Maja Hitij/Getty Images via Creative Commons
Olaf Scholz's SPD has been declared the winner in Germany's election on September 26, 2021.
German voters have spoken: After the September 26 election, Germany’s politics will take a modest, but marked, move to the left.
The biggest winner of the election was Germany’s Social Democratic Party. The SPD had the strongest showing with 25.4 percent, replacing Angela Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, as the largest party in the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament.
Taken together, the elections mark a modest but certain move to the left in German politics. However, this shift does not come without challenges.
This is an impressive victory for the SPD, climbing 5.2 percent above their totals in the last federal election in 2017. Should the party succeed in consolidating its power in a governing coalition, it will be the first SPD-lead and center-left government since 2005.
There was no applause, however, from German conservatives. The CDU experienced its worst election result in the Federal Republic’s history. It took the largest loss of any single party, dropping 8.9 percent from 2017 to only 21.4 percent of the vote. This positions the CDU as the second largest party in parliament and will most likely send it into the opposition for the first time in sixteen years.
The small consolation to which conservatives cling is the abysmal showing for the Left Party (Die Linke), which excludes them from joining a “Red-Red-Green” majority and will keep them out of any ruling coalition.
Following the SPD and CDU in order of vote share are the Greens and the Liberals, which achieved 14.8 percent and 11.5 percent of the vote respectively, a record for the Greens and a decades-long high for the FDP. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, dropped slightly to 10.3 percent and will no longer hold its coveted place as Germany’s largest opposition party.
The Left Party, which barely made it into parliament, circumnavigated the 5 percent threshold through a rarely used provision after achieving three direct mandates but only 4.9 percent of the vote. The results are a disaster for the party, which performed so poorly that it has guaranteed its exclusion from any ruling coalition.
Taken together, the elections mark a modest but certain move to the left in German politics. However, this shift does not come without challenges. While an SPD-led government is likely, it is no sure thing.
Traditionally in Germany, it is the party with the most votes that leads the coalition talks and forms a governing coalition with itself at the head. But Armin Laschet, the CDU chancellor candidate who has been largely blamed for his party’s poor showing, has nevertheless pledged to work toward a governing coalition despite his historic loss.
Laschet has faced criticism for this, but his path to the chancellorship is not without precedent and entirely legal. It was the SPD in 1976 and 1980 that last formed a minority government after placing second to the conservative parties. Across Europe—in Denmark, Spain, and Sweden—minority governments have also come into power in recent years.
Despite the low chances of this happening, the SPD and its chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz will be challenged in forming a coalition in their path to power. A so-called “Traffic Light Coalition,” that is, a coalition of the SPD, the Green Party, and the Liberals, will cast a wide ideological net encompassing the Liberals’ more conservative bent and the left-leaning factions within the SPD and Green parties.
In this case, it will be the Green and Liberal parties that will be the dual kingmakers of a governing coalition and force compromises from the three parties that enter into it together, whomever they might be.
No matter the result, the SPD can find some comfort in a resurgent popularity, and the CDU will likely enter a period of party soul-searching after its historic loss and the departure of its wildly popular longtime chancellor Angela Merkel.
Both parties will have to grapple with the reality of a three-party government and the gradual rise of smaller parties. This election provided the Green and Liberal parties with some of their best results ever. Young voters overwhelmingly made up that support, a possible indication that, if young voters stay with these parties, this new reality might be here to stay.
The AfD, perhaps surprisingly for a populist far-right party, is also popular among young voters in Germany’s eastern states. While they lost percentage in the countrywide vote share, the AfD actually consolidated its power in the states of Saxony and Thuringia, where it is now the strongest party. This will challenge the other parties of these states that have vowed not to govern with the AfD and must now cobble together coalitions against it. Likewise, it will challenge Germany as a whole, which continues to struggle with the political divide between East and West which has persisted since Reunification.
And, of course, the Left Party must also reorient itself after its own election result disaster. Something of a party identity crisis combined with the red-baiting of the more conservative parties might be to blame for the Left’s poor results, but it nonetheless must commit to intense party-building in order to save itself from complete devastation.
The coming weeks and months will be filled with intense media speculation about the possibilities for a coalition, but in Germany, these talks happen behind closed doors and are largely hidden from public view. The last round of coalition talks in 2017 resulted in the dramatic and unsuspected withdrawal of the FDP, creating a chaotic atmosphere that led to the longest coalition talks in history and, ultimately, in a reboot grand coalition of the SPD and CDU.
After this election, the SPD and CDU don’t want a “grand coalition,” so they will compete for the Greens and Liberals, a process with an uncertain time frame and outcome.
Olaf Scholz has suggested a goal of Christmas (December 25) for a resolution, but the necessity of a three-party coalition and Laschet’s stubborn challenge mean there are no promises of an easy prediction.
Reporting for this article was done on the ground in Berlin, Germany.