Who What When Where Why: The German Election, Explained

In November, 1932, German voters went to the polls. For year after year, establishment governments had fallen as fast as they rose, and none of them had provided solutions for the problem at hand. Though populist dissatisfaction was peaking, only one in three voters chose the Nazi Party. 

A series of events ensued.

After the dust settled, the Western powers needed to ensure West Germany would never walk down the same path again. They designed the constitution to, in every way, sacrifice flexibility for stability, making it almost impossible for a government to collapse between elections. And those elections are run by the MMP system, with its inbuilt moderating, coalition-building incentives. But Olaf Scholz has still managed to do it. He has called time on his own government. Soon after firing his Finance Minister (Justin Trudeau is also at this stage of collapse right now), he held a vote of no confidence he expected to lose, and lost it. The next election would have taken place in September. Now, Germans will go to the polls in February.

We New Zealand political observers should keep a watchful eye on the country we took our electoral system from. (Though German politics still operates differently in some ways. Our largest party puts forward their leader as Prime Minister; German parties select a Chancellor candidate at each election that does not have to be their leader.) This election looks set to be, in many ways, a rerun of the 2023 NZ election. The government that fell here was Labour-Greens - their government that just came down more resembles Labour-Greens-ACT. So let’s start with their governing parties.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (Olaf Scholz)

Current polling: 17%

Last election: 25.7%

NZ Labour, 2023: 26.9%

The centre-left Social Democrats are most comparable to our Labour Party. However, Labour’s status as one of our two biggest parties has only rarely been threatened (in the mid-90s and 2017). The SPD have spent the 21st century bleeding out, governing in coalition with Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU (akin to National) and suffering electorally for it. Even as Jacinda took power, the SPD collapsed under 20% support. Finance Minister Scholz’s unflappable demeanour breathed new life into the SPD amidst COVID, floods and feuding in 2021. In just four months, the Social Democrats soared by 11%. That put Scholz in prime position to form a government. 

Since then, it's been one thing after another. Inflation and anti-immigrant hostility have each done their damage. So have fractures in the coalition: while the Greens limply pleaded with Labour to do more, the FDP and Greens took to each others’ throats over whether to spend more or less. The Social Democrats are once again battling for second place. Reelection looks near impossible - certainly far less likely than Labour’s task last year. His opening salvo to the campaign, promising “massive investment”, suggests the opposite strategy to Hipkins - and perhaps more of a focus on preventing the Greens from overtaking than clawing back the centre vote.

Alliance 90/The Greens (Robert Habeck)

Current polling: 12%

Last election: 14.7%

Greens, 2023: 11.6%

Oh, the Greens. 2021 looked, at long last, to be their moment. Two decades removed from the embarrassment of their overly centrist first spell in government, they had the magic formula figured out. They were juicing up voters fed up with the establishment Grand Coalition, while still appearing moderate enough to be trusted with the reigns. On course to overtake the Social Democrats, they nominated Annalena Baerbock to replace Merkel…

And things kinda-sorta fell apart. Not totally - the election still lifted their vote share just as much as it did for the Social Democrats. But Baerbock tripped over a series of scandals, and Scholz took the Chancellery. Now they have chosen the 2021 runner-up, Robert Habeck. He’s also a Realo (centrist) like Baerbock, but will have an easier time selling himself to moderates. Aside from identity politics, he’s personally governed a rural northern state and is currently Vice-Chancellor, with responsibilities for economics and the environment. His odds of becoming Chancellor are paper-thin. However, after the disappointments of recent years, in some ways they will be thankful for the SPD downfall. Just like in New Zealand, the Greens will angle to overtake the SPD as the main party on the left. However, the long-term plan for forming a government seems fraught if they can no longer stand one of their coalition partners…

Free Democratic Party (no Chancellor candidate; led by Christian Lindner for the last eleven years)

Current polling: 5%

Last election: 11.4%

ACT, 2023: 8.6%

If anybody will be bitterly regretting sipping from that strangler of a poisoned chalice in 2021, it’s the classical liberal (i.e right-wing but not socially conservative) Free Democrats. They blew up negotiations for a CDU-Green-FDP coalition in 2017. Lindner famously altered Churchill to say “It's better not to govern than to govern wrongly”. He’ll surely be wishing now he could have gotten a government like that, rather than one with two left-wing partners. Understandably, his voters have revolted at getting a government nothing like what they voted for. Coupled with the broader anti-establishment revolt, right-wing voters are streaming away to illiberal options. 

The only silver lining for them is that they are, paradoxically, the likeliest of the three parties to return to government. The FDP may have alienated many of its voters over the past few years. What remains is still one of the more reasonable parties in German politics; at a time of such extremism, they will be first in the queue for the likeliest new Chancellor to call.

That brings us to the opposition parties, starting on the right and working our way back to the left:

Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union (Friedrich Merz)

Last election: 24.1%

Current polling: 32% 

NZ National, 2023: 38%

The CDU, like National, have dominated their nation’s politics historically - aided by close collaboration with the CSU, their more socially conservative counterpart in the second-most-populous state of Bavaria. Merkel sustained this leadership, hovering slightly above current polling. However, when she departed in 2021, Armin Laschet crashed the CDU/CSU campaign, most memorably by being caught on camera laughing amidst footage of devastating flooding. 

