Angela Merkel and the alliance of her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with the Bavarian social conservatives of the Christian Social Union (CSU) won Sunday's German federal elections, granting Merkel her fourth consecutive term as chancellor. But that is not the real news out of the election.
Exit polls suggest that the dominant center parties, the center-right CDU and the center-left Social Democrats (SDP), have lost ground since the 2013 elections, with the CDU-CSU alliance down to 33 percent from 41 percent and the SDP down to 20 percent from 25 percent.
This is a form of news, but it is not novel. The novelty lies in the rise of the anti-immigrant and anti-Islam nationalists of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, some of whose antecedents, attitudes, and followers evoke Germany’s historic alternatives to democracy.
In the 2013 elections, the AfD narrowly failed to cross the 5 percent threshold for representation in the Bundestag. On Sunday, it won 13.5 percent of the vote nationally, and more than 20 percent in the economically depressed areas of the old East Germany. The AfD will be the third-largest party in the new Bundestag, with up to 89 seats. This is the strongest showing by a new party since 1949.
Merkel’s CDU-CSU alliance, down from 311 to a projected 218 seats, will, as German governments usually do, form a coalition. The Social Democrats, down from 146 to 138 seats, might have continued in the post-2013 “grand coalition” with Merkel’s alliance, but on Sunday night the SDP’s leader Martin Schulz declared his party to be the official opposition.
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01.20.2025