Merz's Germany? The next Bundestag election and beyond

If the opinion polls are accurate, the CDU/CSU will take a comfortable first place but the AfD are entrenched in second and there is still no agreement on dealing with them

The state of play

The next federal election in Germany is due to be held on 28 September 2025. If opinion polls are broadly correct, and the election was held tomorrow, the result would be roughly as follows:

CDU/CSU 33 per cent
AfD 19 per cent
SPD 14 per cent
Greens 10 per cent
Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht 8 per cent
FPD 4 per cent
Die Linke 3 per cent

The remaining nine per cent would be spread among the Free Voters and a number of very small fringe parties. Under reforms agreed in March 2023 but subject to interim modification by the Federal Constitutional Court in July this year, the size of the Bundestag is fixed at 630, and parties are only represented in the legislature if they exceed a threshold of five per cent of the vote or win three of the 299 constituency seats.

At the last election, the Free Democrats, currently the third partner in the governing coalition, won no constituency seats and relied on the party list to gain them 91 seats in the Bundestag with 11.4 per cent of the vote. Their current polling suggests they could drop out of the legislature altogether at the next election, as they did in 2013. Die Linke, the other party currently below the electoral threshold, won three constituencies in 2021 and 36 seats on the list, with 4.9 per cent, so may be able to survive, though those constituency wins are critical to their parliamentary future.

The Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union are clearly set to top the polls and win substantially the largest number of seats in the new Bundestag. But they will not win an outright majority—no party ever has since the Federal Republic was established in 1949—so even if they take a healthy 200+ seats they will need at least one coalition partner. Traditionally, they have looked to the liberal, free-market FDP, governing with it from 1949 to 1966, 1982 to 1998 and 2009 to 2013, but if the Free Democrats fail to make the threshold for representation, that possibility will not exist.

The Social Democratic Party which is the leading party in the coalition government is on current indicators heading for a catastrophic defeat. In 2021, it took a quarter of the vote and won 206 seats, but Olaf Scholz has endured a torrid time as chancellor and his popularity has plummeted. If the party’s current level of support of 14 per cent is even close to accurate, that would be an historic reverse: it has never scored less than 20 per cent in a federal election since 1949, and if it wins fewer than 100 seats, which is wholly possible, that will also be an unprecedentedly poor result. The last time it received less than 20 per cent of the vote in a free election was in February 1890, only 15 years after the party’s foundation.

The SPD’s current coalition partners, the Greens (formally Alliance 90/The Greens, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), are on course to lose a third of their support. In 2021 they scored 14.7 per cent, giving them 118 seats, but as things stand they will emerge from the forthcoming election with something of the order of 70. That would be a return to the level of support they achieved for most of the 2000s and 2010s when they were largely in opposition. If, as some predict, the FDP drops out of the Bundestag altogether, this could leave the parties which currently form the government with a combined total of as few as 150 or 160 seats, only a quarter of the Bundestag.

The headline, apart from the buoyancy of the CDU/CSU, is the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. Founded only 11 years ago in February 2013, it did not have any seats in the Bundestag until 2017, when it more than doubled its support to 12.6 per cent and burst onto the parliamentary landscape with 94 members. At the last election, the party actually fell back slightly, to 10.4 per cent and 83 seats, but current opinion polls place it second only to the CDU/CSU, and if it does indeed win nearly a fifth of the vote it will easily break the 100-seat barrier for the first time.

At the same time, the newly founded, left-wing, populist, nationalist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance—Reason and Justice (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht—Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit), entering its first federal election since its formation in December last year, is polling at eight per cent, which could yield as many as 50 seats in the Bundestag. The BSW represents a platform which has few comparators, certainly in the United Kingdom; its leader, Sahra Wagenknecht, was a member of the ruling (Marxist-Leninist) Socialist Unity Party in the German Democratic Republic before unification, then joined its legal successor, the Party of Democratic Socialism, in 1989. During that time, she was a member of the PDS’s Communist Platform, a far-left faction. In 2007, the PDS merged with the Labour and Social Justice—The Electoral Alternative, another far-left group, to form Die Linke. Wagenknecht was a member of Die Linke and led its group in the Bundestag from 2015 to 2019, but left the party last year to establish her own organisation.

