Far-right surges, but left surprises, in German elections

The next chancellor of Germany will be the former Blackrock consultant Friedrich Merz. His election comes alongside a surge in votes for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and 93 years after a similar figure, Franz von Papen, ascended to the German chancellorship. Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister, the Christian Social Union (CSU), picked up 28.5 percent of the vote, more than any other party but still one of its worst results in the history of the German Federal Republic.

Germany’s former ruling “traffic light” coalition—consisting of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Greens and the economically liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP)—collapsed in November 2024, prompting this month’s elections. The former ruling parties all suffered heavy losses. The SPD received just 16.4 percent of the vote, its worst result in more than 60 years, while the FDP lost all 91 of its Bundestag seats and the Greens lost more than one-quarter of their representatives.

The biggest gains were made by the AfD, a far-right ethnonationalist party that has been radicalising and gaining ground in regional parliaments for more than ten years. The party dominated the eastern states of the former German Democratic Republic, earning one out of every three votes there and more than 20 percent of votes nationally. The AfD is the spearhead of fascisation in Germany, pulling almost all other parties toward the right, especially on migrant and refugee politics.

In a surprise turnaround, Germany’s far-left party Die Linke soared past expectations to win 8.8 percent of the vote, buoyed by an influx of 30,000 new party members this year. It is now the strongest party in Berlin, the capital, and won its first-ever district west of the old Berlin Wall: Neukölln, the heart of the Palestine solidarity protests.

Political polarisation

With the exception of Die Linke, the election campaign was dominated by a full-spectrum lurch to the right as parties tried to keep up with the AfD’s racism and anti-migrant politics. Underneath the official party positions, though, political polarisation has continued in German society.

A pivotal moment came at the end of January when the CDU introduced a harsh anti-migrant bill, knowing it would require AfD votes to become law. Although the bill failed to pass, the attempt broke a consensus among parties never to cooperate with the far-right party. Despite an outcry in the media, Merz subsequently made it clear that the CDU would continue to operate with the tacit support of the AfD, signalling the end of the “firewall” against fascism and, thereby, also the end of a basic binding consensus in German politics since the founding of the federal republic after the defeat of the Nazis in World War Two.

While all other parties were complicit, either by directly voting for the bill (FDP, BSW) or by implementing almost identical policies while in office (SPD, Greens), only Die Linke put forward an alternative. Footage of Linke chancellor candidate Heidi Reichinnek excoriating Friedrich Merz on the floor of the Bundestag went viral, tapping into a deep wellspring of disgust with fascism and with the other parties for failing to do anything about its rise. “The firewall in this country remains us, and all of us will go to the streets”, Reichinnek declared, “to the barricades!”

Tens of thousands of young people joined Die Linke in the aftermath, forming a veritable electoral army of doorknocking activists. Despite its stunning results, Die Linke’s prior record of helping to administer austerity in regional governments, its contradictory approach to foreign policy, and the many failures of its leaders to stand with the Palestine solidarity mobilisation leave questions for the future of the party.

Germany’s polarisation proceeds according to the same dynamics as in the United States, Brazil, France, or any number of other countries today: the dynamics of class conflict.

How we got here

Germany has an extremely wealthy elite and high levels of inequality—the two richest German families own more wealth than the bottom half of the population. As the economy slows, the ruling class increasingly sees the path back to profitability running to the right.

The old “export model” of German international competitiveness has faced roadblocks for some time, but it entered a crisis under SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s watch. The German economic model was upended by the combined effects of the Covid crisis, China’s mass exports of electric cars, and the energy price shock caused by the loss of cheap Russian gas. (Russia invaded Ukraine just two months after the traffic light coalition took office.) The country entered a recession that led to rapidly falling industrial output, layoffs in auto, chemicals and other industries, and skyrocketing energy and housing costs for residents.

Employers called for scrapping green energy transition plans and adopting traditional means of reviving the economy. Despite some inconsistent social reforms instituted during his administration, Scholz’s government responded to employers primarily by slashing social services and the climate fund.

Further, despite rhetorical denunciations of Merz’s dalliance with the AfD, Scholz’s coalition was central to implementing extremely harsh European-wide anti-migrant and anti-refugee laws in the last five years through the Common European Asylum System. As the Green Foreign Minister Baerbock put it bluntly to Merz on the floor of the Bundestag: “What can you get with the AfD that we didn’t already do through the CEAS?”

The CDU and AfD are both fiercely committed to serving the wealthy. Their common program includes lowering taxes on the rich, strictly adhering to the “debt brake” (which limits government borrowing and therefore leads to covering costs with cuts to social welfare), slashing wages and basic income protections and reasserting heteronormative nuclear families by cutting parental support subsidies and parental leave and further dismantling childcare infrastructure.

Within the CDU, Merz has been central to a shift away from former leader Angela Merkel’s “soft conservatism” towards a more far-right platform. The refashioned Christian party seeks to re-cement a German cultural identity centred on belonging to the homeland. It aims to get rid of asylum rights, raise the retirement age and re-equip the German military. In all of this, it follows the AfD, the ethnonationalism of which has masked its leaders’ willingness to meet the demands of German capitalists for a new employers’ offensive to restore German global competitiveness.

