For decades, the German party system was one of the most stable in Europe. What has changed and why? Why is there so much support for the AfD? What is the left's position in this race? In a pre-election political guide, Kamil Trepka explains.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
The fast-track elections for the German Bundestag, to be held on Sunday, February 23, are likely not only to end Chancellor Olaf Scholz's short term, but will mark a sad caesura for German politics.
If current polls are confirmed, one in five voters will cast their vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) - never in the history of post-war Germany has a party to the right of the Christian Democrats won so much support at the national level.
It remains unclear until the very end how many parties will enter parliament - two electoral lists are balancing around the electoral threshold at the end of the campaign, so only after all the votes are counted will it be decided whether five or even seven groups will enter the Bundestag.
The end of the Deutsche Ordnung
For decades, the German party system was one of the most stable in Europe. From the 1950s until the mid-1980s, the West German parliament was dominated by two groupings - the conservative Christian Democrats, formed by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). The liberals of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), who governed with both the Christian Democrats and the SPD, were the tongue in cheek.
In the 1980s. Members of a fourth party, the Green Party, sat on the benches of the Bundestag, and after the reunification of Germany in 1990, post-Communists from East Germany were also elected to the nationwide parliament, appearing at the time under the banner of the Party of Democratic Socialism (between 2005 and 2007, the PDS was joined by former SPD members disillusioned with Gerhard Schröder's social policies, including former Social Democratic chairman Oskar Lafontaine, which resulted in the grouping's rebranding to Linke, or simply "Left").
The next stage in the "development" of the German party system was the emergence in 2013 of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which emerged as a collective of supporters of a return to the German brand, Euroskeptics, national liberals and right-wing conservatives. In the September 2013 Bundestag elections, when the Christian Democrats led by Angela Merkel won as much as 41.5 percent of the vote, the AfD failed to cross the electoral threshold.
The AfD's big comeback came after the migration crisis of 2015-2016, when anti-immigrant and racist sentiment intensified in Germany, as well as across Europe. The AfD's electoral success - in the 2017 and 2021 elections it was supported by 12.6 and 10.4 percent of voters, respectively - did not prompt the party to move to more centrist positions, on the contrary: the party founded by "Eurosceptic professors" has radicalized and today represents far-right views, particularly on the issue of migration policy and integration of people with migrant backgrounds, who today make up about one-fifth of Germany's population.
The AfD supports the lifting of economic sanctions on Russia, advocates the reconstruction (!) of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, and its politicians have repeatedly - in thought, speech, deed and omission - proven that they are happy to serve as Vladimir Putin's fifth column on the Rhine, Elbe and Danube.
When Elon Musk virtually connected with the AfD's electoral congress in late January, delegates gave the South African billionaire a lively welcome, with which they once again manifested their affiliation with the international far-right.
The return of the good old CDU
Despite the AfD's record high support, it is almost out of the question that it will be part of a future governing coalition. In the polls, the Christian Democrats are in the lead (gaining 27-32 percent support), clearly ahead of the AfD (20-21 percent), Chancellor Olaf Scholz's SPD (15-17 percent), the Green Party (13-14 percent) and the Left (5-9 percent). The fate of the liberal FDP and the new grouping of Sahra Wagenknecht is at stake - both groups have ratings around four and five percent.
The new chancellor is likely to be CDU chairman Friedrich Merz - a conservative Catholic and economic liberal from Westphalia, years ago Angela Merkel's main intra-party rival, who left for business in 2009 after losing his battle with the chancellor. After a hiatus of almost a decade, he returned to active politics and was elected CDU president in 2022 - after two unsuccessful attempts in 2018 and 2021.
Merz promised the Christian Democrats a return to the "good old CDU" and an end to the centrist course of the Merkel era: the CDU was again to be a conservative party with a pro-business economic profile, not a social democracy of light (which it never was, by the way; the social successes of Merkel's rule were mostly pushed through by the SPD, with which the Christian Democrats formed a so-called grand coalition - besides, it is worth recalling that in 2017 the Chancellor voted in the Bundestag... against the introduction of marriage equality).
