German Elections - 2025

Anyone else following this?

https://www.dw.com/en/german-2025-election-in-charts-v2/a-71639900

My takeaways so far:

Musk/Trump/Vance pushing for the neo-Nazi AfD seems to have little to no effect. Looks like they will finish within the ~20% band they have polled within for the last couple of years. No last minute surge.

Merz already claiming victory.

Not over yet (a lot depends on if BSW makes it) but could just be CDU/CSU and SPD coalition. Otherwise might have to add Greens. Coalition with AfD ruled out.

In his first televised address Merz says new government’s top priority is to create a foreign and security policy independent of the US. Trump managed to turn a lifelong Atlanticist into a Gaullist. Asshole.

The Liberals are toast.

Greens underperformed and Left over performed expectations.

It looks like BSW is just gonna miss the 5% threshold. Since they didn’t win any direct seats it means Putin’s second favorite party (behind AfD) is gonna be out of the Bundestag - good.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/nArz6/2/

Anything else?

Friedrich Merz, Germany's new chancellor: "The interference in the German elections by Elon Musk and Trump's Washington was no less radical and outrageous than that of Moscow."

https://bsky.app/profile/youranoncentral.bsky.social/post/3liuv6leizs2g

Like Okona outrageous or Jem outrageous?

A new study found that, on TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter, nearly 3/4 of all partisan content being pushed algorithmically to German users favored the party best known for its ties to neo-Nazis.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/02/i...ut-huge-amounts-of-far-right-pro-afd-content/

Interesting youth vote in the German election. Die Linke, the Left party, got 27% of first-time voters energised by a big TikTok campaign run by the party’s leader Heidi Reichinnek.

But the far right AfD got 21% of young voters, up 14% from 2021.

https://bsky.app/profile/chadbourn.bsky.social/post/3liv6kwid622w

Is anyone better at creating Nazis than Communists?

Looks like BSW barely misses 5% with 4.972% of the vote and CDU/CSU + SPD can form a Grand Coalition government.

Is it good or bad news that it isn’t just American Zoomer men who suck donkey balls politically?

This is interesting.


The three traditional parties are the SPD (center left), CDU/CSU (center right) and the FDP (the liberals - libertarians but not crazy).

The FDP has been struggling for a while. Ten years or so ago they weren’t represented in the Bundestag for the first time. Now they are back to being unrepresented.

It’s interesting to me though that the remaining main two parties did better with those with only basic education compared to those with higher.

Wonder if it is like the Biden base. Actual working class folks don’t have the luxury of gambling on radical change so stick with what they know.

Yes, that might be the most important long-term takeaway. It also relates to the fact that the prognoses were spot on, meaning that demoscopes still know what's going on in the electorate, and we see that people mostly vote as they say -- no hidden majorities as other countries have seen them in favour of radical parties.

It's clear now that FDP and BSW are definitely out, so we will get a CDU/CSU/SPD coalition. While I support the Greens, I do think that makes more sense than a coalition adding the Greens, which would have been basically the whole pre-1989 parliament spectrum in one coalition. This way, we have some traditional political force sin opposition as well, and it's not just the AfD claiming they're fighting alone against 'all the old establishment parties'

I still think this is astonishing. And I'm interested in learning more about the German political scene. Looking at the breakdown it seems that the AfD are way ahead in the east but more often second or third in the west. Doesn't that create regional tensions?

Is this stuff from Merz genuine, with any likely follow-through? It could easily just be rhetoric. Any serious attempt to break with the US will require enormous changes, will meet with a lot of opposition and will cause upheaval. I've heard a lot about German deindustrialisation. That would need to be reversed for a start.

Yes, but the last 30 days have shown it's the best move for most countries, both politically and economically.

Yes, but sadly it's necessary. So long as Americans keep electing morons to the White House and Congress, the rest of the world needs to figure out how to move on from the American hegemony.

Can you explain this reaction?
Even the Trump Administration is going not to like some of the things this entails and will fight back against them. And there are other interests involved domestically and internationally too.

