A German Political Primer Ahead of Tomorrow's Elections

Many readers – especially many American, Canadian and British friends – have expressed bewilderment at Germany’s party system. The eve of the German elections is as good a time as any to provide a basic primer on the different parties competing for votes within the Federal Republic, their rivalries and alliances, and their future prospects. This broad view will also clarify many present political tensions and explain why the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland has become such an important political principle, increasingly synonymous for our elites with “liberal democracy” itself.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll only describe the largest parties that are most likely to make it into the Bundestag, and I’ll neglect many historical matters and some crucial details, with a view towards clarifying present affairs.

The German party system is highly conservative, and it continues to be dominated by the traditional parties, which have been with us since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 or even before. There are three of these:

1) The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its smaller Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). The CDU and the CSU were originally conservative Christian democratic parties with some market liberal sympathies. Until the crucial chancellorship of Angela Merkel, they were also Volksparteien, or big-tent parties that represented basically all constituencies across the legally permissible right half of the political spectrum. Once upon a time, the CSU ruled Bavaria with an outright majority, and through the mid-1990s the CDU and CSU together generally commanded over 40% of the vote federally. Their decline began before Merkel’s chancellorship, but Merkel and her strategy of asymmetric demobilisation (more on that below) have cast them into a long crisis. If you had to sum up this crisis as briefly as possible, you’d say that it arises from the gradual transformation of the CDU/CSU from Volksparteien into the heavily triangulated centre-right parties of the present. The Union parties booked their worst result ever in 2021, with a mere 24% of the vote. They will be lucky if they get much more than 30% this time around. Americans looking for some orientation could do worse than equating the CDU and CSU with the pre-Trump Republican Party of the United States.

2) The Social Democratic Party (SPD). The SPD is the left-leaning counterpart to the right-leaning CDU/CSU, and their origins stretch back to the nineteenth century. The National Socialists banned the SPD, but after their wartime exile they returned to German politics. They were reconstituted in the Federal Republic and folded into the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) in communist East Germany. The SPD were also originally a Volkspartei, covering the left half of the political spectrum as a counterpart to the Union parties on their right, and they were once the traditional party of the working man. The SPD formally renounced Marxism after the 1950s, but they remained the home of hard-line leftists thereafter, although more moderate welfare-state progressives and cultural leftists have grown in prominence over the years. The SPD have always been slightly weaker than the Union parties federally, but through 2005 they could generally count on well over 30% of the national vote, and sometimes (as in 1972 and 1998) they even bested the CDU and CSU. Like the Union parties, the SPD are also in long-term decline, as they bleed working-class voters to the AfD and even CDU/CSU, and some of their more doctrinaire leftists to the newcomer Greens and even Die Linke. Tomorrow they will do worse than they have since the founding of the Federal Republic, coming in around 15%. American friends might want to think of the U.S. Democratic Party as a very rough analogue to the SPD, although the British Labour Party is perhaps a better comparison.

3) The Free Democratic Party (FDP). I often call the FDP a market-liberal party, but strictly speaking they are Ordoliberals who advocate for free markets while remaining agnostic on the wisdom of the social welfare state. Very crudely, you could say that the FDP is the party for people who would like to see their tax burdens reduced and hope for less interference in their lives and their businesses from the regulatory state. The FDP cultivated an openness towards both the left and the right halves of the political spectrum and traditionally worked as a majority maker for either the CDU/CSU or the SPD. Their association with the disastrous traffic light coalition government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz has all but destroyed them, and they are on track to receive their worst-ever election results tomorrow – even worse than their catastrophic showing (4.8%) in 2013. The FDP could really be finished, and they face a doubtful future as a minor West German party with almost no support across much of the East.

