Angela Merkel served as chancellor of Germany from 2005 until 2021. Her long tenure in office overlapped in her final years with Donald Trump’s first term as president. Critics of Trump liked to point to Merkel as a positive alternative, even praising her as “leader of the free world,” a designation otherwise reserved for the American president. Merkel moved her traditionally center-right Christian Democratic Union toward the left, adopting several controversial positions: the suspension of military conscription, the termination of nuclear energy as well as fracking, reliance on energy from Russia, supporting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and especially establishing the open-borders policy of 2015 that led to the influx of an unprecedented wave of immigrants from the Middle East. A particular point of irritation between Berlin and Washington was Merkel’s famously resisting Trump’s appeals that Germany meet its obligation, under the NATO Wales Pledge, to devote 2 percent of its GDP to defense.
The net effects of Merkel’s policies included a de facto reduction in military capacity and a deindustrialization, framed in environmentalist terms. In addition, social and cultural tensions emerged due to a failure to manage the influx of refugees with their significant cultural differences. Merkel did not leave the German economy prepared for the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, in the immediate wake of which German energy prices skyrocketed, harming both households and industry. When Trump had warned about this dependence on Russia, German diplomats responded with derision. Manufacturing in Germany became less feasible. By 2023, Germany had fallen into a recession due in large part to the policies Merkel had put into place.
She was succeeded by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who was able to cobble together a three-party coalition of his center-left Social Democrats, environmentalists, and liberals. It came to be known as the “traffic light” coalition because of the traditional color-coding of three parties: red for the Social Democrats (SPD), yellow for the liberals (FDP), and the environmentalist Greens. Three-party coalitions necessarily tend toward greater instability than do two-party coalitions. In this case, the triad reflected a more general fragmenting of the political landscape. Older West German politics—before the unification of 1990—had involved two large and one small parties. Politics in the unified Germany of “the Berlin Republic” currently involves at least seven competitive parties, although two of them did not pass the 5 percent hurdle for Bundestag representation.
The unstable traffic-light coalition began to break up late last year. The election of February 2025 was anticipated with considerable trepidation. The far-right party of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) had done very well in the previous year’s European Parliament elections as well as in regional elections in the states of the former East Germany. The AfD is viewed by many as extremist. The prospect that it might play an important role in national politics was of considerable concern against the backdrop of the country’s Nazi past. Meanwhile, its signature political position, severe limitations on new immigration and repatriation for immigrants without a claim on residency, was gaining support, since it was preceded by some high-profile violent crimes—random knife stabbings and car attacks—in the lead-up to the election.
The election results were devastating for the three parties in the governing traffic-light coalition. The largest among them and the oldest existing party in Germany, the SPD, scored 16.4 percent, a loss of 9 points, and the worst results in a national election since 1887. The Greens ended at 11.6 percent, down 3 points, and the liberal FDP lost nearly two-thirds of its voters, ending up at 4.3 percent, and therefore ineligible to enter the Bundestag. The winner was the CDU/CSU, racking up 28.6 percent, a modest increase of about 4 percent over its performance in the previous election. Its leader, Friedrich Merz, has a claim on becoming the next chancellor.
However, the big story on election night was the success of the AfD, which managed to double its percentage of the votes to 20.8 percent. It came in first in nearly all the constituencies in the formerly communist East; men voted for it at a higher rate than did women; and older voters were least likely to support it. (When Brexit won in the United Kingdom in 2016, opponents complained that it was the elderly vote that burdened young people with the departure from the EU; in contrast in Germany, it is fair to say that if the voting age had been higher and older voters had their say, the AfD would have done poorer.)
The AfD’s score was not the largest in the election, but by catapulting itself into second place, the AfD has transformed the political dynamics in Germany. Complicating the picture is the performance of “The Left” party, the heir to the Socialist Unity Party, i.e., the Communist Party of the old East Germany, which managed to attract 8.8 percent, up 3.9 percent from the previous election. “The Left” and the AfD, the two parties on the opposite ends of the political spectrum effectively each doubled their results, together now claiming more than a third of the seats in the new Bundestag. When it convenes, one month after the election, on March 25, that third becomes important. It represents a “blocking minority” that can prevent certain nominations and, most importantly, stand in the way of amendments to the Basic Law, Germany’s constitution.
