Germany's future: the next Bundestag, cabinet-making and the "firewall"
February's elections for a new Bundestag could see the hard-right Alternative für Deutschland win a fifth of the vote and second place: how will others react?
The likely broad strokes of Germany’s political future have been clear for some time. In September, I wrote about the next Bundestag election, which at that point was still scheduled for 28 September 2025, the end of a full electoral term. In November last year, however, the Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, dismissed the Minister of Finance, Christian Lindner of the Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei, FDP), breaking up the three-party coalition government. On 16 December, there was a vote of no confidence in Scholz in the Bundestag, which the Chancellor lost, as a result of which he asked the President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to dissolve the Bundestag and schedule early elections. The country will now go to the polls on 23 February.
Although that series of events was in the future when I was writing, the broad analysis remains sound. If the opinion polls are representative, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Friedrich Merz, is likely to become the next Chancellor, with his party and its Bavarian sister, the Christian Social Union (CSU), securing roughly a third of the votes. Scholz’s Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) will be roughly handled and can expect somewhere between 15 and 18 per cent, having won 25.7 per cent at the last election in 2021.
The SPD’s former coalition partners, the Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and the FDP, have mixed prospects: the former are currently polling at between 12 and 15 per cent, having won 14.7 per cent in 2021; but the FDP’s support has collapsed and they are in the three to five per cent range, down from 11.4 per cent. Crucially, parties are only represented in teh Bundestag if they win more than five per cent of the vote or, failing that, win three of the 299 constituency seats. In 2021, the FDP did not win any constituencies and relied only on their vote share, so there is a strong chance the party will drop out of the legislature altogether, as it did after the election in 2013.
(The FDP is a slightly strange party which has no direct equivalent in Britain. It was founded in 1948 as the Federal Republic of Germany, which was referred to as West Germany for convenience and differentiation from the German Democratic Republic or East Germany, was being conceived, and it originally drew its membership from the Weimar-era centre-left German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei, DDP) and centre-right German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, DVP). At first it was intended to call the new group the Liberal Democratic Party, but delegates at its foundational meeting in Heppenheim in December 1948 chose “Free Democratic Party” instead.
The party’s first chairman was Theodor Heuss, a former journalist, editor and former DDP deputy approaching his 65th birthday. He passed the Nazi era in remarkable peace and in September 1949 became the first President of the Federal Republic. The FDP was founded on support for free market economics, secularism and classical liberalism in terms of personal freedom and autonomy, although there was an influential faction in its first years which was markedly to the right. Political scientists have rather struggled to encapsulate the FDP’s philosophy and it has been described as centrist, centre-right, right-wing, liberal, conservative-liberal, classical-liberal, liberal-conservative, fiscally conservative, libertarian, right-libertarian and neoliberal. Crudely it is seen as closer to the CDU/CSU on economics but leaning towards the SPD and the Greens on civil liberties, education, defence and foreign policy.
At the European level, the FDP is part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE) and a member of Liberal International, affiliations it shares with the Liberal Democrats of the United Kingdom, but they are not exactly parallel. The FDP is perhaps closest to the so-called “Orange Bookers”, the Liberal Democrat adherents of the ideas set out in The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism (2004) which contained contributions by David Laws, Nick Clegg, Vince Cable, Ed Davey, Chris Huhne, Susan Kramer, Mark Oaten, Steve Webb, Jo Holland and Paul Marshall (a somewhat motley assortment). But the FDP’s attachment to classical liberal economics is stronger than that of the Liberal Democrats and it has far less of an attraction to Anthony Crosland-style social democracy than its British ally.)
Comfortably in second place in the opinion polls in advance of next month’s Bundestag elections is the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), regularly attracting between 18 and 20 per cent of the vote. In 2021, the AfD only received 10.4 per cent, but with immigration becoming a more and more important issue for voters, it has, like the National Rally in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and the Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, made considerable electoral progress. It won the largest number of seats in the Landtag of Thuringia in September 2024 and performed well in state elections in Brandenburg and Saxony (all three Länder are in the former East Germany), and there is every reason to assume that the AfD will comfortably outpace Olaf Scholz’s SPD and be the second-largest party in the Bundestag after next month’s elections.
