Analysis of the federal election: After Sunday there are many cracks in Germany

Governments are not elected, they are voted out - and this is all the more true when they themselves have forfeited their mandate to govern. This is what happened on November 7, 2024, when Chancellor Olaf Scholz ( SPD ) dismissed the FDP ministers after a dispute over the federal budget that had lasted almost a year. However, the maneuver did not turn out to be a liberating move, neither for the Social Democrats nor for the FDP, who had prepared meticulously for such a scenario, nor for the Greens, who presented themselves as a statesmanlike third party.

Not only did the failed chancellor pugnaciously declare himself the top candidate on the evening of the break-up of the self-proclaimed progressive coalition, thereby depriving his party of any opportunity for a fresh start in terms of personnel. Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner also immediately recommended himself for the same office, while Federal Economics Minister Habeck (Greens) declared himself fit to be chancellor.

The citizens paid the price for this hubris on February 23. The three previous governing parties together did not even receive a third of the second votes, with the SPD (16.4 percent) and the Greens (11.6) together receiving fewer votes than the CDU and CSU alone (28.5). The FDP, with 4.3 percent, was eliminated from the Bundestag for the second time since 2013. Never before has a government been voted out of office in Germany in such a disgraceful manner.

Of course, a new government majority cannot be deduced from the performance of the previous opposition parties. In fact, their mandate could hardly be more ambiguous. The share of votes of the two parties on the left and right of parliament has doubled. The Left Party, which was sounded the death knell after the split from the Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) alliance a year ago, managed to return to the Bundestag without the basic mandate clause, unlike in 2021. With 8.7 percent, it was stronger than ever. The AfD (20.8 percent) sees itself as the new second strongest force in parliament, called upon to enter a federal government and thus execute the "will of the people".

But even if the share of votes for the party, which is in part right-wing extremist, has doubled in less than four years, this result must also be interpreted as meaning that four out of five voters did not vote for the AfD - and this despite a high voter turnout of 83 percent (plus six percentage points), from which both fringe parties benefited above average - except for the BSW. The movement, constructed around its namesake founder, which ran in almost all constituencies without its own candidates, ultimately lacked around 14,000 second votes to overcome the five percent hurdle.

Despite the AfD's strengthening, the often-used comparison with other European countries and the associated diagnosis of a dramatic "shift to the right" in Germany are also flawed. The AfD is still a long way from results such as those of the Rassemblement National in France (more than thirty percent in both rounds of voting for the 2024 National Assembly) or other European parties on the right-wing political fringe such as the Austrian FPÖ (strongest party with 29.2 percent in the 2024 parliamentary election).

Because on Sunday, voters once again and still chose the Union parties over the dominance of right-wing populist parties like in our neighboring countries. But with what result? With the exception of 2021 (24.1 percent), the CDU and CSU have never performed as badly in a federal election as they did on Sunday - and that despite the unprecedented debacle of the three governing parties. The mood for change feels different. The lack of it is not only because the loss of control over migration since the beginning of the 2010s is still associated for many citizens with the Union as the governing party.

The real reason for the Union's relatively weak performance was the combination of a candidate for chancellor who was rather weak in terms of reputation and perceived competence, and a party whose competence in all important policy areas except "economy" was not considered good, but only relatively better than that of its competitors. The images from election Sunday and the post-election surveys by infratest-dimap (for ARD) and the research group Wahlen (for ZDF) did not suggest that the Union had completely renewed its personnel and program in the past four years in opposition.

Otherwise, the collapse of the traffic light coalition would have given the Union the boost that, according to the "Sunday question", did not materialize in the first three years of the legislative period. Since 2021, until the traffic light coalition collapsed, the CDU and CSU were never ranked above 30 percent, regardless of what dispute the traffic light coalition was currently fighting and what legislative proposals, from the Building Energy Act to the reform of the Bundestag electoral law or the partial legalization of cannabis, were currently being discussed or rushed through parliament.

