Potential new German chancellor Friedrich Merz faces a hard path ahead.
Germany’s election results went more or less as expected. More or less. The center-right CDU/CSU led by Friedrich Merz won the largest share of the vote with (on the latest count) 28.5 percent of the vote, down a percentage point or two from where it had been earlier in the campaign, but up from the 24.1 percent it had taken in the 2021 election. Merz will almost certainly be the next chancellor. The populist right AfD came in second with 20.8 percent, doubling its share from last time, roughly as forecast. That makes it the big winner along with Die Linke, a party of the hard left descended from East Germany’s ruling party which scored 8.8 percent, much more than had been expected until recently. That’s about four percentage points more than in 2021, despite the defection of Sahra Wagenknecht, whose breakaway BSW, hard left but opposed to mass immigration and climate zealotry just failed to cross the 5 percent threshold legally required (with one exception) to enter into parliament, a fate it shared with the FDP, a free market(ish) party that until recently had been in the governing coalition.
The dominant party in that coalition, Olaf Scholz’s center-left SPD, suffered the humiliation of coming behind the AfD, with only 16.4 percent of the vote, down from 25.7 percent in 2021, the party’s worst result since 1887, and less even than it managed in the highly questionable elections held a month or so after Hitler became chancellor. The Greens also lost ground, with their share falling from 14.7 percent to 11.6 percent.
If those percentages hold up, they will mean that, translated into parliamentary seats, the CDU/CSU could form a coalition with the SPD alone. Such a coalition would have a narrow majority. Merz has reiterated that he won’t enter into a coalition (or any informal arrangements) with the AfD, which contains a strong element which genuinely deserves the much-abused label “far right.” The AfD has said that it would work with the CDU/CSU. If rebuffed, as Merz is saying that it will be, it will become the main opposition party, a position that it could easily give it another boost.
A CDU/CSU/SPD coalition is, even if in an improved form, a government of a troubled status quo. With the SPD as his partner, will Merz be able to enact a tough enough immigration regime to head off the AfD’s further rise? It’s also unclear by how much Merz will be able to walk back the commitment to net zero which has done so much to damage Germany’s faltering economy. The SPD supports the race to net zero. The AfD opposes it.
Merz has also been talking about strengthening “Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA. . . . After Donald Trump’s statements last week . . . it is clear that . . . this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe. . . . I am very curious to see how we are heading towards the Nato summit at the end of June . . . whether we will still be talking about Nato in its current form or whether we will have to establish an independent European defense capability much more quickly.”
Those are tough words from the likely new leader of Germany, the most prominent of the NATO countries to neglect defense spending and rely on the U.S. to do the heavy lifting in the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall (and let’s not mention Nord Stream). Merz was not, of course, pleased by the support shown for the AfD by Elon Musk and (slightly more obliquely) JD Vance.
However, a significant increase in Germany’s defense spending would probably require easing Germany’s constitutionally enshrined “debt brake.” Theoretically that is a change Die Linke and the AfD, both parties overly sympathetic to Russia, could block. The AfD has said it would vote against any easing. Die Linke favors scrapping the brake, but it also wants to see a cut in expenditure on the military. Its best chance of at least slowing any increase in defense spending would be to vote to retain the brake.
Parliament can approve a temporary suspension of the brake in the event of an emergency, which is one route Merz may take. Another route to boosting defense spending might be joint funding either on an EU-wide basis or by agreement between European countries, although what Germany’s constitutional court would have to say about that is far from clear.
What is clear is that Merz faces a hard path ahead. And time is not on his side.