Quo Vadis, Berlín?
- Pablo Díaz Gayoso
- Mar 3
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 24
On February 23, German democracy faces an existential test, as we saw in the article Unde venis, Berlin? The German country has faced similar tests throughout its history, and the answers it has given in the past have had consequences that still resonate. Pending early elections called by Chancellor Scholz, poll projections suggest a change in the German party system. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification of the two Germanies, a political party system and a democratic culture were established that guaranteed the country's political stability for more than three decades. That system is now in a state of crisis.
With the absorption of the German Democratic Republic into the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1990s, an institutional system was established in which stability rested on two major parties: one representing the center right, the CDU/CSU, and the other the center left, the SPD. These major parties were complemented by other more minor parties: West Germany contributed the liberals of the FDP and the Greens of Die Grünen, while in East Germany, the main party was the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which in 2007 became Die Linke. In this system, stability was guaranteed by grand coalition governments between the CDU/CSU and the SPD, and when this was not possible, the FDP and the Greens acted as minority government stabilizing partners. On the other side was the PDS and later Die Linke, which has been the eternal opponent of the executive. This system began to change in 2017 when the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a surprising 12.6% of the vote, coming third in the Bundestag with 94 out of 709 seats.
Below, let's take a closer look at the main contenders in these elections and what we can expect in the near future of the German country. The legislature that will begin in 2025 presents, from the outset, an assured change in the chancellery. The new German parliament will swing far to the right, according to the trend of recent months in the polls.
The most voted party will be the CDU/CSU, with 30% of the votes, and is led by Friedrich Merz, a lawyer with a long political career that began in 1989 as a member of the European Parliament. He is part of the conservative party establishment, liberal, pro-European and Atlanticist. In the election campaign, he has promised to prioritize the traditional industrial system over policies to combat climate change. In January, he proposed before parliament measures to restrict migration with the support of the far-right AfD, jeopardizing the traditional cordon sanitaire championed by his predecessor, Angela Merkel. This move has proved strategically clumsy, as it has cost him almost 3 points in the polls in favor of AfD. Merz then reverted to the traditional anti-AfD discourse that the CDU had followed, with considerable damage to its credibility.
The next party projected to be the second force in the Bundestag, with more than 20% of the vote, is the far-right AfD, with Alice Weidel as its most visible electoral head. She shares the leadership of the party with Tino Chrupalla, and both are considered to be from the more moderate wing of the party. Their campaign focuses on the discourse against immigration, Islam, the European Union, NATO and climate change.
The party advocates historical revisionism regarding Nazi Germany and the crimes against humanity they committed, calling these historical facts a “cult of guilt”. They also support anti-Semitic measures such as a ban on kosher meat and Islamophobic measures such as the policing of mosques. The AfD supports a ban on circumcision for non-medical reasons for minors, a measure that would directly affect both Jews and Muslims.
In third place will be the SPD, with 17% of the vote. The party is running with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, despite the fact that the poor results of his administration led the party into an internal crisis over its leadership. The most popular SPD candidate is Boris Pistorius, Minister of Defense since 2023, but he declined to run as an alternative to Scholz for these elections. The electoral prospects of the Social Democrats and the Greens (13%) place them as the most likely (coalition or parliamentary) partners for a Merz-led government.
The last parties that can overcome the 5% electoral barrier are Die Linke and Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance-For Reason and Justice (BSW), with 5% and 6% respectively. In these elections, both AfD and BSW are the two parties that will surprise. The former, for the reasons explained above, and BSW because it is a novel formula of what the alternative left can become in the future.
BSW is a splinter of Die Linke, led by one of its most charismatic and popular figures. Sahra Wagenknecht is a political leader who heads a conservative, anti-woke and workerist left-wing movement. BSW seeks to mix left-wing discourse in the economic sphere with conservative positions on social issues and immigration, thus reversing the progressive and open-minded trend of the post-communist left after the fall of the Berlin Wall. BSW advocates a discourse that is critical of NATO, sovereigntist with the EU and seeks to distance itself from the urban leftist elites, which it considers distant from the popular classes they once represented.
The scenarios that open up on February 23 will not only affect Berlin, but will also have an impact on Brussels and the rest of the world. As Germany is the third largest GDP country in the world, any direction it takes will inevitably affect the rest of the world. The CDU/CSU's presumed return to power under Merz may mean a slowdown in the green transition, especially in industry. At the European level, Merz can be expected to seek to strengthen relations with neighboring France and Poland, in the format of the Weimar Triangle, with an eye on defense and European support for Ukraine. Merz, in the past, has taken more belligerent positions than Scholz on military support to Kiev, so it is to be expected that there will be friction in this area with the new tenant in the White House as well.
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