Merkel’s cautious centrism has been replaced by the more firmly right-wing edge of Merz. He enjoyed a lively rivalry with Merkel in the early 2000s before withdrawing from politics from 2009 to 2021. Having returned at just the right moment to capture the party, he is now on track to become Chancellor. He can be expected to spend less money, cut taxes, tamp down on social progress and immigration and redouble Germany’s international commitments and defense posture. The great challenge will be if he can walk the line to provide responsible governance with broad appeal while also winning back voters from the far right.

Alternative for Germany (Alice Weidel)

Last election: 10.4%

Current polling: 19%

It’s hard to find a New Zealand equivalent for the AfD. We simply don’t have a politically influential far-right, and even by the standards of Europe’s far-right, the AfD are as fringe as it gets for a successful political outfit. Like, to put this into context, the BfV - domestic police responsible for surveilling extremist threats to democracy - have classified them as a threat to actively monitor. If any other party chose to enter a coalition with them, they would instantly lose their other coalition partners and half their own MPs would revolt. 

The populist hostility of the AfD finds many outlets against wokeness and whatnot, but is centered on doing everything possible to get migrants out of Germany. Moreover, they are pro-Russia. Many of these attitudes can be traced back to the extreme ideology of the German Democratic Republic, as the AfD performs best in East German states despite its right-wing economic leanings. All of these traits are shared to varying extents with the…

Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance – Reason and Justice (no Chancellor candidate; led by Take A Verdammt Guess)

Current polling: 7%

Last election: didn’t exist until January this year!

NZFirst, 2023: 6.1%

It’s a clumsy comparison between the BSW and NZFirst, but it’s the best you’ll get. This is your classic European populist fusion: at the same time as they carp about immigrants and bemoan aid to Ukraine, Sahra Wagenknecht touts her Marxist credentials and promises to support the working class and protect welfare. As a new party fishing in a somewhat similar pool to the AfD, they are on track for a much smaller result. They could well still get significant numbers into Parliament, and only add to the ranks of the anti-establishment populists nobody else will work with. 

Because that’s the thing - for however strong the extremes are getting, they aren’t entering government any time soon, as all the other parties rule them out. All they can hope to do is shift the discourse as other parties cave on issues to pander to their voters, and to, eventually, grow to become so powerful that the other parties can no longer shut them out. Which brings us to the final of our parties to discuss…

The Left (no Chancellor candidate; co-chaired by Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken)

Current polling: 3%

Last election: 4.9%

Though not always ruled out by the left-wing parties, Die Linke have been forever confined to the margins of German politics by their status as successors to the legacy of East Germany, putting forward left to far-left perspectives on a variety of issues. However, after battling along just over the threshold for some time, they seem now doomed to practically the dustbin of history. Their lunch has been eaten; too many of their voters are fed up with progressivism on too many issues and looking to the extremes. They will be fighting hard to take voters back from the AfD and BSW and not just return to the Bundestag through electorates but really show they have a future as a bloc. Sidelined by their far more publicity-hungry counterparts, their chances look bleak.

So, then, that’s the parties. The magic number necessary for a coalition is dependent on how many overhang seats emerge, and unlike New Zealand, a huge number often come out of German elections. However, they will certainly need over 300. If we consider the last election, the SPD+Green+FPD math looked like 206+118+91, and the FPD will not work again with the other two. Let’s do some basic calculations ignoring overhang seats to get an idea of the proportions involved.

At current polling, the SPD would get 102 seats and the Greens 72. At best, they could stitch together a coalition with the Left to add 18 more seats, for a total of 192. Now you see the difficulties of a return. On the opposite side of the aisle, however, you start to see the real trouble looming. Here in NZ, there was a clear emerging right-wing majority over 2023; National and ACT formed around half of the vote, with the only question being if NZFirst would end up being necessary. 

The CDU are headed for 192 seats in this forget-the-bigger-picture calculation, and the FDP for an added 30 to get to a total of 222, and you’re well short of how many you need. Could they rise through a combination of winning overhang electorates and waging a good campaign? Maybe! But they’re at 37% of the vote combined right now, and winning another 14%’s worth is a tall task. This isn’t the UK, where you can get away with forming a government on a third of the vote. 

So they’ll need a coalition partner - and they’ll never enter a coalition with the AfD, the BSW, or the Left - and that just leaves the SPD and the Greens. So, we can foresee one of three outcomes. One: Germany forms a CDU/CSU-FDP coalition, its most right-wing government in a generation, akin to our own. Two, and probably least likely between the numbers and the ideological disharmony: Germany forms a CDU/CSU-FDP-Green coalition, and the Jamaica vision of 2017 finally comes to fruition, for good or for ill. Or, three, perhaps most plausibly, Germany is sentenced to a Germany coalition of CDU/CSU-FDP-SPD, and the Grand Coalition lumbers on once more. All told, the first seems like the cleanest option in terms of governance - if the second or third happens, who knows how soon Germany will be back at the polls again…and how much hay the extremes will make of it all.