This, of course, bring us to the central challenge which will almost inevitably face German politics. There has been a long-standing agreement between mainstream parties from across the political spectrum that none will cooperate with or form coalitions with the so-called far-right, including the AfD. In Thuringia, a rather unlikely and uncomfortable alliance was stitched together consisting of the CDU, the populist, economically left-wing and socially conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance—Reason and Justice (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht—Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit, BSW) and the handful of SPD deputies; this was created specifically to exclude the AfD from taking power even at a state level. This exclusion agreement has been termed a firewall or Brandmauer against extremism.
The Brandmauer continues to hold, even now. But neither the AfD nor other parties regarded as far-right, like The Homeland (Die Heimat), previously known as the National Democratic Party of Germany, The Republicans (Die Republikaner), the German League for People and Homeland (Deutsche Liga für Volk und Heimat) or the Third Path (Der Dritte Weg), have ever come close to the level of electoral support which the AfD is currently enjoying. It is perfectly plausible to imagine one in five German voters casting his or her ballot for the AfD next month, which presents the mainstream parties with an intellectual and a practical difficulty.
The intellectual challenge is this: how far is it sustainable and defensible to say that a party and an ideological platform backed by a fifth of the electorate is one not only with which you disagree but which you do not even regard as legitimate? That is the logical extension of the Brandmauer: to refuse to engage with the AfD at any level and regard them as “other” in the political process is to indicate that you regard them as a group too abhorrent and potentially dangerous to be treated in the same way as other political opponents. It is, in an ideological sense, literally putting them beyond the Pale. In a democratic society, the arguments for in some ways disqualifying 20 per cent of voters are not straightforward. Moreover, given that one of the AfD’s central arguments is that it represents the “ordinary” people who have been excluded from and ignored by the political process, maintaining the Brandmauer rather suggests there is some truth behind that accusation.
The practical difficulty is how this translates into parliamentary seats and how the Bundestag delivers a coherent and sustainable government. John Kampfner, in an article for Politico about the forthcoming elections, remarked in passing that “while [Friedrich] Merz dreams of an outright majority, the voting system likely won’t give him that”. I think that rather undersells the point: since the Federal Republic of Germany was founded more than 75 years ago, only once, in September 1957, has a single party bloc achieved an overall majority in the Bundestag, when incumbent Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the CDU/CSU alliance won 270 seats out of 497. Although there have been some near misses, no-one else has achieved that, and every German government since 1949 has been a coalition of at least two parties (even in 1957, despite winning an outright majority, Adenauer maintained his previous alliance with the conservative and monarchist German Party (Deutsche Partei), which won 17 seats).
The logic is inexorable. Merz’s CDU/CSU alliance, even if it massively outperformed its support in the opinion polls, would be incredibly unlikely to win an overall majority, an almost unprecedented result, and to form a single-party group government would actually be unprecedented. It is so unlikely that it can be disregarded as a possible outcome. Even if Merz wins substantially more seats than predicted, he will require a coalition partner. If the AfD were another centre-right party, it would be an almost inevitable and automatic fit, and the two would almost certainly command enough support to construct a substantial and sustainable parliamentary majority. But the AfD is not, and it remains (for now) beyond the Brandmauer.
So what will happen? The elections seem likely to deliver, based on current polling, a CDU/CSU group comfortably larger than anyone else but some way short of an overall majority, a hefty AfD representation in second place then smaller SPD and Green contingents. The remaining seats are likely to go to the BSW and The Left (Die Linke), the socialist party which is in part the descendent of the ruling Marxist-Leninist régime in East Germany, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands).
Friedrich Merz, even if he “wins” the election, may be facing a situation in which he has no good options. If the CDU/CSU continues to keep the AfD behind the Brandmauer and regards any deal or coalition with it as beyond the bounds of acceptable political association, then his only choice is to look in the opposite direction. That means either an informal “confidence and supply” arrangement or a formal “grand coalition” (Große Koalition or “Groko”) with the SPD and, perhaps, the Greens (though he has on occasion hinted that the latter option is unlikely).