For 37 years – from 1961 until 1998 – the CDU/CSU, SPD and FDP constituted a closed political ecosystem within themselves. They excluded upstarts from national politics in much the same way as the they fight to exclude Alternative für Deutschland now. Two generations of West Germans grew up within this triptych and have a near-religious devotion to the traditional parties. This is why West German voters appear unable to make rational choices at the ballot box and continue to elect the CDU by the millions, however many times the Union parties betray them. Ironically, it is the instinctive conservatism of many Germans that has allowed the CDU to adopt an increasingly leftist agenda and to flirt with left-wing parties like the SPD and the Greens. Many older West Germans will vote for the CDU until they die, whatever the party does.

Reunification disturbed these old relationships, and the years since 1990 have seen the slow yet remorseless erosion of the traditional party system of Germany and the emergence of destabilising rivals. There are four of these, but 6) and 7) are the most important:

4) Die Linke, or the Left Party. The communist DDR was ruled by the Socialist Unity Party, or SED. After reunification, the SED rebranded itself as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). Separately, hard-left activists in the SPD, disenchanted by the centrist politics of SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, formed the minor Labour and Social Justice Party (WASG) in 2005. Two years later, the PDS and the WASG merged to form Die Linke. They are basically a smaller post-communist opposition party that has never been in government. After the last elections in 2021, Die Linke appeared to be in its death throes, and when Sahra Wagenknecht (their most prominent politician) abandoned them to found her own Linke offshoot (the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, see just below), many including myself thought that Die Linke were done for. Not so! Thanks to a social media blitz masterminded by the abrasive Heidi Reichinnek and a tactical return to nuts-and-bolts socialist themes like affordable housing, Die Linke are surging in the polls and will perhaps come in as high 8% tomorrow. This is not altogether unexpected. In the Merkel era, Die Linke always hovered between 8% and 12% of the vote.

5) Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, or the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). The BSW is the newest of newcomers, founded in January 2024 by the erstwhile Linke politician Wagenknecht and tightly bound to her celebrity. The BSW is in many ways a party of the old left, combining a hard-line socialist agenda with worker-friendly migration restrictionism and an overarching demand for an end to the war in Ukraine and a cessation of weapons deliveries to the AFU. This combination of themes means that they have some appeal to both the right and the left, and in this respect they mimic something of the electoral strategy (but not the substance) of the FDP. Their anti-Atlanticism, however, works to subvert this superficial compatibility, and will likely disqualify them from any national coalition government. This paradox is easily explained: The objective purpose of the BSW, baked into them upon their founding, was to attract some portion of the Alternative für Deutschland vote in East Germany, enabling the traditional parties to form majority coalitions there without AfD involvement. In the end, BSW did draw some AfD votes, but they pulled support from other parties too. Their mission to make non-AfD majority coalitions has kind of panned out (in Thüringen and Brandenburg), and kind of not (in Saxony). Fulfilling this role has also soured many would-be supporters, and BSW are well down from their polling high of 10% last autumn. There is perhaps a 50% chance that they squeak over the 5% hurdle and return to the Bundestag, and their longer-term significance is highly uncertain beyond East Germany.

6) Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, or simply the Greens. I have written more than I ever should’ve about the Greens, and this party will be no great mystery to my readers. They were founded in West Germany in 1980, combining various new left movements that had no real home in the SPD. They were environmentalists, hard-line opponents of nuclear energy and peace activists, and in their earliest phase they were also infiltrated by DDR agents. Upon reunification, the Greens first melded with the East German Green Party, and then in 1993 they absorbed the East German Bündnis 90 (“Alliance 90”), which is why they sport this awkward name. Along the way the Greens were domesticated, or rather they domesticated themselves. They shed their anti-Atlanticist protest elements in favour of a new rabid Atlanticism, and the uncharitable would say that they left one notional foreign partner (the communist East) for another (the United States). They first entered government in a coalition with the SPD under Chancellor Schröder in 1998, and that marked their gradual promotion to the party of the German political elite. They have grown in social and cultural prominence as the SPD have declined, joining the three traditional parties to form the reigning four-party cartel system. The Greens are the party of the media, of intellectuals and of status-conscious urbanites everywhere. Their mostly well-off and oblivious voters have yet to feel serious economic pain, which is one reason the party demonstrates such resilience. They will probably come in at no more than 13% tomorrow, only slightly down from their 2021 showing of 14.8%. Barring economic catastrophe, the Greens enjoy a hard floor of 8-10% of the German electorate.

