In the west, no surprises. The Sunday parliamentary elections were won by the Chadetia, or CDU (28.6 percent), second place was the far right AfD (20.8%), the podium was closed by social democrats from the SPD (16.4%). Greens (11.6%) and the Left (8.8%) besides entered the Bundestag, just below the threshold were FDP and BSW Liberals – alt-left organization Sahra Wagenknecht.
All indications are that the chancellor will become Conservative Liberal Friedrich Merz, and the fresh German government will form CDU and SPD. This means returning to Groko – a “great coalition”. She last ruled Germany in the days of Angela Merkel. And although it seemed at the time that the dominance of mass, centred parties was coming to an end, present it is this conventional combination that a large part of German society awaits.
Historical drop in SPD, AfD and Left Invasion
However, this does not mean that there is joy in CDU and SPD staff. Chadeci expected a score above 30 percent, and social democrats achieved the worst score since 1887. This is the aftermath of the failure of conventional electorate – a large industrial working class – and the disastrous reputation of the erstwhile government, led by the SPD.
Nor do the Greens have much to enjoy – they won somewhat little votes than in 2021, erstwhile Europe, and especially young voters, cared about the climate. On the another hand, they lost the least of all the coalitions from their erstwhile term. full defeat was suffered by liberals who in the last election made a two-digit result, and will not enter the fresh Bundestag at all. It was the stubbornness of the finance minister and erstwhile FDP leader Christian Lindner that led to breakdown of the outgoing government.
For this they celebrate utmost parties – AfD and Left. The utmost right was better in any polls, but in comparison to the erstwhile hand it will double the number of tickets. Especially many voters have won in the erstwhile GDR, as well as among workers and young men.
Young Germany more red than brown
It seems that the times erstwhile right-wing populists were surrounded by a German public debate called the "sanitary cordon" are over. The ‘no platforms’ strategy utilized so far by German media has proved to be ineffective. With AfD nobody wants to enter the coalition, but a strong second place will surely let the organization to request advanced positions, e.g. in the Bundestag.
At the same time, it was the request of "no platforms" to AfD that brought comparative success to the Left. Post-communist Die Linke seemed to die out with her East German electorate, and the nail to the party's coffin was to be the departure of the mostcharismatic from her face – Sahra Wagenknecht. Before the election, it was not certain that the Left would enter the government. This changed the tirade of the young MP Heidi Reichinnek, who criticised the chadeks for seeking support from the AfD MPs. It was the loudest tictokovic viral of this campaign.
@heidireichinnekDie spontane Rede nach dem Dammbroch.
- first sound – Heidi Reichinnek, MdB
The Left won the hearts of young voters. According to results, exit polls in the 18-24 age group picked up 25-27 percent of votes. AfD was second with a score of 20-21 percent. So I wasn't rather right to compose a fewer months ago that German lignite youth. To a lesser extent, this applies to urban youth. The Left did the best, of course, in Berlin – the elections were won there and it was by the voices of young people. In the run she talked a lot about the housing crisis, which primarily affects students. It is possible that any influence on this success was besides exotic to the propalaestist attitude of the party. This is simply a subject that warms the hearts of many young Germans – especially those with migration background.
Those who announced that this was the first German election to play a crucial function in social media were right. Both AfD and Die Linke are doing large in them – most likely besides due to the fact that their logic is premium by the polarizing content. In turn, exceptionally aggressive in these elections, Russian misinformation was aimed primarily at center parties.
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The exception to this regulation is the failure of the BSW – the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. The fresh party, centered around the character of the leader, did not exceed the electoral threshold (it lacked only thirteen 1000 votes), although Sahra herself is doing large on the Internet. Unlike her erstwhile party, Die Linke, she failed to scope young voters. His alt-left message directed mainly to the elders, playing the strings of nostalgia behind the old, good Germans, whose citizens drive their native production cars, heat their homes with inexpensive Russian gas and fly on vacations in Majorca without worrying about warming the climate.
Tough coalition and challenges for Poland
Sunday elections will not bring a political earthquake to Germany. Strengthening the extremist wings of the Bundestag does not change the fact that German voices have spread reasonably evenly between the left and the right, and the power will take over the center. However, even if the CDU-SPD coalition comes to fruition, it will not make a strong government. 328 seats in the 650-member Bundestag are a tiny majority. This is due to the fact that the parties disagree on respective key issues.
The hardest bone of disagreement will be economical policy – the SPD would like to keep a pro-social course, while the CDU stands on hard liberal positions. It will so be hard to get a common prescription for a crisis in which the German economy has been in for a long time. Social Democrats will most likely besides defy a extremist tightening of the course in migration policy, which predicts chadeci. And these 2 topics were the most crucial in the campaign.
The defence and abroad policy were besides unprecedentedly important. The future (most likely) Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced a hard pro-European and pro-Ukrainian course. He threatened that Donald Trump might neglect to meet his allied NATO commitments, which is why Europe, including Germany, must arm themselves. Among his key partners he mentioned France and Poland. This is not precisely in the taste of the Pacific and pro-Russian parts of the SPD, but all indicates that it will not have much to say after the election. Following the defeat of Chancellor Scholz, the party's leadership has a chance to take over very popular Germany, and at the same time the clearly pro-Ukrainian defence minister Boris Pistorius.
However, the blocking number of the pro-Russian AfD and the Pacific Left may prevent these announcements. Greater budgetary machinations – i.e. the creation of a peculiar fund for the Bundeswehr or the improvement of the debt brake – require a qualified majority (2/3 votes), which the coalition will not have even with the Greens' votes. The left would, in theory, have no problem expanding debt, but the leader Die Linke Jan van Aken explicitly excluded support for solutions aimed at expanding arms spending.
At the same time, it is hard to justice how in practice Merz's closeness with Poland will look. Between the chadeks of Merzem and Tuski it will most likely be a spark, but it will be hard for the fresh government to solve problems which have fallen into shadow on Polish-German relations during the erstwhile Bundestag term. The payment of reparations for Polish victims of Nazism will most likely not include money, and the annoying Polish controls on the Polish-German border, according to the run announcements of Merza, are only to be strengthened.