If my own country is a barometer, I'd say reducing trade with the United States is wildly popular amongst the electorate and business owners.

Multi-billion dollar corporations, maybe not so much.

But in the span of less than ten years we've gone from talking about reducing trade barriers between the two countries to figuring out how to reduce reliance on America and increase trade with other nations.

So, back on topic, I completely understand why this rhetoric is popular in Germany.

Yes, massively so. In fact, part of the success of the AfD in the East can in turn be seen as an expression of regional tensions, with a populace in Eastern Germany still convinced after one and half more generations that they were disadvantaged, and remain unheard, by the Western German elites after reunification. You'll also see that AfD tends to win in regions that are suffering economically. An additional factor that I think has been very important is that the West has seen a stable democracy since 1949, whereas the East is more used to the idea of a government that deserves ardent mistrust and will eventually fail.

I think the perception here is mostly that it isn't our decision, but that the US have clearly said they won't be available as a partner any longer.

What gets me is that materially speaking it is the opposite of the American Rust Belt’s turn to Trumpism.

The East isn’t seeing its economy and quality of life decrease but the opposite. Since unity no area has seen a larger increase in incomes, life expectancy, quality of life, basically every metric than the former East Germany.

Which gets to the ‘status’ theories about the turn to the right.

Well. Yes, if you put it in terms of change alone, that's true. On the other hand, it's been 35 years, and most economical markers are still at only 75-80% of the general German average. And it's much worse on the countryside and in a few choice cities, and progress is getting slower rather than faster. Young people move away, leaving senior citizens and anyone unable to afford a move behind -- frankly, walking through those areas can be haunting, with whole streets of boarded-up shops, completely abandoned.

Not quite, traditional industries have been decimated in the East, firstly by the Treuhand changes, then by the general trend to deindustrialization, and finally from green policies.

In terms of employment and job security, the East never really recovered from reunification, and the shifts from State based industry to Market based, and the opening up to a global market.

The refusal to allow the AfD a seat is only going to strengthen them, they get to play awkward games without any responsibility and can play Waldorf and Statler to German politics, so I wouldn't be too shocked to see a risk of them being the biggest party next time around.

You deal with protest parties by making them part of the establishment, by giving them ownership of problems, and thereby drawing their sting.

Look at the Lib Dems in the UK, now politically a totally different ballpark than the AfD, but also prone to promises of unicorns for all, and the moment they got a seat at the table with the Tories, they were done for. As a junior partner they had to make all kinds of trade offs, and it killed them for close to a decade. Even now, they've only just got back to being the party of people who like the concept of being taxed more, but would rather not risk it actually happening.

And Farage the MP is losing some of the fans of Farage the Unelected Gobshite, although Remain are doing well.

That firewall also acts as armour to the AfD.

Be interesting to see what Merz can do over the next few years, I can the see the SPD wanting to put brakes on his plans, looking at tactical wins for its own supporters rather than taking a more strategic view of killing off the AfD, and I suspect a lot of talk about increasing military spending and capability won't be more than just talk.

I can see a great betrayal, and normalising relations with Russia in order to get cheap gas again - I believe the Danish have already cantered across the lets-fix-the-NS Rubicon - and Trump has provided cover for that.

Merkel appears to be quiet at the moment - remember those halcyon days when we had dubious papers a-go-go telling us all how much better women were as leaders? Turns out when you took off the rose-tinted specs they were every bit as shit as the blokes were - although I imagine she'll be unleashing the ghosts of Ostpolitik in the background.

Uh. Okay Hindenburg.

That absolutely does not work, because modern protest parties and their supporters don't give a shit about facts or intellectual/ideological consistency.

Their supporters aren't the problem, the voters are. And they are not the same thing - AfD has just north of 20,000 members, now unless I've missed a lot more ISIS members LARPing Carmageddon, Germany has a bit more than 400k voters.