The BSW is firmly left-wing on economics, taxation and redistribution of wealth, and rejects the traditional model of capitalism. It also advocates greater welfare benefits as part of a platform of social justice. Wagenknecht has described the Chinese Communist Party as “an exemplary model for how to manage a national economy”, and is also opposed to the European Union’s policies on integration and globalisation. At the same time, the party supports greater restrictions on immigration and a move away from policy dominated by environmental concerns, which has given it substantial common ground with the far-right AfD. The BSW has enjoyed astonishingly rapid success, but some of that may so far have been built on the simple harnessing of discontent with the status quo. Whether it can hold together an electoral coalition with so catholic a collection of ideological beliefs remains to be seen.

The main players

Opposition parties in Germany usually nominate a “chancellor candidate” (Kanzlerkandidat) before a Bundestag election, the person who would be their designated head of government if they were called upon to fill that office. Often this will simply be the party leader, but it becomes more complicated in the case of the CDU/CSU alliance which, self-evidently, has two party leaders. In the run-up to the 2021 election, opinion polls suggested that the CSU leader, Markus Söder, minister-president of Bavaria since 2019, was substantially more popular both with CDU-CSU voters and the electorate more broadly than the CDU’s new leader, Armin Laschet, minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia. However, Söder pledged to abide by the decision of the CDU’s executive board, which in April 2021 chose Laschet over him as its chancellor candidate by 77.5 per cent to 22.5 per cent.

The current leader of the CDU, Friedrich Merz, recently announced that he would be the alliance’s candidate for chancellor at the forthcoming election. Söder, who remains head of the CSU, has endorsed Merz. Olaf Scholz, the current chancellor, will of course lead his party into the election; his leadership has been little short of disastrous, and he is reckoned to be the most unpopular chancellor in the Federal Republic’s history, but there seems little prospect of the SPD mounting an internal coup against him. Recent polling found that even replacing him with the popular minister of defence, Boris Pistorius, a plain-speaking party veteran from Lower Saxony, would only increase the SPD’s support by a few points.

The Greens are likely to field the current vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck, as their chancellor candidate, as his fellow former co-leader, foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, announced she would not seek the role she held for the 2021 election. Baerbock, only 43, has been an effective and articulate minister but has said she intends to devote her time and energy to her government duties. Habeck, who is minister for economic affairs and climate action as well as vice-chancellor, has been criticised for his policies on the environment; he earned the wrath of farmers for his cuts in agricultural subsidies, and has been accused of misleading the public over the decommissioning of Germany’s nuclear power stations.

The AfD announced last year that it would nominate a chancellor candidate, given its rise in support and strength in the Bundestag, but has yet formally to agree on one. The party currently has two co-leaders, 45-year-old financial analyst and consultant Alice Weidel from North Rhine-Westphalia, and 49-year-old East German former decorator and construction company owner Tino Chrupalla. Neither is a stereotypical far-right politician: Weidel has a civil union and two adopted children with a Sri Lankan film producer, Sarah Bossard, while Chrupalla has (in relative terms) plotted a moderate political course, focusing on border security and warning his colleagues against insularity and isolationism.

Coalition politics in the 21st Bundestag

If the outcome of the next election roughly reflects the current opinion polling data, there will be a very challenging political scenario in the Bundestag. Very approximately, let us assume the party balance looks like this:

CDU/CSU 270
AfD 120
SPD 90
Greens 65
BSW 50
Die Linke 25

(That leaves some margin from the 630 seats but, as I say, this is just indicative.)

Any coalition needs 316 seats for a bare majority, and no single party will achieve that figure on its own. But the CDU/CSU will clearly have the initiative. It is an alliance of centre-right parties, and the only other substantial right-wing force in the Bundestag is likely to be the AfD, but German politics has traditionally worked on the assumption that “mainstream” parties will not co-operate or ally with extremists, especially those on the far-right. This is described as a “firewall” or Brandmauer against extremism, and after the AfD won the largest number of seats in the Landtag in Thuringia earlier this month, the chancellor urged all parties to maintain the policy of refusing to co-operate with the AfD. I wrote about the state elections in Thuringia and Saxony for The Hill a fortnight ago.

