A quick service post on the German elections

Mostly for my non-German subscribers

Earlier today I did a snap analysis of the results of the German national elections on Bluesky — there’s understandably a lot of international anxiety around the results, what with the United States’ new government, Caudillo Elon Musk and Cuck Chairman JD Vance specifically, very openly pulling for the far right AfD.

There wasn’t much suspense going into tonight — barring an absolute earthquake and insane polling errors, we knew who would be likely to be Germany’s next chancellor, and who wouldn’t. In terms of who wouldn’t: the current chancellor, Olaf Scholz. The question was how bad it would be. But given the seemingly foreordained nature of tonight’s result, it ended up being … kind of a surprising night?

The headline is: According to the most recent vote count, the center right (I guess?) CDU/CSU is the strongest party — its chairman, Friedrich Merz, will almost certainly end up holding the post once held by his arch-nemesis Angela Merkel. The SPD, under still-chancellor Olaf Scholz, absolutely collapsed and is now only the third-strongest party at 16.4 % of the vote. The second-strongest party is the far right AfD, which doubled its results from three years ago, from 10.4% to 20.8%. Especially in the Eastern German states that are not Berlin, the AfD is clearly the strongest party. So far the more or less expected bad news.

But drill down a bit further, and the news gets more interesting. The CDU’s gains were exceedingly meager. Merz had a pretty clear strategy since taking over the party: basically steal the AfD’s positions and woo back voters the CDU lost to the far right over the last decade or so. In a twist literally everyone saw coming this … does not seem to have worked. The CDU gained a very modest 4 percent, which, given a spectacularly unpopular incumbent government, feels like the number you’d hit if the entire party tripped over something and slipped into a coma on the first day of the election campaign. It’s easy to say a rotted pumpkin could have run up that sort of number. But that would be wrong: it feels like a rotted pumpkin would have easily topped that number.

Merz will try to claim some kind of victory out of all this — and God knows the media will lend a healthy assist. But it’s hard to look at that number and not think that someone who wasn’t running a far right-lite campaign, and wasn’t such a massive, galaxy-sized asshole, could have run up a margin easily two or three times larger. So we’ll get a Chancellor Merz, but that chancellor will begin his tenure basically having to wrangle everyone and everything into line.

Late tonight, it emerged that due to the BSW not making it into parliament (more on that below), a “grand” coalition might be a possibility: CDU/CSU and SPD in a rehash of an unloved centrist coalition, which would still have only a ten-ish-seat majority — meaning bold proposals that would require tweaking the constitution would be out of the question. A black-green coalition, which the Greens seem to have been angling for, won’t work. A coalition with the AfD is possible, and I have a suspicion that this is the outcome Merz favors, but it would likely lead to out-and-out revolt in his party. So either he could either spend all his time wrangling another party, or he could spend all his time wrangling his own. In a way, it’s a fitting punishment for a man who has Musk/Trump-style delusions of just governing by banging his fist on the table. He will … be as far from that as anyone possibly could be.

Let me talk briefly about the parties represented in the previous government, the “traffic light coalition”. Chancellor Scholz’s SPD got completely worked. The Greens meanwhile lost a fairly small vote share — minus 3.1 percent isn’t awesome. Still, given that (1) they were both the main target of Merz’s campaign (yes, they, rather than the Nazis were the CDU’s “main enemies”, according to the incoming chancellor), (2) they ran a pretty confusing campaign that seemed designed to appeal to everyone and no one, and (3) they were junior partners in a coalition that couldn’t get much done, they can be pretty pleased with this result.

As for the third party in the “traffic light” coalition — the FDP — they got absolutely clobbered. Dropping from 11.4 percent in 2021 to 4.3 percent is bad enough. 5% is also the magic threshold under which you can’t enter parliament. Meaning the FDP is out, and deservedly so. Say what you will about Olaf Scholz, he was saddled with about the worst coalition partner one could possibly imagine: after declining to join the government in 2017 because they thought being in the opposition would get them more votes, the FDP hesitantly joined the government with all the enthusiasm of a teenager making their bed. They almost immediately became the government’s most vocal critics, above all the party chairman Christian Lindner, who is the human answer to the question of what happens when a meme coin fucks a ski instructor.

The annals of Lindner’s suckitude are long and oily: just as an example he made an appearance at a protest by irate farmers, giving a brutal speech in favor of their cause against the government he was there to represent. In the end he didn’t even have the guts to actually leave the government, fearing he’d be blamed for crashing the government, so he connived to have Scholz cause the rupture. Luckily, he turned out to be as terrible at conniving as he did at governing — the ploy turned out to have been heavily planned in advance, irate members of the FDP (which still has some decent people in it, apparently) leaked the hell out of those plans. Voters were not amused. Early during the campaign, Lindner hit upon the idea sloganeering for “more Musk and Milei” for Germany — only to have his idols endorse the AfD instead. Hard to forget Lindner sucking up to Elon in a reply after his first AfD endorsement — it’s like gazing into a dimension of pure cringe and everyone knows Christian Lindner. Anyway, the party is a shell of its former self, Lindner already announced his retreat.