(Such a tripartite agreement is known as a Kenia-Koalition, because the party colours of black (CDU), red (SPD) and green (Greens) are the colours of the flag of Kenya. Until 2018 it was only a theoretical party combination and remains unprecedented at the federal level, but the three parties formed an administration in Saxony-Anhalt in 2016, and then in Brandenburg and Saxony in 2019.)
The CDU/CSU and the SPD, although fundamentally representing opposing sides of the political spectrum, have governed together before. There were Grokos in the Bundestag from 1966 to 1969 under Kurt Georg Kiesinger and 2005 to 2009 and 2013 to 2021 under Angela Merkel. So their partnership would not be unprecedented even if the addition of the Greens, if it were necessary, would be.
The symbolism of such an outcome would, however, be hugely significant and damaging in almost every respect. Firstly, the electorate could reasonably look askance at the continuing presence in government, albeit diminished and chastened, of the SPD and perhaps the Greens after an election which is likely to reject their administration in emphatic terms. Those of us who prefer the first-past-the-post system could argue that such an apparent defiance of the popular vote in an inevitable possibility of proportional representation, under which coalitions are forged among parties in private, away from the public glare and unaccountable to the voters, but it would still stick the craw of many German voters, and might reflect badly on Merz as having enabled their presence.
From the other perspective, the AfD, as Reform UK is doing more modestly in the UK, would make much of the idea that the political establishment was doing anything it could to shut the AfD out, even if it came second and had the support of a fifth or even a quarter of voters. Again, this plays to a narrative already present of grievance, exclusion and inferiority, of being passive victims of a political elite and vested interests.
We have seen the results of this kind of polarisation and fracturing in the National Assembly in France since the legislative elections last summer. It now contains very broadly equal blocs of the left-to-far-left (New Popular Front), centre and centre-right (Ensemble pour la République) and the right-to-far-right (National Rally and 17 deputies from the Republicans), and it has created a situation in which it is easy to construct combinations of votes to prevent things from happening, but much more difficult to assemble support behind positive actions or stable governments. It took President Emmanuel Macron almost two months after the elections to choose Michel Barnier, a Republican, as Prime Minister, in which post he survived for 99 days before being ousted by a vote of no confidence. He became the shortest serving premier in the history of the Fifth Republic, and few think his successor, the centrist François Bayrou of the Democratic Movement, will have much greater longevity.
German politics since the Second World War has been predicated on the idea of stability. It was a reaction to the shifting inconstancy of the interwar period: between November 1918 and the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933, there were 14 changes at the head of government, and Hitler was the 14th man to hold the office of Chancellor. The longest continuous tenure was Heinrich Brüning of the Centre Party, who lasted for two years and 61 days in 1930-32. By contrast, Olaf Scholz, the incumbent Chancellor, is only the ninth holder of the office in 75 years.
The mainstream parties in Germany, as in many other European countries, will have to consider how they approach the AfD if it continues to be more popular and more durable than previous parties of the far right. In the longer term, there are two relatively benign possibilities: that the mainstream parties understand, engage with and tackle the problems which are making voters choose to support the AfD; or that the AfD gradually sloughs off its extremists, repudiates its more racist and nationalistic instincts and policies and somehow comes into the mainstream, as Marine le Pen has worked strenuously to achieve with the National Rally in France (though many still regard her and the party as beyond the Pale). But neither of those developments is inevitable.
When I was a select committee clerk some years ago, a chairman once sent me away with a particularly difficult problem with the jocular but minatory words “I have faith in you: the future of democracy is in your hands!” I hesitate to say that the future of German democracy could be in the hands of Friedrich Merz after February’s elections, but, if the current opinion polls are broadly representative of the result and the composition of the Bundestag after those elections, then he bears a very heavy responsibility. How does he construct a stable government, avoid giving power and credibility to the AfD and prevent the impression in some voters’ minds that the establishment is a closed shop which refuses to listen to opinions it deems unacceptable? There are no easy answers; in fact, I sometimes struggle to see any answers at all.