The 2025 German federal election, held some eight months ahead of schedule following the collapse of the governing coalition late last year, largely proceeded as expected, with losses for the coalition partners, gains for the centre-right, and big gains for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Only the impressive result for Die Linke proved to be a real surprise.
At 82.5 percent (+6.2 percent), voter turnout was significantly higher than in the last federal elections (2021: 76.4, 2017: 76.2). It would appear that social polarization in the country drove people to the ballot box. Yet the theory that a higher voter turnout would help to dampen support for far-right parties did not stand up to empirical evidence. The AfD benefited from the increased voter turnout, winning over the most non-voters (1,810,000) by far.
A Bruising for the Centre
The Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party (CDU/CSU) emerged from this election as the winner, albeit barely — as expected, it won by a large margin over the runner-up, while still facing its second-worst result in history. The party achieved 28.6 percent (CDU: 22.6, CSU: 6.0) and thus improved by +4.4 percent (CDU: +3.6, CSU: +0.8) compared to its 2021 result (24.1), the worst election result ever achieved by the CDU/CSU in a federal election.
Nevertheless, the CDU/CSU remained below most poll predictions. As Leader of the Opposition, the CDU’s chancellor candidate actually had a pretty easy time of it against the most unpopular government in German history. Yet he jeopardized his foreseeable victory unnecessarily with an unexpected volte-face and, in his own words, went “all in” by breaking a historic taboo and creating parliamentary majorities with the help of the AfD for the first time in the country’s history. In doing so, he not only invited a rebuke from Angela Merkel, the defining CDU figure of the last two decades, but also public opposition from the Catholic and Protestant churches. CDU headquarters may have breathed a sigh of relief when the first polls showed no significant downward trend, but the move is still a heavy burden for Friedrich Merz and the CDU/CSU that will last far beyond election day.
Politically speaking, the CDU/CSU’s campaign offered few surprises now that Merz has positioned the party much further to the right: The party promised to “bring Germany back to the top” and achieve an economic turnaround through deregulation and corporate tax breaks, close the borders to “illegal migration”, and cancel unemployment benefits under certain conditions. In his personal letter to voters, Friedrich Merz wrote that he wanted to be “proud of Germany again”.
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) faced an expected election debacle of 16.4 percent (-9.3) — never before has the party performed so badly in a federal election. The fact that the party stumbled at the start of the campaign with a brutal internal debate over who to nominate for chancellor (Olaf Scholz or Boris Pistorius) and apparently chose the wrong one, should not obscure the Social Democrats’ structural problems: if the SPD candidate has nothing to offer on the issue of migration other than the assertion that deportations are already being carried out and will soon be accelerated, then it matters little what the candidate’s name is.
The impetus for renewal that the SPD received after electing Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken and mastermind Kevin Kühnert as chair seems to have reached its end. Walter-Borjans has retired and Kühnert has now left politics for health reasons. The SPD’s competence ratings on issues of social justice are at an all-time low (26 percent, -14). The SPD literally lost voters to all sides: 560,000 votes to Die Linke and a further 440,000 votes to BSW, but it lost the significantly larger share of votes to the right, losing 1,760,000 voters to the CDU and an additional 720,000 to the AfD.
The Greens lost -3.6 and end up with 11.6 percent, which is still their second-best result in a federal election. They lost less than the other governing parties, but the project launched by then party leaders Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock to become the new hegemonic centre-left party and systematically reach out to new groups of voters has failed. The Greens were unable to cover the entire spectrum and lost ground to Die Linke. Green lead candidate Habeck explained that this is the price they must pay for being willing to govern under these circumstances and under a Chancellor Merz.
The “Green boom” sparked by growing climate mobilizations in the late 2010s and early 2020s has thus finally ebbed away, as the Greens are collapsing, especially among younger voters (16–24 years: -12 percent). The Greens lost the majority of voters to Die Linke (-700,000) and the CDU/CSU (-460,000). Of those who still voted Green, 74 percent think a coalition with the CDU is a good option. For 62 percent of their voters, “climate and environmental policy” was the decisive reason for voting.
A Fever Dream for Die Linke
Die Linke is the party of the hour, securing 8.8 percent of the vote (+3.9) and winning six direct mandates. After just 2.7 percent in the European elections in June 2024 and years at well below 5 percent in the polls, the party managed to triple its support in just a few weeks of campaigning, building on previous electoral successes and breaking one membership record after another. With 4.35 million votes (4,355,382 to be precise), the party achieved its second-best result ever in a federal election, and its best-ever result in the West (3,034,032 votes). Die Linke remains a party of its politics: 80 percent of Die Linke supporters voted for the party because of its programme (9 percent party loyalty, 12 percent because of the candidates). It increased its vote share among blue-collar workers (8 percent, +3) and white-collar workers (9 percent, +4), as well as among women (10 percent, +5), among male voters it reached 7 percent.