It is still not clear what will happen in Thuringia, but it is worth examining as a potential microcosm of federal politics next year. With 32 seats out of 88, the AfD cannot govern on its own, but it has the strength to stop any measure which requires two-thirds support, giving it a “blocking minority” (Sperrminorität). These measures include the election of the president of the Landtag, the appointment of judges, amendments to the state constitution and an early dissolution of the state legislature. While Alice Weidel has claimed that the electoral result gives the AfD a “clear mandate to govern” in Thuringia, her party would need to support either of the CDU, which came second with 23 seats, or the BSW in third with 15.

Sahra Wagenknecht has stated that her preference would be to form a coalition with the CDU and/or the SPD. Neither would be a strong enough partner alone: between them, the BSW and the SPD have only 21 seats, while a CDU/BSW coalition, with 38 seats, would still fall short of a majority. A combination of all three parties, mustering 44 seats, would represent exactly half the Landtag, making governing a very tricky proposition (although there has been a suggestion that Die Linke, which won 12 seats, could provide enough support to sustain a government office). In any event, many CDU members would be deeply opposed to an alliance with the far-left BSW, and the party has historically refused to engage with Die Linke.

However, if the mainstream parties, understandably, continue to regard the AfD as beyond the Pale, it is hard to see what the way forward might be. There is an analogy with the electoral calculus in France’s National Assembly, about which I wrote last week: several groupings have the strength to stop things happening, but no-one has the numbers to impose a positive solution. Even if the CDU, the BSW and the SPD, with tacit support from Die Linke, did cobble together some kind of administration in Thuringia, it would be an alliance united solely by a desire to exclude the AfD from power. Not only would that provide very little coherent sense of policy direction, but it is all too easy to imagine how it could be weaponised by the AfD to promote its existing narrative of an establishment plot to keep it and its voters away from power.

How might this play out at a federal level? In purely numerical terms, it is very easy to see how a CDU/CSU/AfD coalition would stack up, but there is little sign that Friedrich Merz is willing at this stage to break through the long-established firewall and allow the AfD into power as a coaliton partner, least of all at a federal level. Opinion polling for the past year has shown that the most popular outcome of post-election negotiations in a new Bundestag would be a CDU/CSU/SPD “grand coalition” of the kind which existed from 1966 to 1969, 2005 to 2009 and again from 2013 to 2021. But “most popular” is relative and only translates to between 16 and 23 per cent of the electorate. The next most popular options, trading places for second and third, are a government formed by the SPD and the Greens (essentially as now, minus the Free Democrats) and a CDU/CSU/FDP coalition (which depends on the FDP having any representation in the next Bundestag, which is at best doubtful).

The challenges here are obvious. Even the most popular option of a grand coalition would represent a governing combination opposed as a concept by more than three-quarters of voters. It is easy enough to see why: if the SPD sinks to an historic defeat at the election, with around 14 per cent, German voters could be forgiven for feeling some resentment that it somehow continued in office, even if reduced to the status of a junior partner and with Scholz ousted as chancellor. The polling indicates the party not merely losing support but being given an unprecedented electoral drubbing, and many will feel that should have more serious consequences than fewer seats around the cabinet table and, say, Boris Pistorius becoming vice-chancellor.

There are some inescapable facts about a Bundestag composed as suggested above. The first is that the current SPD/Green/FDP coalition will not remain in office, nor will the parties involved have anywhere near enough seats even to dream of doing so (especially if the FDP is knocked out of parliament altogether). The second is that the CDU/CSU is the only party large enough to form the basis of a governing coalition, if it wins something like a third of the seats. The third is that the AfD is not currently expected to win enough seats to achieve a blocking minority. But the fourth is that, if the AfD is categorically ruled out of government, then any coalition constructed is going to be inherently weak either because of its reliance on parties which have been savagely chastened by the electorate or because it consists of such diverse members that it is enormously fissiparous.