7) Alternative für Deutschland, or the AfD. In the wake of the 2008 Euro crisis, Angela Merkel repeatedly characterised unpopular countermeasures – whether bank nationalisations or financial aid for a beleaguered Greece – as “without alternative.” In response, a small group of disenchanted former CDU members founded Alternative for Germany in 2013 as a moderately Eurosceptic party opposed to the financial policies of the Eurozone. Merkel fed the AfD via her characteristic political strategy of asymmetric demobilisation, according to which she would preemptively adopt for herself the programme of the opposition (particularly of the Greens) to deny them campaign issues. Thus many of Merkel’s signature policies, from the nuclear phase-out to open borders, have a distinctive leftist flavour to them. As Merkel transformed the CDU into a standard European centre-right party, she left her right flank unguarded, and the AfD grew to fill this empty political space. The AfD political programme has accordingly expanded over time. You might think of the present AfD as consisting, very roughly, of three parts. There is the older market-liberal contingent, from which the present leadership hail. Separate from them is the nationalist contingent around figures like Björn Höcke in Thüringen and Maximilian Krah, who draw the greater part of the (disingenuous) Nazi accusations. Beyond the strict bounds of the party, meanwhile, is the Vorfeld, its “forefield” or “apron” – a loose group of activists, social media personalities and the like who skew younger, often have unapologetic nationalist tendencies and contribute much of its cultural energy. The AfD benefit from the self-destruction of the Union parties and also from the native working classes, who are leaving the SPD in droves. Tomorrow they will do better than they ever have before, with perhaps 21% of the vote.

From the first moments of the AfD’s existence – well before the nationalists ever appeared in their ranks – they have been branded as an extreme-right party, and the CDU have rigorously enforced a firewall against them, pledging that they will never achieve any legislative or governmental outcomes with AfD support. Merkel and the rest of the CDU leadership feared that any approach would legitimise the upstarts and set off mass defections to their rivals. These views still hold strong within CDU leadership, but a growing number of CDU members question the wisdom of this strategy.

If the German political landscape seems complicated, that is because the traditional parties have proven too inflexible to incorporate new political currents on the one hand, while nevertheless managing to survive on the loyalty of older German voters on the other hand. Since the late 1990s, the three mid-century parties have fused with the Greens to form a political cartel – one in which the Greens mostly set the agenda while the CDU positions itself to provide majorities. The Greens enjoy sufficient cultural power that they can influence the political agenda even if they find themselves in the opposition. You could say, with only slight exaggeration, that the cartel parties function as a single disorganised uniparty among themselves. Only the Greens and the AfD demonstrate any strategic aptitude and any interest in delivering to their voters.

Put another way: German politics presently hosts two different political systems in competition with each other. Against the cartel are arrayed the unincorporated upstarts (AfD above all, but also BSW and perhaps also Die Linke) who betoken a new politics that the establishment is fighting desperately to suppress. The firewall, originally conceived to contain CDU voters under Angela Merkel, has become the final defence against this new politics and the singular lynchpin of the cartel’s power. The most unusual feature of the present election is the support that the AfD have received from prominent Trumpist Americans like Elon Musk and J.D. Vance. The cartel parties, including the CDU, perceive this advocacy as a direct attack, and they have responded by doubling down on the firewall, because if and when it falls, German politics will change forever. Their sinecures, their grants, their activist organisations and eventually even much of their sympathetic media will disappear, as the SPD and especially the Greens lose their relevance at the national level and the Union parties enter a terminal decline.