Leah Ennis | News Contributor
On the evening of 6 November 2024, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz dismissed Finance Minister Christian Lindner, leader of the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP). This led to the collapse of the governing three-way “traffic light” coalition between Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the FDP, which had been in power for nearly three years. With the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) polling second at 18%, February’s snap election will likely usher in a u-turn and further polarisation in German politics.
A Planned Collapse?
Following the SPD’s narrow victory over the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in the September 2021 federal elections, this historic three-party government coalition, named after the colours of the respective parties, ended Angela Merkel’s (CDU) 16-year chancellorship. However, this novel governing arrangement—self-proclaimed as a “progress coalition”—soon faced unprecedented challenges, most notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which caused a spike in energy prices and tested Germany’s commitment to NATO and the approximately 1.2 million Ukrainians seeking refuge in the country.
Amid these crises, ideological differences and rows over suspending Germany’s “Schuldenbremse” (debt brake), strained the coalition as Finance Minister Lindner blocked various government projects to exercise financial restraint. Tensions escalated over the 2025 budget, and Scholz accused Lindner of betraying his trust and prioritising party interests over the country’s, leading to Lindner’s dismissal. Subsequently, the FDP immediately withdrew all its ministers, except for Transport Minister Volker Wissing, who left the party but remained in the government, leaving the SPD and the Greens in a minority government.
However, nine days after this fallout, on 15 November, an investigative article suggested that the FDP had been plotting the government’s collapse in what an internal communications paper called “Operation D-Day”. While Lindner, who did not anticipate being dismissed, maintains that Scholz had “calculated” the break-up, it is evident that the FDP had been threatening to pull the plug for weeks. Following media pressure, the party published its 8-slide presentation “D-Day Scenarios and Measures” on Thursday 28 November. This led the FDP’s General Secretary and Federal Managing Director to resign from their posts on Friday, sending the party into turmoil. Lindner, whose position in producing this paper remains unclear, has so far evaded calls from the other political parties, his FDP party colleagues, and the electorate to step down as party leader, instead tying his fate to the will of the electorate. Now polling only at 4%, below the 5% vote threshold required to enter parliament, the party may have ushered in its own demise.
On 16 December, Scholz lost a vote of confidence in the Bundestag, triggering his request for the dissolution of parliament and an early election, expected on 23 February 2025, seven months ahead of schedule. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier now has 21 days to decide whether he agrees and calls a new election within 60 days.
The Current State of the Political Spectrum
German political parties across the board have gained new members since the coalition’s collapse, most notably the Greens with at least 20.000 new signups, but the CDU are predicted to win the next election, currently polling at 32%, with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland being the projected runner up.
Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU, is projected to become Germany’s next Chancellor. Returning to the Bundestag in 2021 when Merkel, often referred to as Merz’s “nemesis”, left and the “traffic-light” coalition took office, he drew the party back to the right and promoted a more conservative vision of governance. Despite the party’s popularity, the former supervisory board member of the German branch of Blackrock struggles to appeal to younger voters and women due to his anti-immigration rhetoric and controversial political track record (Merz voted against both the liberalisation of abortion and the criminalisation of marital rape in the 1990s).
The Eurosceptic and anti-immigration AfD has polled in second place for more than a year and has been gaining support since Germany’s “refugee crisis” in 2015-16. Five of the AfD’s youth organisations Junge Alternative’s (JA) regional chapters have been declared right-wing extremist movements by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, and numerous others are currently under investigation. Earlier this year, an investigative report revealed that several high-ranking members of the AfD participated in secret meetings on “re-immigration”, which devised deportations on a mass scale and declared the intention of stripping ethnic minorities of German citizenship. Following their European election, candidate Maximilian Krah’s comments that not everyone in the SS (the Nazi regime’s main paramilitary force) was a criminal, the French far-right Rassemblement National announced it would no longer sit together with the AfD in the European Parliament. Krah’s aide was arrested on suspicion of spying and Krah himself was investigated for receiving payments from Russian and Chinese sources. Yet, the party has maintained its popularity, not least due to its effective use of social media.
In contrast, the political Left has gone through a turbulent time. The former Left party leader Sahra Wagenknecht founded her splinter party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), in January 2024. Her pro-Russian and anti-immigration rhetoric has gained traction amongst the electorate and her party is predicted to cross the 5% of vote threshold required to enter the Bundestag. Meanwhile, the Left party, from which BSW seceded, is fighting for its survival. Given the party’s perilous poll numbers at around 3%, three of its most senior members are hoping to exploit a loophole in the constitution which allows a party to circumvent the 5% threshold by seeking re-election through direct mandates in their constituencies.
Forming a coalition will not be easy and may require an unprecedented alliance. Although various governing coalitions on the state level provide “successful” options, such as the CDU-Green governing coalitions in Germany’s most populous state, North-Rhine-Westphalia, a national two-party coalition may not be able to establish a governing majority as all mainstream parties uphold the “Brandmauer” (firewall) against the hard-right AfD. Recent elections in the east of Germany, where the AfD gained most votes, have produced historically new partnerships, notably Germany’s first “blackberry” coalition between CDU, SPD and BSW in Thuringia.
Turning to the Right
The rise of the AfD and BSW is changing German politics. In response, public discourse and party positions have already been moving to the right. The progress coalition’s introduction of border controls against “illegal migration” in September of this year has certainly marked a U-turn from Merkel’s “welcoming” politics towards refugees and asylum-seekers in 2015. While the fear of increasing immigration to Germany is rising, according to a recent study, there is a simultaneously growing fear among Germans of the AfD coming to power.
In May, teenagers who had attended a far-right rally of the neo-nazi Freie Sachsen conducted an unprecedented violent attack on the SPD’s European Parliament candidate for Saxony, Matthias Ecke. This has led to increased warnings about the far-rights’ tolerance of political violence. The incumbent Saxon CDU member of parliament Marco Wanderwitz has said he will not stand in the February elections out of fear for his family’s safety.
In the September elections in Thuringia, the AfD became the strongest party in a federal state for the first time. Following the AfD Alterspräsident’s (senior president) refusal to hold a vote on the CDU and BSW’s joint proposal to change the rules of procedure to prevent the AfD from being able to nominate the President of Parliament as the largest parliamentary group, the Constitutional Court had to be called. The CDU politician Andreas Bühl, who made the call, accused the AfD politician Jürgen Treutler of “seizing power” and demanded his resignation from the post of senior president while other opposition parties accused the AfD of playing with democracy.
Increased concerns regarding these developments led to cross-party support for launching prohibition proceedings against the AfD’s existence as a political party, which many legal experts believe would be successful given the collected evidence. It is unlikely, however, that the proposal, signed by at least 100 different parliamentarians, will be voted on before the new federal elections as the change in classification of the AfD from a mere suspected case to “definitely extremist and anti-constitutional” by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which was expected for the end of the year and would have provided stronger evidence, will no longer take place to ensure equality of opportunity for all parties ahead of the elections. Meanwhile, the AfD seeks to part ways with the JA and establish a new youth organisation, presumably to avoid a more likely prohibition proceeding against the association.
In light of international geopolitical crises and Germany’s stagnating economy, these political developments are of international concern. The stakes are high as Germany’s next government, likely led by the CDU, will be influenced by the activities of the far-right and the electorate’s polarisation. In any case, it will present a U-turn from the politically liberal traffic light government back to the CDU and-—as many fear—to possibly darker days.
