The voices from the East have little political weight

A majority in parliament does not mean a majority of those eligible to vote. If you include non-voters and voters of small parties, then only around two thirds of those eligible to vote will be represented in parliament after the federal election. A possible government made up of the CDU/CSU and SPD could only rely on just under 37 percent of those who are allowed to vote in Germany.

If you also count the people who are not allowed to vote, for example because they are foreigners or too young, only a quarter of the population supports a possible black-red coalition.

The proportion of eligible voters who did not vote for any of the parties in the new German Bundestag is particularly high in the east. This is primarily because a relatively large number of people there did not even go to vote on Sunday. In some western German cities such as Gelsenkirchen, Bremen and Duisburg there was also an abstention rate of around 25 percent.

In addition, many of the votes cast were ultimately lost votes because the elected party failed to enter the Bundestag. In this respect, the east of the country is particularly affected because the BSW enjoys higher approval there than in the west.

In the end, the new party narrowly failed to clear the 5 percent hurdle and the votes of the voters will no longer have any political weight. In Bavaria, too, many votes were lost in the extra-parliamentary opposition because the Free Voters have strongholds in Bavaria.

If the CDU/CSU and SPD end up forming a government, the east will once again be underrepresented on the government bench. People there relatively often voted for parties that would go into opposition in this case. On the one hand, this is the AfD, which has become the strongest political force almost across the board in the east. On the other hand, votes for the Left Party are also found in the opposition. The party achieved a strong result in East Berlin, among other places.

The high level of abstention and the large number of votes for the opposition in parliament and outside of parliament mean that the east would hardly be represented by a possible black-red coalition. The alliance would have its voter base primarily in western Germany. Many CDU/CSU and SPD voters still live in the rural regions of North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony.

But even there, only in a few constituencies did more than half of those eligible to vote vote for one of the two former mainstream parties. Friedrich Merz's home district, Hochsauerlandkreis, is one of the exceptions.

At the other end of the constituency ranking, only around a fifth of eligible voters support the possible coalition partners. Nowhere else is support as low as in the Berlin districts of Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg East.