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Conservative Christian Democrats claim victory in Germany's federal election

By Kate Brady, Adam Taylor & William Booth The Washington Post

Published Feb. 24, 2025

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BERLIN — Veteran politician Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany's conservative Christian Democrats, claimed victory in the federal election Sunday evening as preliminary returns indicated the party would win a plurality in the Bundestag.

The far right, meanwhile, was projected to make historic gains, and the far left also surged. The country's increasingly fractured politics could complicate the job of forming a coalition to govern.

Merz, Germany's likely next chancellor, warned that the task ahead will not be easy.

"The main thing is to create a functioning government in Germany as quickly as possible with a good parliamentary majority," he told supporters at the Christian Democrats' headquarters in Berlin.

"The world out there is not waiting for us. And it is not waiting for lengthy coalition talks and negotiations. We must now quickly become capable of acting again so that we can do the right thing at home, so that we are present in Europe again, so that the world sees that Germany will govern reliably again."

The government will be expected to take on the country's most pressing challenges: boosting its stagnating economy and deficient infrastructure, and reassessing its role in the shifting global order. Migration also emerged as a major issue during the campaign.

President Donald Trump declared Sunday "A GREAT DAY FOR GERMANY."

"MUCH LIKE THE USA, THE PEOPLE OF GERMANY GOT TIRED OF THE NO COMMON SENSE AGENDA, ESPECIALLY ON ENERGY AND IMMIGRATION, THAT HAS PREVAILED FOR SO MANY YEARS," he wrote on his Truth Social platform in a post that did not mention Merz.

Preliminary projections, based on partial vote counts, showed the Christian Democrats, or CDU, leading with 28.9 percent, followed by the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, with 19.9 percent. Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats were taking a drubbing with 16.2 percent; the Greens were fourth with 13 percent.

In the country that gave rise to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, the establishment parties reiterated a long-standing commitment to what is known as the political fire wall against the far right: They said they would refuse to form a coalition with the AfD.

More than 59 million people were eligible to cast their ballots in the early election, which was prompted by the collapse of Scholz's center-left government in November.

Merz, a self-described social conservative and economic liberal, has pulled the Christian Democrats to the right, particularly on immigration, since succeeding former chancellor Angela Merkel as party leader in 2021. During the campaign, Merz called Europe's immigration system "dysfunctional" and pledged to implement permanent border controls and more restrictive asylum rules. He criticized Germany's generous subsidies to migrants, calling the aid an incentive, and said the country should quickly turn away illegal arrivals.

Merkel openly criticized Merz last month for relying on far-right support to move a nonbinding motion on migration through parliament.

Outside of politics, Merz worked as a high-paid lawyer who specialized in mergers and acquisitions and chaired the German arm of the investment company BlackRock.

The AfD was closing in on its best federal election result since its founding as a Euroskeptic party in 2013, doubling its 2021 election result. The party won its first regional election victory, in the eastern state of Thuringia, in September.

The AfD, branches of which are classified by domestic intelligence as extremist, has tapped into the grievances of a significant portion of the electorate who are concerned about the economy, worried about immigration and dissatisfied with the political establishment - in the words of its leaders, "cartel parties."

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel described her party's gains as a "historic success."

"We are open to coalition negotiations with the CDU," she said. "Otherwise, no policy change is possible in Germany."

But her party has little chance of being part of the next government because of the other parties' pledges not to cooperate with the AfD. Still, it will probably be the largest opposition party in a Bundestag led by a fragmented coalition government.

The party might welcome that role, said Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. "They can present themselves as an alternative, but at the same time they don't really have to show anything for it," she said.

Thousands of people around Germany protested the far right in the weeks before the election. Two more demonstrations were planned in the German capital Sunday evening.

The next task for the election's winners will be to form a coalition. It was unclear from early projections whether Merz would be able to form a coalition with just one other party, and avoid a second unstable three-party government in a row. Whether two smaller partners - the neoliberal Free Democrats and the leftist populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance - cross the 5 percent threshold to hold seats in parliament will affect the options available. One possibility would be the Grand Coalition, or "GroKo": the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.

Scholz will remain chancellor until a coalition deal is settled and his successor sworn in. Addressing supporters at his party's Willy Brandt Haus on Sunday night, he congratulated Merz and took responsibility for the Social Democrats' "bitter election result."

It is a result "from which we must move forward together," he said. Scholz has ruled out taking a ministerial position himself in a "GroKo."

Three of the country's nine coalition governments since the reunification of East and West Germany, including two under Merkel, were grand coalitions. Some Germans say they promote centrist stability; others warn they leave vacuums at either end of the political spectrum.

"The message here is that the role of the major parties - center left, center right - are dwindling," said Sudha David-Wilp of the German Marshall Fund. "It's a new era for Germany."

Germany's left-wing Die Linke provided some surprise Sunday night. Plagued by internal rifts, the party just weeks ago seemed unlikely to remain in the Bundestag. But a surge in youth-driven momentum boosted membership for unexpected success at the polls.

Ahead of the election, Vice President JD Vance and tech-billionaire-cum-Trump-advisor Elon Musk expressed support for the AfD, prompting uproar here. But Musk's claim that "only the AfD can save Germany" and Vance's statement "there's no room for fire walls" in a democracy appeared to have little effect on the campaign.

Rachel Rizzo, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Europe Center, said Merz will probably want to focus on domestic issues such as the economy and immigration, but the Trump administration will be pressuring it to increase defense spending.

"Merz will have a heavy weight on his shoulders right out of the gate," Rizzo said.

The campaign kicked off with concerns for Europe's sputtering economic motor, but deadly attacks by foreigners in recent months shifted discussion to stricter policies on migration and asylum. A stabbing Friday, allegedly by a Syrian refugee, kept the issue in the headlines until the final hours of campaigning.

At a polling station in the city's Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, popular among wealthy young and left-leaning families, Nadine Nimczyk, a 47-year-old city administrator and mother of two, said she was concerned that "the future of the country will no longer be democratic."

"For us, as a family … it's important that everything is still possible, that the future is guaranteed for the children, that it is possible to get a doctor's appointment … but at the same time do something for climate protection," she said. "I don't want to have to send my children off into a broken world."

In the Lichtenberg district, a longtime stronghold for the left, the AfD ran Beatrix von Storch, a granddaughter of Hitler's finance minister, as a candidate.

A first-time AfD voter said he was most concerned about the economy and migration.

Nick Schuster said he was concerned about Germany's slide to the right.

"I think it's sad," said Schuster, a 24-year-old electronics engineer. "And as a homosexual man, I'm even more worried."