Democracy Betrayed? Right Wing Dominates Germany Elections, But New Chancellor May Betray Voters to Partner With Left-Wing Coalition

Right-wing parties have a clear majority, and the Ssvereigntist AfD have soared to new heights, but the milquetoast conservatives may still prefer to enter into an Angela Merkel-style coalition with the left.

The Federal Returning Officer in Berlin published preliminary results of the nationwide elections for the country’s new Bundestag (parliament) and, hence, the next government on Monday morning. These results replaced Sunday night’s early exit polls and confirmed the domination of the political right at the ballot box.

As predicted, the legacy globalist-right conservative Christian Democrats (CDU&CSU, commonly called the CDU) came first with 28.5 per cent of the vote, taking 208 seats in a parliament of 630. This is a modest improvement for the party over the last elections in 2021 when they took 24.1 per cent and 197 seats: clearly, their victory will be seen as something of a hollow one, given their coming first has far more to do with the collapse of the left than their having convinced many new voters.

More impressive is the massive rise of the right-wing sovereigntist Alternative for Germany (AfD), who doubled their vote from 10.4 per cent in 2021 to 20.8 today, taking their seat share from 83 to a provisional count of 152. This result lends a great deal of extra legitimacy to the party — absolutely hated by the legacy political establishment — and not least because the result comes at an election with the highest voter turnout in the 21st century so far.

Germans turned out a full ten points higher than some recent federal elections in the country.

BERLIN, GERMANY – FEBRUARY 24: : Friedrich Merz, chancellor candidate of Germany’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU, 3L) receives flowers next to Carsten Linnemann (2R), Secretary General of CDU, Julia Klöckner (L), Christina Stumpp (2L) and Silvia Breher (R) prior a meeting of the CDU leadership after German parliamentary elections on February 24, 2025 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

Between them, the CDU and the AfD theoretically hold enough seats for an easy, comfortable majority of 360 seats, well above the 316 needed to command the Bundestag, build a government, and pass laws. To an outsider, given they are both parties of the right, have a handful of common points in their political platforms, and have the seats needed to move forward quickly, this might seem a rational path forward.

AfD party co-leader Alice Weidel spoke on Monday morning to say she was open to a coalition with the CDU, inviting them to begin talks. She said: “We are ready to participate in government… The hand is outstretched to implement the will of the people”.

Yet politics is never so simple. The mere existence of the AfD, which fundamentally disagrees with the German status quo, rejects the Angela Merkelification of attitudes and government, and — worst of all — wants to control the country’s borders and deport migrants who have no right to be in the country is seen as an existential threat. Consequently, all other major parties in the country have spent the past decade working in concert, no matter what else they may disagree over, to keep the “far-right” party well away from government.

This ‘firewall’ or ‘cordon sanitaire’ is well known across Europe. It has been used to keep Marine Le Pen’s sovereigntists out of power in France and weaponised against the populists in Sweden. The question now is whether it can hold in the face of these elections because the other options may also not seem so appealing to the leader of the CDU and likely the next Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz.

A quirk of the German political system is a party must in most cases get five per cent of the vote in order to enter Parliament, so while a panoply of parties entered the race, only a handful actually made the cut.

For the corporatist-globalist liberal Free Democrats (FD), for instance, the German people have punished them for their involvement in the unpopular outgoing government. Given the threshold they failed to meet, they’ve gone from a healthy 11.4 percent, 91 seats, and kingmaker position in Parliament in 2021 to 4.3 percent and zero seats—a humiliating end for a party of government.

The real victim of the five per cent threshold, though, is the newly founded Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) which missed out on seats by just 0.03 per cent, having got 4.97 per cent in the provisional results. Excepting a recount, this denies the German parliament a novel new arrival, being a left-wing-populist party that is strongly anti-mass migration and sceptical of the Ukraine War.

Party founder Wagenknecht has said she is considering a legal review of the results, citing irregularities in the ballot’s availability to all voters and stating: “The question arises as to the legal validity of the election results,” reports Die Welt. It has also been suggested there was a deliberate conspiracy in the German media to suppress stories about the party in the run-up to the election given that, like the AfD, her party is a major threat to the political status quo.

Just weeks ago the BSW was riding comparatively high in the polls, looking at up to eight per cent, and eating into the AfD’s vote as it did so, presumably thriving off a certain constituency of left-wing voters who care enough about border control to vote right on that matter. With the sudden decline in interest in the BSW in the last days of the election, AfD’s polling increased in the same proportion, but many of its voters were also those who hadn’t voted before.

So that leaves the various parties of Germany’s left, then, actually having Parliamentary seats. Largest among them are the legacy globalist left Social Democrats (SPD) who led the outgoing government and who have fallen from first place with 25.7 per cent of the vote and 206 seats in 2021 to third place with 16.4 per cent and 120 seats today.

Beyond that is the hard left, made up of the Die Linke (The Left) party, which grew out of the old ruling Communist Party of Soviet East Germany on 8.8 per cent, and the radical Greens, also a coalition partner of the outgoing government on 11.6 per cent.

Sahra Wagenknecht, co-leader of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), arrives a news conference in Berlin, Germany, on Monday, Feb. 24, 2025. (Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

If the firewall holds and the CDU really is determined to not partner with the AfD to rule, practically the only answer left, therefore, is a ‘grand’ coalition with the left. Combining the centre-right CDU, centre-left SPD, and hard-left Greens would give the government 413 seats, a big majority.

But as Germany experienced in the Angela Merkel era of such grand coalitions between left and right, ultimately, the government is dragged left — very left — as the junior partners hold the senior hostage with the threat that they can, at any moment, collapse the government if not indulged. Frankly, coalition governments also give centre-right parties licence to indulge their more left-wing, barely disguised tendencies, as any deviation from election-time promises can be blamed on the needs of the coalition to find a compromise with the left.

That, after all, was the era of the Europe Migrant Crisis.

Realistically, then, would-be German Chancellor Merz has two options. Abandon his pledge to keep the AfD frozen out and face certain riots from left-wing activists — of which there are very many in Germany — and being called rude names in fashionable magazines, or give in to the status-quo and give Germany very nearly the same government they just voted out.

But a coalition made of three parties can be unstable. This snap election was months earlier than planned because the outgoing three-party coalition collapsed in acrimonious bickering. As Weidel warned Sunday, Merz’s going into government with the left may be a pyrrhic victory and one that won’t last the full four years of the parliament.

She said: “The vote is clear: the German people want political change, they want a black and blue [CDU-AfD] coalition… They’re going to have to explain to their voters how they’re going to implement those promises while working with left-wing parties. If they form a government with the SPD and Greens, then interim chancellor Merz won’t last four years”.

In the Netherlands, last year, a comparable election result saw vows by all parties never to partner with veteran anti-Islamification campaigner Geert Wilders fall by the wayside as a route to keep the left out of power became available with his election victory. Conceivably, in this new world where the AfD is confirmed as the second party in Germany, such previous harsh words could now be set aside.

The results seem to clearly show Germans voted for ending economic stagnation and open borders. How much betrayal of the voters’ choices will they be willing to stomach for the sake of Berlin politicking?