Merz, whose ambition is to "saw through the AfD's support," also announced a renewed tightening of migration policy, and Merkel's agreement that Germany should accept Syrian refugees in the summer of 2015 - it was in this context that the Chancellor famously uttered the phrase "We can do it!" - considered in retrospect a violation of the law.
In search of the perfect coalition partner
The biggest problem for Friedrich Merz is the selection of future coalition partners. Since the FDP, the traditional Christian Democrats' coalition partner, may not enter parliament - and even if the Liberals cross the electoral threshold, their support is so modest that a Christian Liberal coalition will certainly not have a majority in the Bundestag - Merz is left with only inconvenient options: a so-called. grand coalition with the SPD or an alliance with the Green Party, and if there is still a shortage of votes, a Jamaican coalition (Christian Democrats + Greens + FDP) and a Kenyan coalition (Christian Democrats + SPD + Greens) are still possible. And this is where another problem arises.
The chairman of its sister CSU, eccentric Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder, has publicly announced that under no circumstances will he support a coalition with the Greens, whom he considers "the main blockers on the migration issue"; he will graciously agree to a joint government with the SPD, but only on the condition that Chancellor Olaf Scholz does not join. Also joining the chorus of blockers is FDP chairman (and dismissed former finance minister in November 2024) Christian Lindner, who has announced that his party will not enter any coalition that includes the Greens....
Friedrich Merz has repeatedly declared that his Christian Democrats will not cooperate with the AfD. Some commentators stopped believing Merz's assurances after he presented a resolution and then a bill to the Bundestag in late January 2025 on "curbing the illegal influx of third-country nationals into Germany," which included, among other things, the introduction of permanent passport controls at the state border (which is incompatible with EU law), the elimination of family reunification for migrant women and migrants with subsidiary protection status, or new powers for federal police to detain foreigners in the country at stations without a residence permit.
The resolution, which had no legal effect whatsoever, passed with a velvet few-vote majority (thanks to the support of the FDP and AfD), meanwhile the bill no longer received the required majority because some CDU and FDP deputies simply did not participate in the vote. Had Merz's bill been passed by the Bundestag, it would have been the first law to be passed by the federal parliament with the support of the AfD. Merz's legislative charge outraged the left side of the political scene and resulted in a series of anti-right-wing demonstrations of thousands in many German cities.
The grisly end of the "coalition of progress"
The immediate reason for the demise of the traffic light coalition (named after the colors of the parties that formed it - SPD red, FDP yellow and Greens green) in November 2024 was Finance Minister Christian Linder's (FDP) disagreement with the loosening of the so-called debt brake rules.
This regulation, enshrined in 2009 in the Basic Law, significantly limits the federal government's ability to incur debt (in principle, newly incurred debt cannot be more than 0.35 percent of GDP annually). For a couple of years, parties on the left (SPD, Greens, Linke) have been calling for reform of the rules to provide funds for necessary investments in deteriorating infrastructure and to speed up the ecological transformation of the economy; meanwhile, parties on the center-right, namely the Christian Democrats and the FDP, refuse to relax these rules, explaining that the state should plan its spending sparingly.
In November 2024, Chancellor Scholz demanded that Linder exempt spending on Ukraine from the debt brake regime, formally declaring a "state of fiscal distress." Since Linder was unwilling (or, as he believes: unable for legal reasons) to agree to such a solution, Scholz dismissed his unruly finance minister, and the FDP left the coalition (with the exception of Transport and Digital Infrastructure Minister Volker Wissing, who preferred to surrender his party ID to the FDP). The Liberals' departure from the government resulted in Olaf Scholz's cabinet losing its parliamentary majority, with the result that elections scheduled for September 2025 were postponed until Sunday, February 23.
Ambivalent balance of the Olaf Scholz government
Although the "coalition of progress" (that's what the coalition called itself in the 2021 coalition agreement) has a few successes to its credit - including. raised the minimum wage, reformed the unemployment benefits system, introduced a cheap all-German ticket for public and regional transportation (initially for 49 euros, from January 1, 2025 for 58 euros per month), facilitated the naturalization of foreigners, increased federal funding for social housing and the share of green energy in the energy mix, partially legalized marijuana possession, enacted a new self-determination law (making it easier for trans people to reconcile their gender on documents) or created a €100 billion special fund for the purchase of armaments for the Bundeswehr - failed to create a common, compelling narrative, meandering from one image crisis to the next.