But Merz was not helped by his "all-in strategy," with which he put a new course in migration policy to a vote in the last week of the parliamentary session before the federal election following the terrorist attack in Aschaffenburg. The SPD did not follow him, although its state premiers had also approved several elements of Merz's plan last autumn. Instead, the Social Democrats encouraged the impression that Merz wanted to join forces with the AfD if necessary - an impression that was reinforced by the churches and that in the end probably cost the Union at least as many votes as it won voters for Merz's decisiveness.

The "gate to hell" that SPD parliamentary group leader Mützenich had painted on the wall in the Bundestag did not open for the CDU and CSU - but also not for the SPD. But the SPD needed it more, because like most other social democratic parties in Europe, it has long since passed through it. The fact that the Union has not exceeded a vote share of 30 percent since 2021 looks downright comfortable in a long-term comparison with the SPD's support. Apart from a brief upturn between August 2021 and June 2022, the SPD has been moving in a corridor between 15 and 20 percent in the Sunday question since autumn 2017 (!) - i.e. where it came out this Sunday.

This finding puts into perspective the intuition that the Social Democrats' poor performance in the federal election was due to the wrong candidate for chancellor. Otherwise, the European elections last spring would not have turned into a debacle.

But in the third year of recession in a row, even the classic social democratic minimum wage and pension were no longer contributing to the SPD's account, not to mention the supposedly greatest social policy achievement of the traffic light coalition, the citizens' allowance. Many of the new regulations, including the inflationary increase, were a mockery of the sense of justice of the "hard-working middle" courted by the SPD. And on the subject of rent control, young voters in metropolitan areas in particular have their own opinion - what use is it if there is no housing? So it is better to expropriate with the Left Party than to mourn the 400,000 traffic light apartments that were promised but never built.

The geopolitical risks are greater than ever since the Second World War, the prospects for Germany as a business location are bleak, the citizens' sense of security is at an all-time low after many years of irregular migration and the trust in the ability of the long-dominated actors to turn not everything, but much, for the better is perhaps lower than ever before in the post-war period - this is the stuff that not only the election result for the CDU/CSU and SPD is made of.

The demise of the FDP also fits this pattern. Four years ago, the party was almost as popular among young and first-time voters as the Greens - together they represented 44 percent of voters aged 18 to 24. On Sunday, as expected, the majority of former FDP voters (1.35 million) turned to the CDU. But almost 900,000 chose the AfD, significantly more than the BSW, the Greens, SPD and Left Party combined. The migration away from the Greens mirrors this: they gained about as many votes from the ranks of former SPD, FDP and non-voters as they lost to the CDU (460,000). This could not compensate for the outflow of around 700,000 voters to the capitalism-critical and migration-friendly Left Party and another 150,000 to the BSW, which sided with Moscow in the Ukraine war.

If the CDU/CSU and SPD did not continue to enjoy above-average support among older voters (see the graphic below), the majority situation in the Bundestag would be even more complicated than it already is. It is little consolation that the weight of older voters will increase in the coming years due to demographic changes - because this also increases the risk that the CDU/CSU and SPD will make political decisions that are primarily geared to the expectations of this clientele. The AfD, meanwhile, is more successful than ever in being the mouthpiece of the working people. For the first time, it has also had significant success among women, even though the gender gap is larger for the AfD than for any other party.

Since Sunday, the story of the AfD as a party for left-behind voters in the East has finally been relegated to the realm of myth. The party, which has been dominated by politicians from the West to this day, has certainly colored the political map in the new states almost entirely blue. But in all five federal states combined, it received about as many second votes as in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. It was not just former CDU and CSU voters who made the "alternative" strong there. In Bavaria, the SPD and the Greens together received only a moderately higher share of second votes (23.6) than the AfD (19 percent); in Baden-Württemberg the ratio was 27.8 to 19.8.

For the Union, on the other hand, the question is how and with whom it could ever overcome the 30 percent threshold again. Schleswig-Holstein's Prime Minister Daniel Günther (CDU) recently demonstrated that this could be a question of political style and political offer. On Sunday, the Union received 518,000 second votes for a vote share of 27.6 percent. In the 2022 state election, the CDU received 601,000 second votes (43.4 percent) with a voter turnout of 60 percent. The AfD was thrown out of the state parliament with 4.4 percent (minus 1.5).