The other party that narrowly missed the 5 percent threshold is the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). Wagenknecht, who had been something of the Christian Lindner of the Linkspartei (maximum noise with minimal seriousness, tacks to the right but can’t get actual right wing votes), and who founded her own party in 2023. There had been hopes that the BSW would draw votes from the AfD — a kind of socially conservative, anti-immigrant social democratic party in the Danish mold. That did not happen. The BSW drew five times as many voters from the Linkspartei than it did from the AfD. Hell, it stole more Green voters than AfD voters. It’s really noticeable that these results seem to indicate that the attempt to offer an AfD-lite from either the left or the right is just an abject failure.

Wagenknecht almost crashed her old party before she left, and after she left it was understood that the Linkspartei would basically disappear into insignificance. Well, funny how it goes: the Linkspartei doubled its (admittedly terrible) result from last time, and is getting close to 9%. Much ink will be spilled over how this happened, but three explanations seem most salient to me:

(1) The party ran a smart campaign with appealing candidates. Specifically, the campaign ran without Sahra Wagenknecht, who is still a divisive figure. They made for an appealing team: Heidi Reichinnek, who went viral with a brutal takedown of the CDU’s rapprochement with the AfD, and who headed the campaign, is 36. Meanwhile three of the old-timers in the party — Gregor Gisy, Bodo Ramelow and Dietmar Bartsch, median age of 70 — went on a tour of their own trying to save the party through “direct mandates” (if you win enough voting districts outright, the 5% threshold doesn’t apply). The party gave the impression of a very motley coalition that basically agreed on most of its central issues — a real change when compared to a few years ago when Sahra Wagenknecht was on TV excoriating her own party every week. Anecdotally, I know plenty of Germans who started getting interested in the Linkspartei the moment Wagenknecht left in 2023.

(2) While basically every party tried to crib at least some of the AfD’s topics (migration, integration, security, closed borders, deportations), the Linkspartei ran on the issues they cared about — high rents and food inflation. They even had an app that allowed people to ask for help in case they felt gouged by their landlord. Anecdotally I know that they picked up a lot voters disappointed by the rightward lurches of SPD and Greens. The Linkspartei, like the AfD, has its roots in East Germany, and they have a pretty stellar track record in pushing back against the rising fascist tide. There’s every indication that there’s a massive gender gap opening up in the East, with especially young men tacking hard to the right and young women turning increasingly to the left. The Linkspartei was there to greet them.

(3) Finally, as I suggested after the European election back in the summer, the Linkspartei was also unique in not joining in the society-wide nervous breakdown over the War in Gaza. While the other parties basically declared unconditional support for Netanyahu’s course in Gaza official state policy, and went after dissent over the war ferociously, with frequently authoritarian tactics, the Linkspartei simply contained and represented a range of positions. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that especially young people went for the Linkspartei, a group that has more diverse opinions on the Gaza War than the established parties generally. The Linkspartei is also the party with the highest proportion of Germans with an immigration background. The party simply thinks and looks the way a lot of Germany thinks and looks. Just that the other parties no longer think of those parts as “really” German and no longer deign to represent them.

So where does this not-as-bad-as-expected night leave us? Well, unfortunately this depends how people end up reading these results. Jonas Schaible, who writes for Der Spiegel and is one of the best observers of German politics, put it this way in a recent Substack post: the most important question is how the CDU interprets the following set of graphics.

These are the numbers of voters who seem to have switched from the various parties to the AfD. Note that while all parties had voters leave them in favor of the AfD, the numbers from the non-voters (1.86 million), the CDU/CSU (910,000) and the FDP (800,000) are pretty massive. Still notice that the CDU/CSU also attracted more erstwhile Green voters, more FDP voters, more SPD voters than the AfD, losing out only on the non-voters.

Jonas points out that there are two possible readings: Either you assume what I said above, and decide that the CDU/CSU “would have had much more potential with a somewhat more palatable candidate or an election campaign aimed at the center.” Trying to copy/paste the AfD did not work. Or you assume that the CDU/CSU discovered that there’s no real downside for poaching in the far right’s preserves. They did gain votes, after all. So “[the CDU/CSU] could have shown even less consideration for moderation and sharpened its profile even more.”

I agree with Jonas that the first interpretation seems far more in line what we know from other countries in which a center-right party has tried to ape far right parties in hopes of diminishing them: think of Austria, think of France, think of the UK. This has almost always served to strengthen of the radical right. But I think it’s also pretty clear which interpretation Friedrich Merz — a man who can never, ever have been wrong — will gravitate towards. In fact, when it comes to Merz, I always have to think of a lovely line from Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last:

“As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions.”

This is pretty much Friedrich Merz’s whole deal. But it’s not just about his individual psychology. After all, his party did just win this election. Feels a little strange to have your chancellor — who is already having to make some pretty difficult alliances to get the job — eat crow before even starting the job. The CDU’s mandate isn’t exactly massive, but it’s real. Why would you weaken it further by getting into a big, public fight about the election campaign that you, more or less, just won? And the vision of the campaign was, as I indicated, rather clear.

So it’s in the CDU’s interest in at least pretending to believe in Jonas’s option 2. But — especially because this theory of the case is almost certainly wrong — the downstream effects for Germany could be absolutely disastrous. Either because the CDU decides to tack even farther to the right, bully its incoming partners into going along with xenophobic campaigns and populist bullshit that doesn’t actually make anyone’s life better; or because they misread the signs of the times so calamitously that they let themselves be drawn into the Austrian option — also previously explored by German Chancellor Franz von Papen in 1933 — and let the AfD into their government.