There is another question which Merz and, to some extent, the other mainstream parties must consider. If the AfD remains beyond the Brandmauer, does this untouchability continue to apply to Die Linke and the BSW? In other words, are parties from the extremes of the political spectrum to be shunned equally as dangerous and unacceptable, or is there an element of relativity? Does the quasi-neo-Nazism of the AfD make the BSW look less repellent as a potential partner?

The next chancellor? Friedrich Merz

It is worth looking for a moment at Friedrich Merz, the sort of CDU he is currently leading and the kind of campaign he is likely to pursue in 2025. Approaching 69 years of age this November, if he becomes chancellor, he will follow the pattern set by Dick Schoof (67), Sir Keir Starmer (62) and Michel Barnier (73) of older politicians becoming heads of government. This is in contrast, sometimes sharp contrast, to their predecessors Mark Rutte (57), Rishi Sunak (44) and Gabriel Attal (35), although Olaf Scholz is already 66.

Consequently, Merz has a long political history. He was an MEP from 1989 to 1994 before being elected to the Bundestag for Hochsauerlandkreis in North Rhine-Westphalia and served as vice-chairman (1998-2000, 2002-04) then chairman (2000-02) of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group. That meant he was the parliamentary leader of the opposition for some of Gerhard Schröder’s tenure as chancellor. In 2007, however, he announced that he would not seek re-election, and he left the Bundestag at the 2009 elections.

After leaving electoral politics, Merz worked as a corporate lawyer and earned a great deal of money. From 2004 to 2021, he was senior counsel in Chicago-based white-shoe law firm Mayer Brown’s Düsseldorf office, working in corporate finance. He also sat on the boards of institutions including Ernst and Young Germany, Cologne Bonn Airport, BlackRock Germany, HSBC Trinkaus, Borussia Dortmund and Deutsche Börse. In 2012 and 2017, he was a CDU member of the Federal Convention which elects the president of Germany.

When Angela Merkel announced in 2018 that she would step down as leader of the CDU, while continuing as chancellor, and her protégée Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, then the party’s general secretary, and health minister Jens Spahn declared their candidacies, Merz also elected to run for the position. He was endorsed by the conservative Values Union faction of the CDU and its Economic Council, as well as by former party leader Wolfgang Schäuble, former general secretary and minister of defence Volker Rühe and long-time lord mayor of Frankfurt Petra Roth. At the CDU’s National Congress on 7-8 December 2018, Spahn was eliminated in the first round of voting, but Kramp-Karrenbauer narrowly defeated Merz by 517 to 482 in the second round to win the leadership.

When Kramp-Karrenbauer announced in February 2020 she would resign due to the government crisis in Thuringia, it was expected that the election to replace her would take place in the spring. However, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic delayed the congress several times until it finally met virtually in January 2021. Merz was again defeated by Armin Laschet, once more quite narrowly with a margin of 521 to 466, despite having been tipped for victory by almost every opinion poll. Somewhat bizarrely, Merz then proposed that he would “join the current government and take over the Ministry for Economy”, which must have come as a surprise not only to Chancellor Merkel but also to Merz’s CDU colleague Peter Altmaier, who was in fact the minister for economic affairs and energy. Laschet sought to defuse the situation by bringing Merz into his campaign team for the forthcoming election and stressing that he was “without doubt a team player” whose economic and financial expertise would benefit the party. Coincidentally, Patrick Sensburg, who had replaced Merz as Hochsauerlandkreis’s representative in the Bundestag, failed to secure the continued support of his party, and Merz was able to resume his seat at the September 2021 federal election after a 12-year absence.

After the CDU’s election defeat, Laschet resigned as party leader. Merz sought the leadership for a third time, and, as in January, was the favourite in opinion polls against former minister Norbert Röttgen and Merkel’s head of Chancellery Helge Braun. This time, under a new voting system, Merz was successful, cruising to victory with 62 per cent of the vote. He officially took office as leader of the CDU on 31 January 2022.

