He won, but it still wasn’t a great night for Friedrich Merz. In the German elections on Sunday, Merz’s conservative CDU got 28.5 percent — the second-worst result in the party’s history, and several points below polls from a few weeks ago. Even as the winner, Merz remains immensely unpopular: just 23 percent of voters describe the former BlackRock manager, who identifies as “middle class” while flying around in a private jet, as “likeable.” He was lucky to be slightly less unpopular than his rivals.
The center-left coalition of social democratic SPD, Greens, and hyper-liberal FDP collapsed back in November, forcing these snap elections. As was expected, all three parties suffered dramatic losses, with the SPD down 9 points, the Greens down 3, and the FDP down 7. With just 16.4 percent, the SPD got their worst result since 1887. The FDP will not even enter the new parliament, having remained below the 5 percent threshold. The respective leaders — Olaf Scholz, Robert Habeck, and Christian Lindner — all announced they are retiring.
The far-right AfD won almost 21 percent of votes, doubling their result from four years ago. They had a strong concentration in the country’s post-Stalinist East, with 38.6 percent in Thuringia. Every fifth voter chose the AfD — and that with a historic turnout of 82.5 percent, the highest since 1987.
Combining CDU and AfD, over half of voters picked right-wing parties. The new Bundestag will be further to the right than any time since the Federal Republic was founded in 1949.
Chauvinism
In the final weeks of the campaign, Merz had attempted a maneuver to pass anti-immigrant legislation with AfD support. This backfired: the AfD won a few points at the CDU’s expense, and millions of people took to the streets in opposition to the Rechtsruck, the ongoing shift to the right. But breaching the “firewall” also didn’t cost Merz too dearly.
Since Merz has excluded any kind of coalition with the AfD, a “grand coalition” of CDU and SPD is just about the only option (with a small possibility of including the Greens in a “Kenya coalition”). Merz has been demanding drastic cuts in social spending in order to give hundreds of billions of euros to the military, while ratcheting up deportations. This might sound like a difficult fit, but the SPD and the Greens campaigned along similar lines — this combination of austerity, authoritarianism, racism, and militarism is already state policy.
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which split from Die Linke in late 2023, fell just short of the 5 percent threshold, winning 4.97 percent, or less than 14,000 votes short of entering the Bundestag. Wagenknecht is considering contesting the results.
Wagenknecht’s hypothesis, going back to at least 2017, has been that a “left conservatism” combining social welfare with anti-immigrant chauvinism would prevent voters from turning to the Far Right. While her eponymous party won initial successes in state elections last fall, the BSW immediately joined governments alongside the CDU and the SPD — and thus could hardly present themselves as an opposition to politics as usual. Exit polls showed the BSW drawing voters primarily from Die Linke, and very few from the AfD. In other words, rather than pulling voters with anti-immigrant views away from the Far Right, Wagenknecht only succeeded in allowing formerly left-wing voters to become more chauvinist.
The Youth
The big surprise of the evening was Die Linke, which had been in what seemed like a terminal crisis for years, endlessly stagnating at 3 percent in the polls. Yet in the campaign’s final stretch, the party pulled off a surprising comeback, reaching not just 8.8 percent nationally, but even first place in Berlin with 20 percent. The Left Party won four of the capital’s twelve districts, including their first-ever Western district, with the activist Ferat Koçak getting over 30 percent in Neukölln. The mood is euphoric — even though the result is still far below the 11.9 percent the party won back in 2009.
Among voters under 25, Die Linke was in first place with 25 percent — among young women, that number was an astounding 34 percent. The AfD, for its part, got 21 percent among the youth. This is where the polarization is strongest: among young people, the CDU got just 13 and the SPD 12 percent.
Young people are standing up against racism and the Far Right. In the face of a terrible housing crisis, with public infrastructure crumbling, the constant demonization of refugees only serves the interests of billionaires.
The irony is that Die Linke had decided on an election campaign focussed entirely on bread-and-butter issues, with deliberate silence about war, racism, sexism, or other “controversial” topics. Yet it was the CDU’s racist demagoguery, and the massive protests these provoked, that drove young people into the arms of the Left. It remains to be seen if the tens of thousands of new members can affect Die Linke’s policies — or if they are quickly worn down and driven out by the party’s bureaucratic functioning focussed on joining governments.
Die Linke has been part of capitalist government coalitions every single day since the party was founded in 2007. “Left” ministers have continuously carried out privatizations, deportations, and evictions. Die Linke is currently in government in Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, while it recently voted for CDU-led minority governments in Saxony and Thuringia. As a result, the party’s leading personnel is intertwined with the state, and they share the German Staatsräson of unconditional support for Israel, even expelling pro-Palestinian activists.
There is virtually no chance of Die Linke joining a national government now, yet the day before the election, Jan van Aken, its leader, felt the need to emphasize this remained the goal: “If we get enough votes on Sunday evening, I’m ready to negotiate about forming a coalition government.” The day after the election, Bodo Ramelow (former prime minister of Thuringia, now one of six directly elected members of parliament from Die Linke) declared his readiness to work with Merz. This reformist party is structurally committed to the goal of administering the capitalist state, believing — despite all evidence — that this can be done in the interest of working people.
Socialist Candidacies
With the German economy stagnating, and increased conflict with the Trump administration already underway, the new chancellor will face a difficult scenario. It’s not clear that Merz will be able to pass the aggressive, right-wing agenda he largely copied from the AfD.
The month before the election showed one thing: it’s not reformist parliamentarians who will form a “firewall” against the Right. It’s the millions of people directly affected by right-wing policies — immigrants, women, refugees, queers, and others — who can put the brakes on the Rechtsruck. The shift to the left among young people, even if it is currently expressed by support for a reformist party, is an auspicious sign — socialists will be working to bring all of these young people together with the working class on the streets against a Merz government. We need a united front of all unions and left-wing organizations to mobilize against the coming attacks, on the basis of self-organization in workplaces, schools, and universities.
Die Linke’s parliamentarians, who present themselves as a “social opposition,” have voted together with the CDU and the AfD on resolutions in solidarity with Israel. But in the coming period, the party will see lots of tensions between established leaders and new members, and revolutionary socialists will support the latter as they inevitably enter into conflict with a leadership committed to “compromise” and collaboration with the bourgeoisie.
A socialist electoral front of Klasse Gegen Klasse (KGK), Left Voice’s sister group in Germany, and the Revolutionary Socialist Organization (RSO) ran candidates in three districts. These three got a total of 2,179 votes. The social worker Inés Heider of KGK got 713 votes in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg in Berlin — a difficult race due to the competition between the Greens and Die Linke in this historically very left-wing neighborhood. The social worker Franziska Thomas won 818 votes in Tempelhof-Schöneberg, also in Berlin. The midwife Leonie Lieb captured 648 votes in Munich-West.
In a country with almost no tradition of revolutionary socialist election campaigns, these candidacies were a surprisingly successful first step. As KGK, we will work to convince more activists and socialist groups of the necessity to work together to build up an anticapitalist alternative. The new, right-wing Bundestag will attempt to carry out historical attacks against workers and oppressed people — but it is likely they will face historical resistance.