On the day after Donald Trump was re-elected as US president in November, the German chancellor Olaf Scholz dissolved his coalition government of Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Free Democrats and brought forward the election that had been scheduled to take place in September 2025. This has left Germany without a government at a time when many in the European Union think decisive action is needed on both economic and security questions. But the reality is that not much will change after the election that will now take place on 23 February.
Current polling suggests the next government is likely to be yet another grand coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the SPD. Before Angela Merkel became chancellor in 2005, there had only been one grand coalition in the history of the Federal Republic. But since then, they have become the norm – Merkel led a grand coalition for three of her four terms in office.
However, even when the government is not technically a grand coalition – as in the case of Scholz’s traffic-light coalition, which did not include the CDU/CSU – it still functions like one. This is because of the diffusion of power in the German political system: the Bundesrat (the upper house), for example, is made up of the governments of Germany’s 16 states. The country’s inertia is mostly structural. In any case, there is such a consensus on almost everything in the centre of German politics, that changes of government don’t produce the “seismic change” that some hope for.
The one good thing that might come out of another grand coalition is the end of the debt brake, which limits the government’s debt and budget deficit. First introduced during Merkel’s first grand coalition in 2009, it required a two thirds majority in the Bundestag to write it into the constitution and will take another two thirds majority to remove it. The debt brake has been disastrous both for Germany and for the rest of Europe because it has prevented much-needed investment in everything from infrastructure to education to defence. In 2011, after the euro crisis began, Merkel also got the rest of the EU to agree to adopt a version of the German debt brake.
After defending the debt brake for 15 years, the CDU/CSU have finally indicated they are open to its reform, not least so that they can invest more in defence – one of the areas where they are trying hard to differentiate themselves from Scholz’s SPD. But the CDU/CSU remain fanatical about what they see as fiscal responsibility, so it’s far from clear what a reform might look like.
This article is part of the series: The Year in 2025. You can find the rest here
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This article appears in the 08 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Power Gap