This impressive “comeback of the year” is a collective success and therefore not easy to grasp: it is “like a fever dream” explained party chairwoman Ines Schwerdtner, who herself has only been a member for around a year and a half. Even long-standing party members are puzzled. Anyone searching for explanations will come across various factors, a few of which were fortunate circumstances, but the vote in the Bundestag announced by Merz on 24 January, which led to the first majority in the Bundestag with decisive votes for the AfD on 29 January, functioned like rocket fuel for a dynamic that had already begun to developing in the weeks before. The success will continue to be discussed for weeks and months, but a few vital components can already be identified:
- The party’s programme, which takes on capital and the super-rich in order to overcome the crises of our time as part of a socio-ecological transformation, remains a unique selling point in the political arena.
- The substance of the party is intact and has been renewed in many places in recent years. In addition to the often unseen, long-standing rootedness in local initiatives or the many years of social counselling, the party has repeatedly shown what it is capable of in recent years with surprisingly powerful and sometimes successful local election campaigns. It is a process that often took place under the radar and became even more dynamic since the departure of Sahra Wagenknecht: Die Linke is gaining ground and can finally show what it is capable of.
- Unlike in previous election campaigns, there was no sabotage from the parliamentary group. Indeed, the parliamentary group even worked together with the party leadership, functioning as a tool of the party. This has been completely normal in other parties for decades and is now also the case in Die Linke.
- The new leadership’s first official act was to limit their own salary to the average workers’ wage, which boosted their credibility both internally and externally. They also made a few adjustments, such as focusing on the right topics in communication (rent caps, price increases and wealth redistribution) even if another issue, the “fight against the right”, ultimately proved decisive for many new members and voters.
- The entire party stared into the abyss after the 2024 European elections and was disciplined accordingly. The fact that the party was able to agree on two leading candidates so quickly was an expression of this new unity. Accordingly, the entire election campaign was characterized by unity and free of technical errors. The fact that the party had already developed a roadmap to the federal election at the beginning of 2024 and was in the process of conducting widespread door-to-door surveys in the autumn and was able to develop its election manifesto based on the results allowed it to enter the surprise election campaign prepared.
- By election day, the party had knocked on more than 600,000 doors across the country and established its own channels beyond the opinions broadcast on talk shows, acting as both a seismograph (reading the mood) and an information channel (broadcasting information into society). The practice of door-to-door campaigning, introduced under the leadership of Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger and continuously developed since, proved to be a useful counterpart to the social media offensive, an important tool in the analogue space to be close to the people.
- Not only Die Linke, but the wider Left would have faced a catastrophe without a left-wing party in parliament. As a result, not only did swathes of new members join the party, but Die Linke benefitted from a broad spectrum of endorsements, statements, positive newspaper commentaries and other forms of direct and indirect support, from the left-wing newspaper Taz to influencers, trade union circles, movement activists, and media presenters. All in all, this created momentum for the party.
- The party responded to the decline in support below 5 percent with a few lively ideas: with Mission Silberlocke, the party demonstrated a path to parliament even without 5 percent, which was equally important for their own supporters as well as for sceptical voters. The party demonstrated its practical value with an app that checked tenants’ heating bills and another that tracked exorbitant rents.
- The election itself was favourable for Die Linke: there was no close race for the chancellorship, so that, unlike in 2021, there were no “tactical” reasons for centre-left swing voters to vote for the SPD or the Greens. Friedrich Merz’s taboo-breaking gave Die Linke additional momentum.
- Die Linke’s top candidates were also at the right place at the right time: Jan van Aken’s appearances on talk shows were enthusiastically received not only within the party, while Heidi Reichinnek’s speech against Merz was viewed by over 25 million people.
In light of the membership boom, it will now be important to use this success to analyse the political situation. Despite the good mood, a sober look at the general social conditions is still needed. The AfD is at over 20 percent, it has established relatively stable networks in parts of the country (especially in the East). We thus probably find ourselves in a dynamic of “fascization”, in which it is unclear what path the CDU/CSU and its associated power elites will take. That said, upcoming struggles would certainly be worse off without a left-wing voice in parliament.
The momentum unfolding around Die Linke is impressive. The party has effectively been re-founded: around 60 percent (59.9 to be precise) of members have joined since the 2021 election, and more than 50 percent since Wagenknecht’s departure. Back in November 2023, a study by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation found that Die Linke’s electoral potential approached 15 percent. This must now firstly be exploited even more and secondly expanded with the obvious new appeal. The fact that Die Linke won the under-18 vote with 20.8 percent can give the party just as much confidence as its strong election results among the younger voter groups (18–25 years: 25 percent (+17), 25–34 years: 16 percent (+9). Many of them apparently voted for the Greens or FDP in recent years, and one of the central challenges for Die Linke is to hold these voters in the long term. It should also not forget that the over-60 voter group makes up 42.1 percent of the electorate (whereas the under-30s only make up 13.3 percent of the electorate). As in the 2021 federal election, Die Linke received 4 percent of voters over 60, which means there is enormous potential for it to expand further.