Merz’s political direction

Friedrich Merz has changed the ideological emphasis of the CDU noticeably. While Laschet and Kramp-Karrenbauer were hardly in office long enough to lay hands on the wheel, let alone turn it in any direction, Merz has steered rightwards from the broadly centrist Merkel era. He regards himself as economically liberal and socially conservative, in the tradition of the CDU’s pro-business wing, and his leadership has focused on the economy, security, foreign policy and the family. There is no reason at all to doubt his sincerity, but these are also the battlegrounds on which he must face the AfD if he is to stem their tide.

If he does become chancellor, as seems probable, and is able to set policy in a new government, what can we expect from the former corporate lawyer facing his 70th birthday?

In migration, Merz has called for asylum seekers to be turned away at Germany’s land borders and has sharply criticised the “open door” policy which originated under Merkel. His description of some Ukrainian refugees as engaging in “social welfare tourism” and attacks on the children of Muslim immigrants as “small pashas” with no respect for authority have made some centrist voters uneasy but Merz knows he must speak to those who might otherwise lend their support to the AfD, especially in eastern Germany; he knows too that one of the reasons for his leadership victory at the third time of asking was because he struck a chord with the CDU’s grass roots who felt their core conservative values had become lost or underplayed.

On foreign policy, his views do not fit easily into an Anglo-American framing. As chairman of the German-American Atlantik-Brücke association from 2009 to 2019, he is a dedicated Atlanticist and a staunch supporter of NATO, but he also calls himself a “truly convinced European” and backs closer ties between Germany and France. He also made the case for “an army of Europe” in a 2018 essay, and has been outspoken in his criticism of Donald Trump’s hostility towards the European Union. On the Russia invasion of Ukraine, he has been enthusiastically supportive of Ukraine, urging Chancellor Scholz to supply the country with weapons, and unswervingly critical of Russia. In recent months, however, he has begun to focus attention on how the conflict will end.

In comparison to the current government, therefore, Merz has said he wishes to “keep on helping” Ukraine, though he has not repeated his earlier calls for Germany to supply Kyiv with Taurus cruise missiles. He explains his position in pragmatic terms.

I believe we did too little, too late. I always said we should have done more at the start. But now it’s June 23, 2024. There’s no sense in looking back two and a half years. We’re looking forwards.

The waters he must navigate are challenging. Half of Germany’s electorate supports seeking a diplomatic resolution to the war in Ukraine, but much larger majorities think this outcome is unlikely to be achieved and that President Vladimir Putin is not a serious or trustworthy interlocutor in seeking a sustainable peace settlement. His rhetoric and his actions will both be important in altering Germany’s policy towards Ukraine.

In economic terms, he has argued strongly against the permanent issuing of joint EU debt, an idea floated in the report on the European Union’s competitiveness recently issued by Mario Draghi, former Italian prime minister and president of the European Central Bank. His view is that arranging such debts is “not covered by the current provisions of the European treaties” and he reminded the Bundestag that “we have a ban on borrowing in Europe”. This is in line with his fiscal conservatism and free-market instincts: he supports less onerous regulation and bureaucracy and lower taxes to encourage growth, to which, he argues, low energy prices are essential. For this reason he has opposed the current government’s interventions to attempt to create a carbon-neutral economy, and proposes cutting tax on electricity and lowering grid fees.

Merz has also been unafraid to articulate views on culture and integration. He believes immigrants should conform to what he calls the Leikultur, or leading culture, and has previously declared that “I stand for a cosmopolitan Germany whose roots lie in Christian ethics and the European Enlightenment”. He has also spoken of the need to ensure “that national identity and traditional values ​​have a firm place in our thinking and actions, especially in times of migration and globalisation”.

The kind of CDU that Merz embodies does have a coherent conservative offering to the electorate. The slogan he has chosen, “Living in Freedom, Leading Germany Safely Into the Future”, in theory addresses the right issues to defang the far-right, conceding that migration is an issue of concern and seeing economic growth as a key part of defusing tensions. But Merz, who can be tetchy and given to bursts of anger when frustrated, has been promoting this message for more than two years, in whcih period the AfD’s support has roughly doubled, from about 10 per cent to around 20 per cent. The CDU may be benefit from a disaster befalling the governing coalition, but the challenge to the mainstream parties, from left and right, remains potent and there is no obvious solution at present.