Reflections on the German Federal Election of 2025

The early election in Germany this year seems to me to warrant comment as reflective of the broader trend of electoral politics across the Western world. This may most obviously be the case in how as has already been seen in Italy and France, where the party system has long been more mutable (perhaps because it is so fragmented), but also to a lesser degree in more concentrated and stable British politics (where the vote for the Conservatives collapsed in 2024, and Reform UK surged), Germany likewise seeing support for the traditional parties collapse, with the far right the principal beneficiary.

In discussion of the matter I have seen the historical background was almost always less than sketchy, partly I think because there is less in the way of handy comprehensive tabulations of historical election results for the Federal Republic (anything like the excellent publication from the House of Commons' Library unavailable). Still, it seems to me that a look at this is key to giving us more than a superficial picture of the situation, and it does not take too much work to cobble together at least a rough image of the past. According to the data I have found the Federal Republic saw its two traditionally leading parties together claim 60 percent of the vote in that first election in 1949, a higher 74 percent in 1953, 81 percent in 1957, at which point one can regard these dynamics as having established the norm for the next several decades. In the nine Federal elections held over the 1957-1987 period the two parties together claimed a consistent 81 to 91 percent (on average, 86 percent) of the vote--a formidable share indeed, leaving less than a fifth, often much less, to all the third-parties combined (like the Free Democrats, or from 1980 forward, the Greens).

However, that position was eroding by the 1990s, with the two big parties claiming just 77 percent of the vote in the four elections of the 1990-2002 period, and then trending more sharply downward from 2005 on. Seeing the two big parties claim 69 percent of the vote in 2005 (their lowest since that first election in 1949), and 57 percent in 2009 (the lowest ever since the Republic's founding), after a limited resurgence in 2013 (to a still relatively low 67 percent), the downward trend continued to new lows in the three elections since, with the figure 53 percent in 2017, just under 50 percent (49.8 percent) in 2021, and finally, under 45 percent (44.9 percent) in 2025, scarcely half the norm for the 1957-1987 period. That last election saw the Conservatives, even as the "number one" party, with a near-record low share of the vote (28.5 percent, second only to their share in 2021, as against the 41-50 percent they managed in every election in 1953-1998, the 38 percent they at least averaged in 2002-2013, and the 33 percent they got in 2017), while the Social Democrats had their absolute worst performance since the Republic's start. Their mere 16 percent of the vote is to be compared with their second-worst of 20 percent in 2017, their 23 percent average in 2009-2021, and before that their share of 32-45 percent, and average of 38 percent, in 1957-2005--as well as, of course, the 21 percent that has seen the far-right party the Alternative for Germany replace them in the number two spot.

As the numbers presented here imply the decline of the two leading parties was a decades-long matter. It would seem that the reunification of Germany played its part here by shifting the electoral landscape (whether due to legacies of the German Democratic Republic, the combination of shock capitalism and swaggering right-wing nationalism that left many former East Germans traumatized for decades, or some mix of both), paving the way for and in respects (the relative poverty and general feeling of "second class"-citizenship in eastern Germany) intensifying those factors that have so much shaken party systems elsewhere--reaction against the commitment of all the major parties to neoliberalism, which worsened significantly with the onset of the Great Recession and all that has come after it, and opposition to war. This points to the extent to one of the most significant features of that collapse, namely the way in which opposition to neoliberalism and war, consistently translates to votes for parties which deliver more neoliberalism and more war, not least by way of those far-right parties that members of the "Fourth Estate."

Of course, the mainstream of the commentariat cannot be expected to point to, let alone puzzle out, what such a situation says about voters' range of "choice"--just as they do not consider how, even were one to accord der kulturkampf more weight in electoral politics than it actually has, in Alternative for Germany's Alice Weidel, a choice of leader who resides outside the country where she is an office-holders with her Sri Lankan (female) partner as leader of a German far-right party, makes a mockery of the pretensions of those who take a conventional view of the culture war. After all, incongruous as the situation may seem to them, it is less so to those who take the reminder that not only has identity politics been advantageous to the right in its diverting attention from class, and creating divisions and resentments of which the right has taken full advantage; or that such politics have often been reconcilable with many a right-wing imperative, not least in the economic arena ("market populism," "woke capitalism"), but even the geopolitical-military arena; but that the anti-universalistic, nationalist tendency of such politics has enabled identity politics to be pressed into the explicit service in highly pointed fashion, as seen in the phenomena of "feminationalism" and "homonationalism," in which purported respect for the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ is openly presented as a justification for racist hostility or religious discrimination toward selected minorities, immigrants and foreign countries, a game that Ms. Weidel has, of course, personally played. In the process one is reminded by the possibility of such accommodation of what the right's priorities truly are--and that useful as cultural traditionalism has often been to the champion of status quos and reaction, in the end with elites, even more than with working people "It's the Economy, stupid," first, last and always (after all, what else makes them elites in today's world?), with the vehement denials of their courtiers only ever underlining the matter.