In an election triggered by the collapse of chancellor Olaf Scholz’s left-leaning coalition, German voters on Sunday turned out in large numbers – 83 per cent – to back a turn to the right. What they got was a robust call for European unity and self-sufficiency.
Far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), endorsed by the Trump administration, doubled its vote to 21 per cent, a post-war high for the extreme right. However, the immediate post-poll message from the man set to be the country’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, leader of the conservative CDU-CSU alliance, was an insistence as an “absolute priority” for Europe to “achieve independence” from the US.
With bluntness unprecedented from any European leader in the wake of Trump’s onslaught on Europe and Ukraine, he spoke in language that will be music to the ears of sceptics of the transatlantic relationship like French president Emmanuel Macron. The Trump administration, Merz warned, was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”. He wondered if, at the next Nato summit, “we will still be talking about Nato in its current form or whether we will have to establish an independent European defence capability much more quickly.”
The message was a clear pledge to back increased defence spending and continued support for Ukraine, but Merz still faces a substantial challenge in cobbling together a coalition. A small majority with the battered Social Democrats (SPD) appears the most likely option. But Merz’s more aggressively anti-immigrant stance during the election is likely to make a deal with the SPD more difficult.
The liberal Free Democrats and the far-left Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) both failed to meet the 5 per cent threshold to win enough votes to enter the Bundestag. The resulting adjustment of seat numbers just about makes a two-party coalition feasible.
Merz insists that he has no intention of doing business with the AfD, but the latter’s seat tally, and the success of the hard-left Die Linke, mean that together they hold the one third of seats required to block amendments to the country’s constraining constitutional debt brake.
In what was a sharp riposte to US vice-president JD Vance’s speech in Munich two weeks ago, when he said that the greatest threat to European democracy was its own internal challenges to free speech, Merz warned of the dangers posed by the AfD surge. He castigated the interventions in their support from Elon Musk and Washington.
Dealing with the apparent collapse of the transatlantic alliance is an urgent task for Merz. Bold steps are also needed to tackle economic decline. To tackle all this, he will need a stable and effective new government to be formed quickly. For Germany – and for the EU– a lot is at stake.
