The Newly Elected German Parliament
Germany has voted, and the results are a damning report card for the country’s outgoing government. All members of the unpopular traffic light coalition of social democrats, greens and liberal democrats suffered significant losses compared to the 2021 election, as the party of outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz, the SPD, saw its worst-ever result at the federal level in post-war Germany. Despite reaching its second worst result in history, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and sister party CSU will be the largest faction in the new parliament, making Friedrich Merz the likely new chancellor of Europe’s struggling economic and political heavyweight.
Since Merz and his party have ruled out working with the far-right AfD, which was the biggest winner of the election by roughly doubling its share of the vote from 2021, the new government will most likely be formed by the conservative CDU/CSU and the social democrats (SPD). Due to the fact that the liberal democratic party (FDP) and the newly founded, leftist-populist Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) didn’t clear the 5-percent threshold for entry in the new Bundestag, CDU/CSU and SPD do have the necessary majority to form a new government without having to form an unwanted and potentially unstable three-party coalition including the Greens.
The election, which saw the largest turnout in decades at 82.5 percent, will see Germany move a great deal to the right, as designated chancellor Friedrich Merz made clear in his last campaign speech on the eve of the election. “The left is over,” Merz said at a campaign party in Munich. “There is no left majority and there will be no more left policy in Germany,” he added, not speaking like a candidate who wants to bring the country closer together. Instead Merz vowed to govern for “people who haven’t lost their marbles” rather than for “green and leftist nutjobs” – employing a rhetoric more reminiscent of Donald Trump than of the leader of former chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian conservative party.