After two long months of campaigning, Germany heads to the polls today for its federal election. Approximately 60 million voters across the country’s 16 states will elect the new government. Will incumbent SPD chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party be punished for his three years in power? Will the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) cruise to its highest ever federal result? Will Friedrich Merz’s conservative CDU do well enough to only need one partner to form a coalition? This is what to watch out for tonight.
To enter the Bundestag, the parties need to win at least 5 per cent of the national vote. The German proportional representation system means that everyone gets two votes: the first goes towards selecting individual candidates in a constituency from each party’s official list; the second is a vote for a particular party that goes towards its national vote share. The vote share each party wins nationally determines how many of their constituency candidates enter parliament.
For Olaf Scholz, the map of how the country intends to vote makes for humbling viewing
To a large degree, the results of today’s votes have been baked in for a long time. The CDU is expected to claim first place in the election with approximately 30 per cent of the vote. The AfD is expected to come not far behind it with 20 per cent. Any deviation from this would be a considerable shock.
Further down the polls, however, things get a little more interesting. Scholz’s SPD party is competing for third place with the Greens. The two parties have been polling within a few percentage points of each other for much of the campaign. According to the latest surveys, the SPD is ever so slightly ahead with just over 15 per cent of the vote, compared to the Greens’ 13 per cent.
Then there are three smaller parties who currently aren’t guaranteed to make it back into the Bundestag. The far-left Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) and libertarian FDP parties are both polling at just over 4 per cent. After a last-minute bounce, the Linke party is on course to claim just under 7 per cent of the vote.
There is, of course, no guarantee that any of these polling figures will be reflected in the final vote tallies. Indeed, one survey conducted at the end of last week suggested that as many as 20 per cent of Germans were leaving it until the last few days of the campaign to decide who to vote for.
The national exit poll for tonight’s vote will be released at 5 p.m. UK time which is expected to give a pretty accurate picture of the final result. The first official results will start to trickle in shortly afterwards and the provisional election result should be known by tomorrow morning. The final result will take a few more weeks to confirm.
To form a majority in the Bundestag, the parties need to form a coalition of 316 seats or more. As such, which of the parties successfully make it back into parliament and their vote share will determine whether Merz will have to sweet talk one party into joining his government – or more.
As the results come in, there will be a few particularly interesting things to watch out for. Firstly, the AfD has been projected to win every single one of the states in its historic stronghold of the former East Germany – Brandenburg, Saxony, Thuringia, Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt – in the national share vote. Will this come to pass? Thuringia and Saxony in particular have long been considered the party’s heartlands and are neck and neck to host its highest state result, polling at 35 per cent and 36 per cent respectively. The weakest link, on the other hand, appears to be Saxony-Anhalt, where it seems the CDU could just squeak in ahead of the AfD to claim dominance in the state.
For Olaf Scholz, the map of how the country intends to vote makes for humbling viewing. Compared to the last federal election in 2021, when the SPD turned all but four of the states red, the party’s hold on the country has been reduced to the small northern city-states of Bremen and Hamburg. Even then, there is a chance the CDU could steal away Bremen from the party as well.
Thanks to a series of mass attacks, including two designated as terror incidents, committed by foreign-born assailants, this election has predominantly been fought on the topic of migration and domestic security. Issues such as Germany’s flatlining economy and support for Ukraine have to a large degree fallen by the wayside. This election has been a painful, cold slog for all the politicians involved. Many of them will no doubt be relieved their campaigning is finally done. Tonight’s result will determine how Germany deals with the many problems, economic, societal and political, that are barrelling down the track towards it.
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