In the meantime, however, Merz has to put together a governing coalition in order to command a voting majority. Since his “Union Parties,” the Christian Democrats and their sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) from Bavaria, won the largest share of the votes, it is up to him to take the lead. Since he (along with the leaders of all other parties) has committed to upholding a “firewall” against collaborating with the AfD, deemed a Nazi party, his coalition options are limited—all the more so, since the CSU refuses to join with the Greens. The only option left is a coalition with the SPD. So ironically, even though the SPD fared very poorly in the election, it holds a very good hand in the coalition negotiations: without the SPD, Merz cannot form a government. It will use this advantage to eke out significant concessions. The only alternative would be a minority government.
Against this electoral backdrop, German and European politics have been profoundly shaken by the repercussions of the altercations between the Ukrainian and the American presidents in the Oval Office on February 28. The likelihood that the United States will back off from its support for Ukraine and the implication that Washington may be loosening its commitment to NATO and European defense have put security budgets front and center in the political discussion. An EU crisis summit in Brussels therefore led to a declaration calling for increased spending; at stake are both a willingness for immediate borrowing and the intention to loosen regulations that strictly limit deficit spending.
Deficit spending is a particular problem in Germany, with its traditional fiscal conservatism. Indeed, the Basic Law explicitly limits new debt, so it will have to be amended in order to pay for new investment in defense. However, in the incoming Bundestag that will reflect the results of the February election and convene at the end of the month, the AfD and the Left make up a blocking minority. Each of them opposes increased defense investments, from different ends of the political spectrum, and frankly, each maintains a heavy dose of sympathy for Russia. Therefore, German democracy finds itself in the difficult political situation of having to enable an increase in defense spending during this “lame duck” period between the election and the convening of the new legislature that would surely oppose it. This sort of maneuvering is likely to contribute to the skepticism, on the left and the right, toward the rules of the democratic game.
Three other considerations about the German political situation are worth noting. First, in the coalition negotiations with the SPD, Merz is facing demands to modify aspects of his program, especially with regard to immigration but also reforming the welfare state programs and the excessive regulations that are pushing young Germans to seek their fortunes overseas, including in Silicon Valley. There will likely also be negotiations with the Greens in this current Bundestag to get the Basic Law amendment adopted. The Green votes are needed to get to the required two-thirds. Getting the Green votes will come at a cost of maintaining precisely those unpopular parts of the environmentalist agenda that have contributed to high energy costs.
Second, Elon Musk famously endorsed the AfD in his interview with party leader Alice Weidel. The AfD was also indirectly addressed in Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference when he called for an end to “firewalls,” an unmistakable appeal for Germans to consider the party a plausible choice, despite its extremism. It is not clear that either of these interventions genuinely benefited the AfD; however, they certainly did antagonize many Germans, who criticized what they perceived to be outside interference in their elections (of course, Musk is a major investor with a Tesla plant in Germany, so he is not exactly an outsider). In any case, it was odd for Musk and Vance to promote the AfD since the party’s foreign policy view is, to say the least, opposed to the Atlantic Alliance, at times explicitly anti-American and even pro-Russian. It stands in the tradition that refuses to see Germany as part of the West but, at best, as neutral between East and West, if not ultimately inclined toward the East, i.e., toward Moscow.
Third and last, it does appear that at long last the Europeans are about to take their defense needs seriously. They have been hearing warnings from Washington since the Obama administration, but it took the Zelensky debacle in the White House for them to understand that the US commitment to their defense is not ironclad. Perhaps the transatlantic relationship will be mended, but in any case, the Europeans and especially Germany have a big task ahead of them, deciding what they are capable of doing for themselves. Is their priority defending their own eastern—or northern—border against a prospective Russian attack? Is it defending the current front line in Ukraine, or could they countenance supporting Ukraine in an offensive breakthrough to victory? They have to develop a strategy of their own, outside of NATO and therefore without the United States, and determine what kind of warfighting they can wage with drones, missiles, or boots on the ground. Scholz and Merz, just recently electoral rivals, the outgoing and incoming chancellors, both support pursuing a stronger defense posture. Whether they can get this through the Bundestag is another matter.
