The defeat of the CDU is a heavy blow for Germany

On October 3, Germany celebrated thirty-one years of German reunification. The outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel took the opportunity to take stock and stated that “the agreement has not yet been reached spiritually and structurally”. Just a week earlier, Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) had suffered a dramatic defeat in the general election in Germany. The defeat of the CDU in the five former GDR states was particularly blatant. Given Merkel’s biography as a former GDR citizen, the results are certainly ironic.

Federal elections are very different from elections in the United States and the United Kingdom. The Germans have two votes to decide on the composition of the Bundestag – one for a candidate in their district and one for the party list in their state. The German electoral system is based on “proportional representationâ€. The total number of votes cast for a party list determines the number of MPs that party wins. Every vote counts; There is no such thing as a “winner takes it allâ€. As a result, candidates from smaller parties can win seats in parliament. The proportional representation system enables small splinter parties to move into the Bundestag from a five percent threshold. Clear parliamentary majorities are difficult to achieve; hence coalitions have become the rule.

61 million of the current 85 million inhabitants of Germany were eligible to vote on September 26th. The official turnout was 76.6 percent, which corresponds to a steady increase in voter turnout over the past ten years. For the CDU, the election result was the worst in history.

Merkel was chairwoman of the CDU party for eighteen years until 2018. After long and bitter internal party struggles, Armin Laschet became chairwoman in early 2021. People’s Party (People’s Party or “Auffangparteiâ€) achieved between 40 and 45 percent of all votes, but the CDU, together with its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, fell to only 24.1 percent with 11.17 million votes. Their main competitor, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), like the other former ones People’s PartyWith 11.95 million votes, he finished a little better with 25.7 percent. Last year, the SPD won around ten percent of the voters, while the CDU / CSU lost ten percent of 35 percent in the initial phase of the coronavirus pandemic. No wonder that Olaf Scholz, the SPD’s candidate for chancellor, and his deputies declared themselves the clear winners and claimed legitimacy to lead a coalition government. In the jargon of German politics, the resulting government would be a “traffic light†coalition that unites the SPD (red), the liberal Democratic Party (yellow; 11.5 percent of voters, 5.32 million votes) and the Greens (green); 14.8 percent of the electorate, 6.85 million votes).

What are the key takeaways from the September 26 elections?

First: Whatever the next coalition government, Germany has caught up with other European countries, and the era of all-embracing Popular parties is over. This fact will lead to a more complex political party system in Germany and lengthy efforts to form coalitions between smaller parties. It seems that six parties will be represented permanently in the Bundestag because they have more than five percent of the total vote, i.e. the threshold for entering parliament.

Second: The voters blocked a sharp left turn. Support for Die Linke, German for the Left, which combines the remains of the old GDR Communist Socialist Unity Party of Germany and socialist ideologies of the West, fell by half to 4.9 percent. The Left stands for the exit from the North Atlantic Pact Organization (NATO), the further dismantling of the German military, massive claims programs and the expropriation or socialization of key industries. die Left lost 800,000 votes to the SPD, around 600,000 to the Greens and around 200,000 to the FDP. Even if SPD candidate Olaf Scholz remained opaque, an SPD greenleft (red-green-red) coalition is a realistic option in view of the strong left-wing tendencies within the SPD. But the dramatic electoral defeat of the left, especially in the new federal states, prevents a major upheaval in German politics and beyond. In the final phase of the election campaign, the CDU aggressively warned of a red-green-red coalition – at least the CDU was successful in this regard.