Battered Opposition
The Free Democratic Party (FDP) lost the “open battle” it instigated and finds itself kicked out of the Bundestag again with 4.3 percent (-7.1). On the one hand, this is an expression of the party’s long-term crisis: since joining the traffic light coalition, the FDP failed to reach the 5 percent threshold in 7 out of 10 state elections, and in the state elections in eastern Germany it failed to reach the 5 percent threshold. The party was almost pulverized in the state elections in autumn 2024 (Thuringia: 1.1 percent, Saxony: 0.9 percent, Brandenburg: 0.8 percent).
On the other hand, Christian Lindner, as party leader, clearly overplayed his hand in his search for a way out of this crisis. There was not the necessary unity within the party to handle sinking the government, which is why Transport Minister Volker Wissing preferred to remain in the coalition over the FDP. In the vote initiated by the CDU on a law to “limit migration”, in which the CDU was dependent on the votes of AfD and FDP, significant parts of the FDP parliamentary group (including the deputy party leader) refused to follow their leadership.
Politically, the FDP appears to be exhausted after 12 years of the one-man show Christian Linder. His demand to “dare more Milei” and the almost embarrassing public begging for attention from Elon Musk, who courted the AfD instead, have apparently been just as unconvincing as the work of FDP government ministers and their riotous course within the governing coalition, which helped to make the population simply annoyed by the work of the coalition at some point. In the end, the CDU/CSU also distanced itself. The future of the Liberals seems completely open. Lindner already announced the end of his political career.
The Alternative für Deutschland achieved a record result of 20.8 percent. It is the strongest party in the East and will be represented in parliament with 151 MPs — more than ever before. This also means that in the next four years — as long as the party is not banned — more state money will be transferred to the AfD via state party funding than ever before and even more Nazis will be given paid positions in parliament. For AfD voters, “immigration” (38 percent) and “domestic security” (33 percent) were the decisive issues in the election. A majority (54 percent) say they support the party out of conviction, 39 percent say they do so out of “disappointment with other parties”. The party is particularly popular among workers (38 percent,+17) and the unemployed (34 percent, +17). It managed to draw supporters from all parties, with the exception of BSW, as the latter is new (the 60,000 voters who migrated to BSW are hardly significant, however).
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) fell just short of the 5 percent threshold with 4.97 and failed to enter parliament. This leaves Sahra Wagenknecht in a shambles. She had put all her eggs in one basket in the last few metres of the election campaign, staking her personal future on the election result — if she keeps her word, her career as a politician is likely over. But it is not just Sahra Wagenknecht as a person who failed with this result. The idea of fighting the AfD from the left by adopting its positions in certain policy areas (migration and right-wing culture wars) has also failed.
The BSW explicitly set out to weaken the AfD, but a look at voter migration patterns shows that it took more votes from all other parties than from the AfD — only 60,000 voters who voted for the AfD in 2021 switched to BSW, compared to 410,000 from the SPD, a further 410,000 from non-voters and 340,000 former voters of Die Linke. As things stand today, we can conclude that the BSW’s strategy strengthened right-wing discourse, but without weakening the AfD electorally.
After its meteoric rise this year and its successes in the three state elections in the East, problems have recently been mounting. There was unrest over a double candidacy in the Hamburg state chapter, MEP Friedrich Pürner left the BSW, accusing it of being run by old cliques from Die Linke, while in Bavaria prominent party members resigned in protest at the BSW’s parliamentary votes, having abstained from the CDU’s historic taboo-breaking with the first parliamentary majority thanks solely to AfD votes, and two days later even voting with the CDU and AfD in favour of a law to limit migration.
In the European elections in June 2024, 86 percent of BSW voters stated that they voted for the BSW because of the charisma of leader Sahra Wagenknecht. The BSW as a party is likely to continue to exist, the already planned renaming to “Alliance for Prosperity and Security” will probably still be carried out, but most of those involved probably wonder whether the BSW as a political project is at an end. In any case, it is now clear that the “representation gap” claimed by Wagenknecht is not large enough for a “social and conservative” party to break the 5-percent threshold.
The smaller parties are worth a special look in this election: the Animal Welfare Party: 1.0 percent (-0.5), Die Partei: 0.5 percent (-0.5), Volt: 0.7 percent (+0.4). While in previous elections, and especially in the 2024 European elections, the rise of the Animal Welfare Party, Die Partei, the Pirates, and Volt in recent years can be read as a symptom of the unattractiveness and weakness of Die Linke, the opposite is likely to be true now. At the very least, it is noticeable that the stronger Die Linke became in the polls, the lower the score of the other parties.
Moritz Warnke is Senior Fellow for Social Infrastructure and Connective Class Politics at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Translated by Loren Balhorn.
This article was first published on rosalux.de
