western Germany where there is economic despair. A rebranding campaign, led by co-chair and chancellor-candidate Alice Weidel, in particular expanded its support beyond its nationalist core. Weidel’s professional and atypical image aided in this change.

The other winner was The Left. This was unexpected at the start of the campaign, as the defection of Sarah Wagenknecht and her supporters made The Left’s elimination from parliament likely. However, The Left benefitted from being the most effective critic of the rise of the AfD, and its co-chair Heidi Reichinnek skillfully used social media to this end. The party also stressed social welfare issues and rising rents, and it moderated its views on foreign policy. For its part, Wagenknecht’s BSW ended-up with 4.98 percent of the vote, just missing entering the parliament.

Though the combined party list vote of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats was only 44.9 percent, together they won 52.1 percent of the seats in the Bundestag, as 13.7 percent of the vote went to parties that did not win any seats, up from 8.6 percent of votes “wasted” in 2021. Had the BSW won just ten thousand or so votes more and thus (proportionate) seats, there would not have been a seat majority for the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.

But there was such a seat majority, and so after the election a coalition government was formed between the CDU/CSU and the SPD, with the coalition agreement emphasizing increased economic competitiveness and stronger national defence, as well as lessening inward migration. This partisan alignment was expected, not least because during the campaign Merz ruled out a coalition with the AfD. Yet Merz also gave the SPD bargaining power as it was his only coalition alternative. Consequently, the coalition agreement was centrist and did not reflect as great a shift to the right as was expected by elements in the Christian Democrats from a Merz-led government. And despite the considerably larger number of votes and Bundestag seats for the Christian Democrats compared to the Social Democrats, cabinet seats were more balanced. Specifically, the Christian Democrats received eleven cabinet seats including the chancellor (eight for the CDU and three for the CSU) while the SPD received seven cabinet posts – and that included finance and defence. No surprise then that the SPD membership (a vote of which was required) strongly approved the coalition agreement, more so than the last time the Social Democrats were junior coalition partners to the Christian Democrats, in 2017.

In summary, Merz got part of his wish – to have only one coalition partner, not two – but not his full wish of having a choice of either the SPD or the Greens with which to form a majority coalition, something that would have allowed him to some extent play off those parties against each other. That scenario would have required the Christian Democrats or the Greens to have three-plus more percent of the vote than they ultimately received. As noted, that was in fact the case for the Christian Democrats in opinion polls months before the vote.

Worth noting also is that prior to the coalition being formed, Merz moved right away to modify the German debt ceiling in what in the United States would be called a lame duck session, including with the votes of the Greens in return for more spending to fight climate change (in the new Bundestag these three parties have only 65.6 percent of the seats, whereas two-thirds are needed to change the constitution). This change will allow the German government to spend more, and to not “count” borrowing which is used to increase defence spending or aid Ukraine. The FDP was quite opposed to this constitutional change, which relates to Merz’s indifference to their electoral fate.

Looking forward, German election prospects will be quite challenging for the SPD, as its remaining voters are disproportionality older. Yet the bigger long-term trend is the decline of the two Volksparteien, together now down to below 50 percent of the federal vote. This figure was over 90 percent in the 1970s, and still over three-quarters through 2002. Indeed, support for the Christian Democrats dropped further during the coalition negotiations and so in early April they were tied with the AfD at 24 percent support each, and thus the two soon-to-be-governing parties were down to a combined 40 percent.

It is hard to see Friedrich Merz reversing these numbers significantly, as personally he does not poll well with the public.  Nor is he starting off with any electoral honeymoon (only one-third or so of Germans regard him as a suitable chancellor), and his investiture was inauspicious or at least embarrassing: 18 dissatisfied deputies within the incoming government failed to support him on the first ballot (which ones from which parties cannot be known as votes on a chancellor are secret), necessitating a second ballot for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic. At this point, one should be at least somewhat cautious about the new government lasting a full parliamentary term and note that the AfD is set on surpassing the Christian Democrats at the next election to become the largest party – which would make it even harder to keep them out of power.