Third: The Greens, with their rigid guidelines for combating climate change, were the favorite of the German media. For years, “climate change†has been presented as the most important issue for German voters, especially for the younger generation, and the Greens as the only party with effective solutions. The German offshoot of “Fridays for Future” enjoys broad support from journalists, intellectuals and other city activists from higher income groups. Given this seemingly broad support, the Greens’ popularity reached nearly thirty percent, and Annalena Baerbock was nominated as candidate for chancellor. But Baerbock’s candidacy was a sobering disappointment. The Greens only got 14.8 percent (6.85 million votes), less than half of what seemed achievable months earlier. Most importantly, the majority of young voters, especially the first-time voters, did not vote for green. Young people cast their votes almost equally for the libertarian (twenty-three percent) and the green (twenty-two percent) parties. In other words: around 85 percent of German voters did not vote for green. They would not let themselves be moved by the sometimes apocalyptic scenarios for planet earth if the green policy did not prevail. Recent electoral trends in Europe show that young voters prefer freedom and individualism. It is a myth that solidarity and social justice are the main drivers for young people. Only fifteen percent of the young first-time voters cast their vote for the SPD, followed by ten percent for the CDU, which is a major challenge for the former Popular parties CDU and SPD.

Fourth: Many commentators and politicians called the German elections a victory for democracy, claimed that they were a bitter defeat for the extreme left and right and revitalized the political center. But this optimistic perspective is only partially correct. The right-wing extremist party Alternative for Germany (AFD) seems to have established itself as a permanent player in German politics. The AfD suffered slight losses, but still won 10.3 percent of voters nationwide (4.8 million votes). Most notable is the dominance of the AfD in almost all of the former GDR states. Immediately after reunification in 1990, the CDU dominated important eastern German states such as Thuringia (Erfurt, Weimar and Jena) and Saxony (Dresden and Leipzig). At times the CDU even had an absolute majority. Successful governors like Kurt Biedenkopf and Bernhard Vogel were even known in American circles of Germany observers. The latest election result is devastating for the CDU. In Thuringia, the CDU only took third place with 16.9 percent of the vote, while the AfD Thuringia won with 24 percent. And similar results came from Saxony: The AfD received 24.6 percent of the vote and the CDU only 17.2 percent. With its message for social justice, the SPD scores significantly better than the CDU, especially with its advocacy of a minimum hourly wage of EUR 12.00. In Saxony-Anhalt (Halle and Wittenberg) the SPD won with 25.4 percent of the vote, the AfD 19.6 percent; in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (Schwerin and Rostock) the SPD won 29.1 percent, the AfD 18 percent; and in Brandenburg (Potsdam) the SPD won 29.5 percent and the AfD 18.1 percent.

Fifth: Foreign policy or national security issues hardly played a role in the election campaign, which reflects the current overall mood in Germany. Most Germans despise calls for a stronger military role in NATO, let alone the obligation to increase Germany’s contribution to NATO by two percent of its gross domestic product, and prefer to deal with emerging external threats only with enlightened multilateralism and constructive dialogue, of the times accompanied by a touch of moral superiority. Most Germans see the US as the main threat to peace, not Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China. According to the public opinion results of the Pew Research Center from 2020 “clear majorities in Germany see the United States neither as a partner in the protection of free trade, democracy and human rights, nor in dealing with China”. Admittedly, the attempted bullying attempts by Donald Trump against Germany and Angela Merkel personally still shape the German perception. Whichever coalition is formed in Berlin in the coming weeks, hardly anything will change in German foreign policy, except that Germany’s role in NATO may become less predictable. The calls for a tougher stance against China, especially the Greens on human rights grounds, will evaporate. Germany’s economic well-being, especially the survival of its automobile manufacturers, is too closely intertwined with a smooth relationship with China. It remains questionable whether the EU Parliament will finally derail Chancellor Merkel’s EU investment agreement with China. The fact that forty-eight new Young Socialists (Young Socialists, the youth organization of the SPD) will join the SPD parliamentary group in the next Bundestag, will continue to burden Germany’s role in NATO. It is hard to imagine that any SPD Chancellor, including Olaf Scholz, will get permission to expand “Germany’s nuclear participationâ€. In the next few years Germany will have to decide on the next generation of jet fighters capable of nuclear weapons. Last year, the chairman of the SPD parliamentary group already described NATO’s nuclear stance as obsolete and dangerous. One remembers Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, whose SPD sabotaged his Chancellorship from 1981-1982 and Chancellor Helmut Kohl opened the door with a vote of no confidence and a resounding election victory.