Election preview: Germany

There won’t be as much in the way of straight election reporting here this year, as I work on other projects. But there’s no excuse for ignoring Sunday’s German election, brought on some seven months early by the collapse of the previous coalition government.

I’ve been writing about German elections for a long time; I’ve been there for three of the last four elections, although sadly not this one. You could start with this 2005 piece from Crikey on the last time an early election was called. More useful though would be my preview of the 2021 election, and my subsequent explanation of the result and of how the electoral system works.

The key fact about the system is the 5% threshold for representation, which limits the number of parties you need to worry about. Nonetheless that number has been increasing. For a long time only four parties were in contention: the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), the Liberals (FDP) and the Greens. In 2005 the far-left Left (Die Linke) joined the list, followed in 2013 by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Last time around, in 2021, all six of those won seats,* although the Left actually fell fractionally short of the 5% mark and qualified for representation only because it won three constituency seats. SPD, FDP and Greens had a substantial majority between them (51.9% of the vote and 415 of the 735 seats) and formed a coalition government under SPD prime minister Olaf Scholz, which fell apart late last year.

Even if the three were to patch up their differences (unlikely but not impossible), they are clearly not going to win a majority. The SPD is down about ten points in the polls, in the mid teens, although most recently the trend has been slightly upwards. The Greens are a couple of points further back, just below the 14.7% that they got last time, while the FDP vote has halved and they are touch-and-go for making the 5% threshold.

That means that it will be impossible to keep the CDU out of government. It has a big lead, polling around the 30% mark, although that’s noticeably down from its peak of a few months ago. Second in the polls is AfD, which looks like roughly doubling the 10.4% that it got in 2021 – although there are some signs that the strong endorsement it has received from the Trump administration is not working in its favor.

So centre-right and far right will almost certainly have a majority between them. They will not govern in coalition – CDU leader Friedrich Merz, although he is on his party’s right, has made that very clear – but it’s not impossible that, if other options fail, a CDU minority government would be informally supported by AfD.

Even that seems unlikely, since the two are diametrically opposed on the vital issue of the Ukraine war: CDU strongly anti-Russian, AfD pro. The other two strongly anti-Russian parties are the Greens and FDP, so a key question will be whether they plus the CDU win a majority. If the FDP gets back that’s very likely; if not, it will be much more difficult. But if the numbers are there, a CDU coalition with just the Greens would be more stable, since failure of the FDP and Greens to co-operate has been a prime cause of instability in the last two decades.

The Left has also been polling dangerously close to the threshold, although most recently it is looking safer. It is competing with a breakaway group, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which differs with it over Ukraine and immigration (Left pro both, BSW anti); having been well ahead of its parent in the polls last year, BSW has now fallen behind and is struggling to stay above 5%.

If, as seems quite probable, no other workable combination can be found, the fallback position is a grand coalition between the CDU and SPD. Such a coalition has governed for three of the last five terms (2005-09 and 2013-21), but it is never an ideal option. In this situation it is especially problematic because it would make AfD the main opposition force, boosting its credibility in dangerous times.

Merz must take some of the blame [link added] for that danger; his inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric has opened the door wider to the far right (as have leaders of other nominally centre-right parties, notably the Tories in Britain). But if he is now willing to co-operate with other anti-Putinist parties, especially the Greens, it’s not too late for Germany to play its part in countering the common threat.

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* In fact a seventh party was also represented: the South Schleswig Voters’ Association, with 0.12% of the vote, won a single seat; as representing an ethnic minority it is exempt from the threshold.