The Germans voted for a change of leadership on Sunday, delivering the greatest number of votes in a parliamentary election to the conservative centrists, with the far right in second place, and reproaching the left government of the nation for its management of the economy and immigration.
The first returns and output surveys almost certainly mean that Friedrich Merz, leader of Christian Democrats, will be the next chancellor in the country. But he will need at least one or – in the possibility that the Germans hoped to avoid – two coalition partners to govern.
“We won it,” said Merz to the supporters of Berlin on Sunday evening, promising to quickly form a parliamentary majority to govern the country and restore a strong German leadership in Europe.
The elections, which took place seven months before expected after the collapse of the unpopular and overwhelming coalition of three parts of the Chancellor Olaf Scholz, will now become an essential part of the European response to the new world order of President Trump. He designed what seemed to be the highest turnout for decades.
Merz, 69, has promised to repress migrants and cut taxation and corporate regulations in an attempt to kick off economic growth. He also promised to bring a more assertive foreign policy to help Ukraine and a stronger leadership in Europe at a time when the new Trump administration has sowed anxiety by climbing traditional alliances and embracing Russia.
Merz, a businessman, was once seen as a potentially better partner for Mr. Trump, but in the last days of the countryside it was reflected on the fact that the United States would remain a democracy under Mr. Trump. He strongly condemned what the Germans saw as intruded by the Trump administration officials on behalf of the far -right alternative for Germany or Afd.
“My maximum priority, for me, will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible in order to gradually obtain real independence from the United States,” said Merz on a round television table after the polls. “I would never have thought of saying something like this on TV, but after the comments last week by Donald Trump, it is clear that this administration is largely indifferent to European destiny, or at least for this part.”
The first wave of returns and output surveys suggested that his Christian Democrats and their sister party, the Christian social union, would have won a 29 -percent of the votes. It was a low part historically for the highest party in a German election and the second lower ever for the party of Mr. Merz in the Chancellor’s elections.
Both are signs of multiplicating cracks in the policy of the nation and the weak points of the centrist parties who ruled Germany for decades.
On Sunday evening there was a great suspense on the coalition that Merz would have been able to meet, but he clearly hoped in a return of the centrist governments that managed Germany for most of the 16 -year mandate of the former Chancellor Angela Merkel: the Democrats Christians the protagonist, with the Social Democrats as a lonely Junior partner.
It was not clear whether this would be possible. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which is a pro-Russian chips of the old German left, wandered close to the 5 % support necessary to enter Parliament. If he erases the threshold, his presence could force Merz to a three -part coalition with two relatively liberal parts. Another party more ideologically aligned with Mr. Merz, the free democrats in favor of business, probably seemed to go down below 5 percent and lose the cut.
The three -part scenario could mean the repetition of a potentially cumbersome and unstable government for Germany, reconfigured but with some of the same vulnerabilities of what has recently collapsed.
The complication comes because Merz has promised to never join the second finitor, the AFD, which usually flirts with Nazi slogans and whose members have decreased the holocaust and have been connected to plots to overturn the government. But the returns showed that the AFD is a growing force in German politics, even if it has not had its ambitions in these elections.
The AFD has doubled its voting share from four years ago, largely appealing to the voters upset by millions of refugees who have entered the country in the last decade from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere. In the former Eastern Germany, he finished first.
His voting share seemed to live up to his high support brand in the polls a year ago, however. Many analysts expected a stronger exhibition, after a sequence of events that raised the party and its signature problem.
The AFD received public support from the vice -president JD Vance and the billionaire councilor Trump Elon Musk. He tried to obtain political earnings from a series of mortal attacks committed by migrants in recent months, even in the last days of the campaign.
But that advantage has never materialized. The reaction to the recent attacks and the support of Trump officials could even have mobilized a support late to die Linke, the party of the German extreme left, who made a campaign on a platform in favor of immigration, some voters they suggested in Sunday’s interviews.
For all that movement, the most likely coalition partner for Merz seems to be what analysts have foreseen for months: the social democrats on the left of Mr. Scholz, even if they have experienced a strong support drop from four years ago.
The only other possible partner would seem to be the Greens, who seemed ready for fourth place in the votes. Negotiations with possible partners began immediately after the closure of the polls on Sunday.
The interviews and the first returns suggested that the voters were angry with the Scholz government for high shopping prices and inadequate wage growth.
Many voters, even those who supported Christian Democrats, said they were not enthusiastic about Mr. Merz personally. But they hoped that a strong government could forge to solve problems at home and abroad and keep Germany’s far right at bay.
“The greatest risk to Germany at the moment is that we will have an unstable majority,” said Felix Saalfeld, 32 years old, doctor in the eastern city of Dresden who voted for Merz’s Christian Democrats. “That’s why it is better if the CDU/CSU gets many votes and we can somehow form a coalition with the least possible number of people, even if it is not my party.”
Mr. Merz will probably have to face a discouraging task in an attempt to reinvigorate an economy that has not grown, in real terms, through half a decade. He will also try to guide Europe in commercial and security conflicts with Mr. Trump and an American administration that has quickly shuffled his global alliances. The voters said they would look at the next government to cushion the pain of post-Pandemic inflation.
“Everything is becoming more expensive and at the same time, wages are not increasing,” said Rojin Yilmaz, 20 years old, a trainee in Allianz of Aschaffenburg, a city in which an immigrant with mental illness killed a child and an adult the adult last month. Mr. Yilmaz voted for Die Linke.
In the interviews in Dresden, a support bastion for the AFD, some voters said they had lost confidence in other parts to face immigration and other issues.
“I voted for the AFD,” said Andreas Mühlbach, 70 years old. “It is the only alternative that is able to change things here.”
With the support for the AFD on the rise, Martin Milner, 59 years old, educator and musician from Potsdam who divided his ticket between the Greens and Die Linke, said he hopes that German defensive democracy will be quick against the right threat .
“I hope this system shows quite resilient,” said Milner, “who can manage the problems we have without drift to one extreme or another”.
The report was contributed by Christopher F. Schuetze, Melissa Eddy AND Tatiana First from Berlin; Sam Gurwitt From Aschaffenburg; Adam Sella from Potsdam; AND Catherine Oom from Dresden.