You can see with the likes of the AfD a general uptick in electoral participation as people who have felt alienated by the current political landscape reconnect, then add in floating voters frustrated at a policy ceiling, general discontent at the political landscape...

Most of the people who vote AfD aren't their supporters, they're people who've been locked out of the cosy political consensus of the last few decades, and now see an opportunity to make their voice heard.

Take those people away, and the AfD probably don't hit 5%. As it, a 12 year old party that loves Nazi symbolism went took over a fifth of the votes, doubling their percentage share and almost doubling absolute votes.

But we'll keep ignoring them, it's working really well. For the AfD.

If those radicals were really interested in making things better, it might work. They are not and it won't. The key to inciting revolution is convincing enough people that things are bad, getting worse and the only solution is to burn everything down. We saw Trump & Co. execute that strategy perfectly in the runup to the election. Whether they're partners in the new government or not, won't make any difference. Hopefully things DO improve enough that even the hard core ADF supporters in the east will be convinced that they're better off not burning it all down. You can get a good overview of how revolutions work by reading R.A. Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."

Yeah, the answer to Nazi-adjacent scumbags is not to give them power or to adopt their policies. As elsewhere, the mainstream parties must do better to present a positive alternative.

but that would require doing actual, visibly impactful work and not just looking down on everyone who isn't already on the side of Good

Germany isn't the US, a lot of European systems are designed with an eye to having multiple parties in government, so you're not going to get something like Trump without a major rejigging of the political system.

This "hoping things will improve" has been going on for 12 years now, and they're getting incrementally stronger, what's that phrase about repeating the same thing expecting a different outcome again?

Whereas we've actual evidence of Junior partners in coalition governments getting neutralised.

And things aren't going to improve as that would involve many on the left abandoning some of their favourite shibboleths, a majority of gay men indicated they'd vote AfD (Romeo did a survey), which tied into the Berlin Police Chief warning gays and Jews that some parts of Berlin were now areas they shouldn't display that they were gay or Jewish. That's being slowly reflected across Europe, but no one but the further right parties are willing to point out the cause, as that would mean an uncomfortable debate over cultural differences when it comes to Muslims*, and our governments abject failings in assisting with integration.

No one really wants that in the political and media classes, mostly as there are those on the right who will feel having some aspects of their views validated, will infer that all of them are. Plus, few will say it publicly, but they're not keen on being the next Salman Rushdie or David Amess.

Add in that there is a very good chance the next President of France will be Marine Le Pen based on current polls, and in the last election a bunch of parties who mostly hate each other had to band together just to stop RN getting in (they actually had a better result that Labour in the UK), and you have to admit that the current firewalling is not only not working, but actively working in their favour.

*Note, this isn't a "all Muslims bad, m'key", but there's a wide spectrum of behaviour - ranging from Islamist loathing of the West, to 1960's style intolerances and views of women, to groups like the Albanians, who don't observe Islam that strongly - some of which we should live with, some of which we should not. These are not especially forbidden topics when dealing with other religions, just when it's Islam. And many us are weary of the exceptionalism handed to one ass backwards ideology, when we're free to point and laugh at the other ones.

She has been unusually visible in this election for an ex-Chancellor, publishing her memoir during the preceding governmental crisis and even going as far as publishing an open statement on her website criticizing Merz even as he was leading her old party. She's also clearly stated that she and her government were at fault for failing to get Germany independent of Russian oil, and trusting that Putin could be appeased.

In this regard, Weimar had the same system as the current Republic (in fact, even more so, with less consolidating rules for parties elected to Parliament). So:

I'll take data over the fear of history repeating itself.

It's actually a few years old that paper, and I've never had need to look for a follow up where cabinet positions aligned to positions are taken into account, but it shows that being a junior coalition partner is more harmful than not.

If something plainly isn't working, time to try something different, no? Or what will happen if they're the biggest party next election? At what point does taking the "we had to destroy the village to save the village" method to democracy become a stick for autocrats to beat us with?