Although the AfD has reduced its internal disputes significantly, competing wings remain within the party. The neo-Nazi wing around Björn Höcke and Maximilian Krah is aiming to destroy the CDU and inherit its role as the largest party on the right. The market-radical wing around Alice Weidel (the AfD candidate for chancellor in this election) quickly shed its US scepticism after Donald Trump came to office and is committed to dramatically increasing military spending. As Elon Musk’s appearance at the AfD convention and US Vice President JD Vance’s outright campaign for the AfD at the Munich security conference indicate, the AfD is aligning more and more with Trump’s push to split Europe and make deals with individual countries while shifting some of the military burden.

The next government

Merz’s party has a few options to cobble together a ruling coalition, which he has promised to do by Easter, but the negotiating process will be messy. Merz has invited the SPD to talks, and a “Grand Coalition” of the two parties could technically manage a majority in the Bundestag. But as Ingar Solty has pointed out, a CDU coalition with the SPD and/or the Greens will be effectively instrumentalised by the AfD in opposition, feeding its narrative of the interchangeability of all establishment parties.

A CDU/AfD coalition could command a majority and a largely shared program. But it is highly unlikely as it would cause massive outcry and position the CDU against the cross-party political consensus, risking defections from the more liberal upper classes. Then there is the (also unlikely) option that Merz forms a minority government supported by the votes of the AfD, which is nevertheless not formally part of a governing coalition.

Merz does not have a long-term vision. His project is to assert the short-term needs of capitalists against social majorities and the long-term sustainability of the country (and the planet). As Adam Tooze has pointed out, Merz has no real plan for Europe when confronted with Trump’s dramatic new challenges. The CDU leader’s unswerving commitment to “balanced budgets” means any investments in infrastructure, research or other means of capitalist growth will have to be paid for by cutting spending in other areas.

As such, the CDU election platform envisioned incentives for capitalists at the cost of the environment and social welfare. A CDU-SPD-Green government may face difficulties implementing such a program, given that these were precisely the lines on which the former coalition government split. In a televised debate, Merz also made agreement on attacking migrant rights a condition of entering a coalition.

Regardless of its composition, the new government will be anti-worker and anti-migrant. Any opposition to this course will come not from the other parties of a coalition government, but from the left.

Prospects for the left

Despite the bleak years to come under a conservative government, the revitalisation of Die Linke as a social force in Germany has led to at least some celebrations before the true work restarts.

After Sahra Wagenknecht split from the party to form the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), Die Linke achieved a meagre 2.7 percent in the 2024 European elections. The BSW, by contrast, won 6.2 percent of the vote. In the intervening period, however, the BSW joined state governments in Thuringia and Brandenburg, and took on increasingly anti-migrant positions in a failed attempt to appeal to AfD voters. In these new elections, Wagenknecht’s party fell just short of the required votes to enter the Bundestag, a result that is likely to be contested.

Die Linke’s principled stand on migration and its socialist platform allowed it to speak confidently to hundreds of thousands of Germans and become the strongest party among young and first-time voters.

However, many challenges remain. Until now, Die Linke has operated as a left-reformist organisation with small groups of revolutionaries fighting for a movement- and worker-oriented party from within. But the parliamentary fraction and the party apparatus are dominated by careerist reformists more interested in participating in coalition governments with the SPD and Greens than in building mass movements to change German society. Participation in various state governments led Die Linke to implement austerity, carry out deportations, attack workers and compromise on a range of issues.

While the Die Linke stronghold in Neukölln, Berlin, has been a militant pro-Palestine presence, other parts of the party have sided with apartheid Israel; Die Linke’s parliamentary fraction voted in 2023 to stand unswervingly with Israel as well. Just like in the US, Germany’s unconditional support for Israel has created a boomerang of colonial violence that is coming back to the metropole in various forms. Insofar as Die Linke actively participated in Germany’s severe culture of repression against Palestine solidarity movements, it helped pave the way for some of the success of the AfD.

But Die Linke shows signs of potential change. Its base is expanding from the old strongholds of the east toward the entire country. Emerging figures show that Die Linke performed well not only in large cities, but also in many smaller towns, laying the basis for party organisations to potentially re-form there. Neukölln was won by Palestine solidarity organiser Ferat Kocak, who the German press denounces as an anti-police activist with ties to the Trotskyists. The slogan under which Die Linke campaigned during this election was “everyone wants to govern, we want to change things”, a nod towards the importance of building an opposition outside of government power.

Most importantly, the 30,000 new party members could substantially overhaul the previously stagnating inner-party life. Incorporating these mostly young members into party and movement structures is by no means an automatic process and will take a conscious effort and some time, during which a process of mutual political education can be expected.

One thing is certain: if Die Linke has any hope of avoiding slipping back into the social democratic swamp, it will have to forthrightly articulate a mass socialist alternative to the rightward drift in Germany, including on questions of imperialism and Palestine. As many party organisers know well, it will also have to develop stronger ties to Germany’s working class and supplant the “brown neoliberalism” of the AfD with a vision and a plan for socialist internationalism and workers’ power.

Pressured by both geopolitical shifts and the profit-making priorities of its own ruling class, the conservative politicians at the helm of the German state have limited options within their self-defined capitalist paradigm: either eliminate the restrictions on issuing new debt (which is the position of Die Linke) or succumb to the capitalists’ demands to redistribute tax revenue away from social programs towards capital subsidies and an increased military.

If it’s the latter, the social balance that has teetered since 2022 will no longer hold. Social upheaval is coming to Germany. Whether it is organised and rooted in the working class will determine the outcome: socialism or barbarism.

Sean Larson is a member of the Tempest Collective in the US and a founding editor of Rampant Magazine.