After Merkel’s “victory,” uncertainty about next German government

On Sunday, Chancellor Angela Merkel Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), won the German election and Merkel, chancellor since 2005, will serve another four-year term. 

But it was, as commentators said, a hollow victory; according to the preliminary official results, the CDU-CSU’s share of the party list vote – Germans have two votes, one for a constituency candidate and one for a party list, which determines the overall composition of the Bundestag – dropped by almost nine percentage points, from 41.5 percent in 2013 to 33 percent on Sunday. Sunday’s vote was the lowest for the two Christian Democratic parties since the 1949 election, the first in the post-World War II Federal Republic. As a result, the CDU-CSU lost 65 seats in the Bundestag and will have 246 seats – well short of a majority in the new Bundestag, which will have 709 members.

The CDU-CSU’s setback was largely the result of substantial increases in support for both the pro-business, market-oriented Free Democrats (FDP) and the eurosceptic and xenophobic Alternative for Germany (AfD). The FDP, drawing support from those who felt the CDU-CSU had allowed itself to drift too far toward positions supported by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), its partner in the “grand coalition” that has governed since the 2013 election, increased its party list vote from 4.8 percent in 2013 to 10.7 percent. As a result, the FDP, which won no seats in 2013 – a party must win three of the 299 constituencies or 5 percent of the national party list vote in order to participate in the proportional distribution of the 299 seats allocated among the parties that won five percent of the party vote – won 80 seats on Sunday.

But even more noteworthy were the dramatic gains in support for the AfD. Formed in 2013 by some economists and businessmen opposed to the European Union’s euro area and, in particular, the bailouts of Greece and other member states in the long-running eurozone debt crisis, the AfD received 4.7 percent of the vote in that year’s election, thereby falling below the 5 percent threshold for seats. But as the refugee migration crisis, which brought more than a million refugees from Syria and elsewhere to Germany, developed, the AfD pivoted from its early economistic euroscepticism to a virulent xenophobia and nationalism directed at the recent migrants, Muslims in particular, and at Angela Merkel for her welcoming stance toward the refugees.

As it shifted its focus from the eurozone crisis to the inflow of refugees from Syria and other migrants, the AfD attracted growing support in one state election after another, especially in the states of the former German Democratic Republic. In 2014, it won between 10 and 15 percent in the elections in Brandenburg and Thuringia and in 2016 it won between 20 and 25 percent in the elections in Sachsen-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In state elections earlier this year in Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein and Nordrhein-Westfalen, all of which are in western Germany, its vote dropped back to the range of 6 to 8 percent. But fueled by its high levels of support in the eastern states of the former German Democratic Republic, where it won more than 20 percent of the vote – in Sachsen, it won 27 percent, even more than the CDU – on Sunday the AfD won 12.6 percent of the national party list vote and, with it, 94 seats in the Bundestag.

If Sunday was, at best, a hollow victory for the CDU-CSU, it was, as Martin Schulz, the leader of the SPD, said on election night, a “bitter hour in the history of Social Democracy.” Indeed, the SPD’s 20.5 percent share of the party list vote was its lowest vote in any election in the life of the Federal Republic. Many assumed that with Schulz, who until he was elected leader last winter had been the president of the European Union Parliament, leading it, the SPD would improve significantly on its poor performances in 2009, when it received 23 percent of the vote, and 2013, when it received 25.7 percent, and the “grand coalition” would be renewed for another four years. And indeed, soon after Schulz was elected leader, support for the SPD rose dramatically in the polls, to such an extent that by early spring it had drawn even with the CDU-CSU.

But as voters took stock of Schulz and compared him with Merkel as a possible chancellor in troubled times, that surge receded just as dramatically, and by July support for the SPD had dropped back to the 23-25 percent range. The fact that its vote on Sunday not only didn’t exceed its vote in the last election but also fell below its vote in 2009 made it inevitable that the party would not join the CDU-CSU in another “grand coalition.” On Sunday evening as the results became known, Schulz announced the SPD would end its coalition with the CDU-CSU and form the opposition in the Bundestag against whatever government Merkel might put together.   

It will take some time and analysis to understand why the SPD, which in its heyday under Willy Brandt in the late 1960s and 1970s routinely won more than 40 percent of the vote, has now dropped to the 20-25 percent range. Some of the erosion no doubt reflects the cost of being the junior partner in a governing coalition; the FDP, which governed with the CDU-CSU in 2009-2013, experienced a similar fate in the 2013 election; its vote drop from 15 percent in 2009 to less than 5 percent in 2013 and it lost all 93 seats it had held in the Bundestag.

But there are other factors contributing to the erosion in support for the SPD that may not be so easily remedied by a “cure of opposition.” As the Dutch and British Labor parties and the French Socialist Party experienced in elections last spring, the erosion in support for the SPD may reflect, in part, the slow but inexorable shrinkage of its traditional core electorate - the industrial working class – coupled with the increasing propensity of a significant portion of that core electorate to defect to parties on the center-right or far-right that are opposed to immigration and cloth their xenophobia in nationalism. Preliminary analysis suggests that defection was most pronounced in SPD strongholds with unusually high levels of unemployment.

On Sunday evening, Angela Merkel acknowledged that she and her party face “tough weeks ahead.” Indeed, they do; without the SPD as a possible coalition partner and with the far-left Linke (Left) and AfD ruled out, in order to attain a majority in the Bundestag they will have to put together a coalition that includes both the FDP and the Greens – a so-called “Jamaica” coalition (named for the black, yellow and green colors of that country’s flag, which are the colors of the three parties).  Such a coalition would have 393 seats - 246 CDU-CSU, 80 FDP, 67 Green – in a Bundestag of 709 members.

Germany has not had a three-party coalition government since 1957. The special challenge facing Merkel and the CDU-CSU today, of course, is that the FDP and Greens disagree on a host of issues including environmental policy, support for business, energy policy and migration, and all those issues must be negotiated and agreed upon by the parties in a formal agreement before the coalition can take office. Moreover, while a CDU-CSU-FDP-Green coalition has been functioning well in Schleswig-Holstein since the state election last spring, the two smaller parties have a long history of antagonism, in part because they have often competed in the past as a possible coalition partner for one or the other of the two major parties. And while the FDP might welcome a chance to return to government after its ignominious exclusion from the Bundestag in 2013, some in the Greens may prefer to remain in the opposition with their friends in the SPD rather than participate in a coalition that will be pulled to the right by the FDP.

And as if putting together a “Jamaica” coalition weren’t difficult enough for Merkel and the CDU, they face the possibility that their Bavarian sister party, the CSU, which lost more than 10 percentage points on Sunday, much of it to the AfD, may insist that the coalition agreement include an explicit cap on immigration, something the other three parties would probably oppose.

Merkel probably will succeed in holding the CDU-CSU partnership together – in part because, with her encouragement and leadership, the EU has already adopted policies – a deal with Turkey in early 2016 and, more recently, preemptive action in Libya – that have greatly reduced the flow of refugees to the EU and Germany via either Turkey or Libya. And she will probably succeed in putting together a “Jamaica” coalition government, if only because it appears to be the only alternative to renewal of the “grand coalition,” a minority government, or a new election, which no one (except the AfD) wants.

But that will not come easily or quickly; as Merkel said, she and the CDU face tough weeks –  indeed, months – ahead.

David R. Cameron is a professor of political science and the director of the MacMillan Center’s Program in European Union Studies.