Would the fate of the coalition, which succeeded in whipping up inflation caused by the aftermath of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine and making Germany independent of Russian raw materials, have been different if Chancellor Scholz had communicated with voters in a less matter-of-fact, more emotional way? If Minister Lindner had abandoned fiscal neoliberalism and discovered the socialliberal in him, would his party today be fighting not to cross the electoral threshold, but racing with the Greens to see which of the two parties holds the soul government in the progressive German bourgeoisie? These questions will unfortunately no longer be answered.
Showdown on the Left
Reading the programs of the parties to the left of center (i.e., SPD, Greens and Linke), there are quite a few similarities at first glance. Keynesianism and multibillion-dollar state investments dominate economic policy, while a commitment to the welfare state dominates social policy. The groupings call for increasing taxes for the wealthiest while reducing the burden on lower-earning households, in addition to wanting to keep pension levels around 50 percent of the last salary. While Linke's program is more "social democratic" (read: leftist) than that of the SPD, it is by no means a plan to install "21st century socialism" in Germany in the style of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. However, there is one fundamental thing that distinguishes Linke from the Social Democrats and the Greens - the attitude to the war in Ukraine and to NATO.
The emotional debate in the Bundestag around Friedrich Merz's proposed change in migration policy also featured Heidi Reichinnek, the 36-year-old leader of Linke's electoral list, who brashly attacked the CDU chairman. Thanks to an effective social media campaign, including on TikTok (by the end of the election campaign, MP Reichinnek was followed on this platform by more than 540,000 people, roughly the same number as Prime Minister Tusk!), poll support for Linke skyrocketed from around 4-5 percent in January to as high as 9 percent in the latest polls before the election. The resurrection of this peculiar Lazarus of the German left resulted in a deterioration of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which fell below the electoral threshold in many polls.
Sahra Wagenknecht - once an idealistic communist, for years one of the most important figures of the Linke left wing, and from 2015-2019 co-chair of the party's parliamentary faction in the Bundestag - left the group in October 2023 and founded her own association, which later became an all-German party.
The BSW combines a social economic program with demands for a tougher migration policy, a "better thought-out climate policy," and opposition to woke'ism and cancel culture. However, this new political force, which sounds like an ideal proposal for a representative of the "conservative left" (also known in Poland by the term alt-left), has one major flaw: the grouping is thoroughly anti-American, and therefore both pro-Russian and pro-Putin. When Volodymyr Zelenski spoke before the Bundestag in June 2024, representatives of two groups ostentatiously left the hall: AfD and BSW.
But back to Linke: after the exit of the Wagenknecht party, it simply began to resemble a more left-wing version of the SPD. Except for its attitude toward Ukraine.
The SPD generally supports the supply of German arms to embattled Ukraine, continued financial support for the Kyiv government, and German membership in the North Atlantic Alliance (today it opposes only the transfer of Taunus cruise missiles to Ukraine).
Linke, on the other hand, has officially condemned Russian aggression, recognizes Russia as the aggressor and does not question the right of Ukrainian women and men to self-defense, but at the same time... does not agree with the federal government sending military aid to Ukraine, as she opposes any export of German-made weapons. She is also skeptical of NATO, claiming that it is not a "community of values" but a "pure military alliance that serves national and economic interests" - she would like to replace it with a "new European security architecture" based on the Union and other "international institutions." She supports sanctions against Russia's military industry and oligarchs, but... does not agree with sanctions that could make life worse for ordinary Russians.
Perhaps a Western European leftist will find this line of thinking sensible, but to those in Eastern and Central Europe, it sounds like an aberration and even dangerous naiveté.
It won't get better, but it won't get worse either
Among all the bad news coming out of Germany in the coming days, there is also one, and maybe even two, good ones.
First, whatever governing coalition is formed after the elections, Germany will maintain its pro-Ukrainian and pro-EU course. And second, the weakening of the BSW and the party's potential non-entry into the Bundestag is a further step to the German left's self-cleansing of Putin's Russia enthusiasts.
