Sunday’s election results indicate that the Germans are following the French, just a few years behind.
The rise of “anti-systemic” or “populist” parties of the Right and Left are forcing the old mainstream parties into permanent coalitions to keep the “extremists” out. But when the centrists fail to improve their countries’ position, the result is to strengthen the populists still further, since opposition has nowhere else to go.
The risk is that Germany and France — still the two leading countries of the European Union by far — will spend years in a condition of political stagnation, incapable of responding effectively to the international, economic, and social challenges facing them — challenges which have (in the European perception at least) been drastically increased by the Trump administration.
Such paralysis would drive still further the contempt of the Trump administration for European views and European interests. The resulting sense of crisis in Germany could bring the parties together behind radical reforms, but it could also deepen further Germany’s increasingly bitter ideological divisions.
The “victors” in these elections, the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) led by Friedrich Merz, achieved the second worst result in their history (the worst being in the last elections in 2021) with 28.6 percent. That was at least better than their future coalition partners the Social Democrats (SPD), who gained the worst result since the 1880s, with only 16.4 percent. Thus even put together, the two parties that have dominated postwar Germany will have only a small majority in parliament.
In France, in 2017 and 2022, Emmanuel Macron only managed to defeat Marine Le Pen of the right-wing National Front (now renamed The National Rally) by effectively combining all the mainstream parties behind him. In last year’s parliamentary elections, that strategy collapsed when the National Rally and a coalition of left-wing parties between them reduced Macron’s parliamentary support to a minority.
Though presidential elections are not due till 2027, Macron is a lame duck, unable to pass significant legislation through a bitterly divided parliament, and increasingly reduced to ruling by decree.
A gloomy prognosis for the next German coalition government would be that this duck is lame before it even emerges from the egg. On the key issues of migration and economic reform, the two parties are far apart. New Chancellor Friedrich Merz (whose personal popularity ratings are well below even those of his defeated SPD rival, outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholtz) is a former BlackRock executive whose trans-atlanticist radical free market instincts are deeply distrusted by the SPD.
The Social Democrats have also been bitterly opposed to Merz’s attempt to block the rise of the populist right-wing Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) by adopting a much tougher line on immigration, which opinion polls show is the chief concern of many Germans and the principal reason for voting for the AfD. A string of recent terrorist attacks by Muslim asylum-seekers has raised this anxiety still further.
The AfD doubled its vote to 20.8 percent — though this was slightly less than it had hoped. At present, the so-called “firewall” of the other parties against forming a coalition with the AfD (which they accuse of Nazi antecedents and attitudes) continues to stand — but as in other European countries, the eventual collapse of the firewall and the entry of the populist right into government now seems only a matter of time. In several states of the former East Germany, where AfD has its strongest base of support, it is becoming more and more difficult to form majority governments without them.
A key question for the AfD, and German politics, is whether or how soon the party leader Alice Weidel can imitate the successful strategy of her ideological ally Marine Le Pen and purge her party of its more rabid elements. Some of these really do recall aspects of the Nazis. This can however hardly be said of Weidel herself, a Lesbian married to a Sri Lankan woman, or of most of her other leading colleagues. As elsewhere, the German establishment’s long and polemical demonization of critics of mass immigration as “Nazis” and “racists” in the face of steadily rising public concern about the issue has if anything only contributed to “normalizing” figures like Weigel in the eyes of many Germans.
A growing number of German analysts are therefore beginning in private to predict an eventual coalition between the CDU and AfD. This would however lead to a German political scene more deeply and bitterly divided than at any time since 1945. The biggest surprise of this election was the strong showing of the radical anti-establishment Left party (Die Linke) with 8.6 percent.
The Left cut deeply into support for the Social Democrats and the Greens (11.6 percent), who are increasingly seen by younger voters as just another establishment party, and have alienated their leftist elements with their extreme bellicosity against Russia. The Left’s support among voters aged 18-25, at 25 percent, was almost double that for the CDU or SPD.
The Left also recovered votes from the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), forcing it below the five percent threshold necessary to enter parliament. BSW is in essence a faction of the Left that broke with the party because of its adherence to “woke” ideology and open immigration. Its defeat removes (at least for this electoral period) a party that could have bridged the gap between Left and Right on these issues, driving still further the ideological polarization of German politics.
This is a bad time for Germans to be so divided. The economy is stagnant, and increased competition from China and increased tariffs from the Trump administration are likely to make things even worse in the years to come. For the first time in their history, German car makers are laying off tens of thousands of workers. German innovation has shrunk drastically, and German infrastructure is in desperate need of renewal, at a cost estimated at €400 billion ($419 billion).
A resumption of cheap Russian gas imports would do much to help, but continued hostility to Russia is one of the few things on which the CDU and SPD agree. The need for huge domestic investments is crashing into promises to go on aiding Ukraine, and the strict constraints of the German constitutional limit on debt, which the SPD would like to relax but the CDU has promised not to change.
Meanwhile the policies (or rather the statements) of the Trump administration have led to a real concentration on German re-armament, with even the deeply trans-atlanticist Merz talking of the need for European “independence” from America. This is exaggerated. Nobody in the Trump administration is talking of withdrawal from NATO, or ceasing to defend it within its existing borders. The Trump administration has only withdrawn the “promise” to extend NATO to Ukraine — which Merz, Scholtz and almost every German politician has said that Germany will under no circumstances fight to defend.
But so deep has been German psychological dependence on the U.S for security that even a rhetorical threat to this security blanket is producing near-hysteria in the German security establishment. The problem is that any serious common European defense requires deep economic-military integration and the handing of more national powers to the EU — something that is opposed by most CDU voters and all of those for AfD and the Left.
A fundamental German dilemma is that Germany needs radical new policies from a coalition of the same two parties whose past policies have led the country into this mess. Not merely have the CDU and SPD alternated in power for the past six decades, but the last CDU Chancellor, Angela Merkel, three times headed a coalition with the SPD that failed to implement any serious reforms.
Merkel was also responsible for allowing the huge wave of refugees from the Middle East that drove the rise of AfD. The natural default mode of any coalition between is towards compromise, conformism and caution - and caution is the last thing Germany needs right now.
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