Germany’s political landscape is fracturing, and the far-right is on the rise. The established parties need to respond and become more appealing for a broader cohort of voters.   

For decades, German politics – or initially West German politics – was divided between the centre-left social democratic SPD and the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU). Today, the political landscape is much more fractured, with smaller parties playing major roles in federal politics.  

Presently, nine parties or groups sit in the German lower house of parliament, the Bundestag. These include the three governing parties who form the so-called “traffic light coalition” (due to the parties’ official colours): the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (Greens), and the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP). The opposition includes the CDU, its lockstep Bavarian sister-party Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU), the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the left-wing Linke, and as of recently, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), as well as six independent MPs. What is noteworthy is that no party gained more than 30 percent at the federal election in 2021, signifying that none of them qualified to be considered a major catch-all party anymore, called a Volkspartei. 

Enthusiasm for the “traffic light” coalition waned soon after the last election. Currently, the three parties together are sitting at 31 percent favourability in opinion polls, in contrast to the CDU/CSU’s equivalent share of 31 percent. Moreover, due to the 5 percent voter threshold required for a party to win seats in the Bundestag, there is concern that the FDP could fall short of this requirement, and be ejected from parliament at the next election.  

What injects urgency into current polling, however, is that none of the governing coalition parties are even close to second to the CDU/CSU. The AfD is currently polling at 19 percent favourability and is thus the current runner-up to the CDU/CSU. This is in contrast to the AfD’s 10.3 percent turnout at the 2021 election. While all Bundestag parties have vowed not to cooperate with the AfD, the reality that almost one-fifth of voters are siding with them cannot be ignored. Whatever the outcome at the next election, coalition building will be difficult, and forming government may require some drastic compromises.   

This is further exemplified by the recent emergence of two fringe parties: the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht and a group around Hans-Georg Maaßen. The former splintered from the parliamentary Linke party in late 2023, congregating around the MP Sahra Wagenknecht who casts her new party as a novel combination of socialism and quasi-conservatism. Wagenknecht hopes to be a far-left enticement for AfD voters in the former East German states whose economics might still be shaded by the former socialist regime, yet who reject progressive “urban fads” such as climate policies or looser immigration. Wagenknecht’s exit from the Linke might – like the FDP – threaten its ability to gain seats at the next election due to the five percent hurdle.  

Maaßen, who previously served as the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz, is currently splintering from the CDU, taking with him the party’s more conservative Werteunion (“values union”) faction. Both fringe parties could conceivably grab voters from the AfD but will likely, in the process, also depress the shares of the other parties.  

The true test for all parties, both new and established, will likely come in September when three former East German states – Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg – vote for state parliaments. The AfD has been especially strong in the former East and is ahead in all three states. In Saxony, the election of an AfD government may be unstoppable if current polling trends materialise. This is significant because the Saxonian branch of the AfD has been designated as extreme right-wing by the Verfassungschutz and is thus under surveillance, as is the leader of the Thuringian AfD, Björn Höcke. A petition calling for more assertive government actions against Höcke has garnered some 1.6 million signatures, demanding that some of Höcke’s rights be stripped. 

This follows from a revelation by investigative journalists from Correctiv which on 10 January uncovered a secretive meeting in Potsdam of high-level AfD members, as well as three members of the Werteunion, at which the mass expulsion of immigrants (including those who hold German citizenship) was advocated. This sparked widespread demonstrations against the far-right, particularly the AfD, across Germany with hundreds-of-thousands of protestors taking to the streets. Public outrage and condemnation notwithstanding, this revelation has not, as yet, resulted in a significant decline in support for the AfD who are still comfortably in second place in nationwide polling. However, it is worth noting that the AfD has in recent days declined slightly in the polls, slipping by three percentage points to 19 percent. Meanwhile, Wagenknecht’s new party seems to have surpassed the five percent barrier and could join the next Bundestag.   

A myriad of factors have contributed to the growing discontent of many voters. These range from unstable government, high taxation and inflation, and displeasure at high levels of immigration, especially following the 2015 refugee crisis. While the government has responded to some degree – for instance by passing a law in January reducing the number of immigrants entering the country – these measures have not been sufficient to reduce the dissatisfaction.  

While such a large representation of political parties may indicate a vibrant democracy and an atmosphere of debate, it also makes governing a lot more difficult. In 2017, the CDU, Greens, and FDP entered protracted coalition-building talks which failed due to insurmountable differences. As each party advocated different policies, they could not agree on a joint platform. The leader of the FPD, Christian Lindner – who now serves as finance minister in the “traffic light” coalition – famously stated that it is “better to not govern at all than to govern wrongly,” when asked why he withdrew his party from the talks.  

After the collapse of negotiations in 2017, the CDU and SPD formed government again, as they had in 2013. This was a marriage of expediency, since the CDU-SPD coalition had lost significantly in favourability ratings by 2017. At the time, the CDU, under chancellor Angela Merkel, was accused of shifting too far to the left to accommodate the SPD, and the SPD was accused of becoming irrelevant. Ostensibly, this alleged shift in the CDU’s politics contributed, in some measure, to the rise of the AfD and the disquiet among members of the Werteunion.  

The 2017 saga illustrates how difficult coalition formation can be, and how governments can form from expediency, rather than vision. Due to the 5 percent threshold, voting for smaller parties can be a “lost vote,” as Germany (unlike Australia) does not have a preference voting system.  

German voters would do well to coalesce around the major Volksparteien. In bygone days, these were the CDU and SPD, but now also include the Greens. No single political party can completely represent the diversity of the nation’s political views. The Volksparteien thus ought to employ a “broad church” approach, thereby offering a political home for voters who find themselves either more on the left or more broadly on the right of the political spectrum.  

Jasper Hufschmidt Morse is a fourth-year student of International Security Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, majoring in Middle East and Central Asian Studies. He previously lived and worked in Germany, where he received the “Abitur” diploma. 

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.