Germany’s polarised election

Friedrich Merz is on track to be the next chancellor though his country’s traditional political stability has vanished.

Photo by Michaela Stache/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Don’t mention the Alternative for Germany (AfD) – not out of some false, Fawlty-esque sense of decorum, but because it’s already all there is to talk about. It’s election night at the German embassy in London: hot dogs, sheet cakes and cask beer, all decked out in the state rooms of the ambassador’s beautiful Belgravia residence. But, beneath all the merry hospitality, the far-right insurgent party lurks in the air like a chilly draught. The entire question of this short, bitter winter campaign has been whether the far-right AfD can realise its growing popularity in electoral terms. Now we have the answer. According to the exit polls announced on 23 February, it has doubled its support to just over 20 per cent of the vote, making it the second-largest party in the Bundestag. For the first time in Germany since the Second World War, the far right is making the political weather.

When the exit poll landed, this audience – the most elevated sections of London’s German diaspora and the invited media – was muted. The AfD has been polling at around a fifth of the vote or higher for much of the past two years. There was no shock or surprise, or psephological insight. One woman, attending the event with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a centre-right think tank, resorted to commenting on the Christian Democrats’ (CDU) slight drop from the 30 per cent it was expected to achieve (it’s currently on track for around 29 per cent).

CDU’s leader, Friedrich Merz, a veteran politician and undeniably a mainstream conservative, will be the next chancellor, and it is vanishingly unlikely he will cooperate (officially) with the AfD. The German ambassador to the UK, surprisingly named Miguel Berger, a kindly man wearing crooked rimless spectacles, admitted that the AfD is now the “main opposition party”. But he reassured me that the Brandmauer, the “firewall” proscribing by convention any political collaboration with the far right, is “still intact”. And he pointed out that Elon Musk’s two-month-long advocacy for the AfD did not increase its support by a “single percentage point”. There still appears to be a European aversion to Maga-style politics, said Berger, which other European populists like Reform UK should reflect on.

And yet, where the AfD is strong, it is very strong, symptomatic of a Europe in which deep and dark historical forces are reasserting themselves. The Germany electoral map is identical to one from the days of Cold War partition, with the AfD occupying the country once known as the GDR. And as my colleague Ben Walker points out, 50 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted either for the AfD or the two parties of the hard left, Die Linke (the Left) and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. The mythic Germany of the British centrist imagination – usually praised in those flat, admiring adjectives “united”, “sensible”, “grown-up” – vanished last night, replaced by a country of polarised politics and intra-national antagonisms. Yet these forces have re-energised Germany. In comparison with Britain’s increasingly apathetic political culture, voter turnout was the highest since reunification in 1990, at almost 84 per cent.

Merz is already carrying himself with the air of government, promising to remake Germany’s military and security arrangements, and to reposition its relationship with the US. But he will do so at the head of a country, once so used to being described as a “pillar” or “lynchpin” of Europe, that now competes for the label of the continent’s proverbial “sick man”. As the New Statesman columnist Hans Kundnani wrote last week, the AfD has already changed German political culture, normalising talk of deportation from outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose Social Democratic Party is one of the oldest socialist parties in Europe – old enough to have been critiqued by Karl Marx. It is a very different current of German political history that is resurgent now. With the AfD now established in parliament (Berger speculated they might win 140 seats), how much more can they change Germany? And how much has Germany already changed?