Germans vote as Merz leads race to succeed Scholz

Polling stations opened across Germany on Sunday morning with 59.2 million citizens eligible to choose a new Bundestag, in an election that will reshape Europe's largest economy and test the durability of its post-war political consensus. Friedrich Merz, the 69-year-old leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), enters election day as the clear favourite to succeed Olaf Scholz as chancellor, though the arithmetic of coalition-building in a fragmented parliament promises weeks of negotiation before a government takes office.

Merz's narrow path to the chancellery

Merz has campaigned on a pledge to fix Germany's most pressing problems within four years, a tall order for an economy that contracted in two of the past three years, infrastructure that has visibly deteriorated, and a political system suddenly confronting a far-right force stronger than at any point since the 1930s. His CDU leads final polls with roughly 30% support, but the party's refusal to govern with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) means Merz must assemble a majority from the centre-left and centre-right. The most probable partner is Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD), currently polling around 15-16%, though the Greens and possibly the Free Democrats (FDP) could also feature in a multi-party arrangement.

The outgoing traffic-light coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP collapsed in November 2024 over budget disputes, triggering the early election. Scholz, who has been chancellor since December 2021, campaigns as the incumbent but his party sits in third place behind the AfD, a historic humiliation for the SPD and a measure of how thoroughly the political centre has eroded. Merz was adamant on Saturday that no deal with the AfD would occur, reiterating the firewall, or Brandmauer, that has defined German coalition politics since the Federal Republic's founding.

AfD breaks through in the industrial west

The AfD's projected second-place finish, with polling between 19% and 21%, represents more than an eastern protest vote. The party has made striking inroads in the Ruhr valley, Germany's former coal and steel heartland, where deindustrialisation and decades of underinvestment have left communities receptive to a message that blends anti-immigration rhetoric with economic grievance. In Duisburg-Marxloh, a district known for its Turkish bridal shops and large immigrant community, the AfD won 20% in one neighbourhood, 25% in the next, and 30% in the adjacent area during last summer's European elections, figures that stunned local observers.

Five young men in their early twenties, interviewed in a park beside Marxloh's remaining steelworks, said they would all vote AfD. "We're young, we need work and they don't give us a chance to find training," one explained. "We've no money; everything's more expensive; there aren't many jobs any more and there's so much dirt here." None saw the party as extreme. Professor Conrad Ziller of the University of Duisburg-Essen, who has tracked the AfD's western expansion, notes that in rural eastern Germany the party's strength is long established, but in the west it is growing specifically in cities that have lost their industrial base. "Voices of people in favour of the AfD have become so loud," Ziller said. "If you're in a doctor's waiting room it's really common to hear people chat about getting angry about the established politicians and government."

Migration dominates after a string of attacks

Migration has displaced the economy as the campaign's defining issue after five deadly attacks since May 2024, three of them during the election period itself, in Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg and Munich, all allegedly carried out by immigrants. On Friday night, a stabbing at Berlin's Holocaust memorial kept the issue in the headlines; the victim survived and police identified the attacker as Syrian with an antisemitic motive. The AfD has made "remigration" its signature policy, defining it as the deportation of migrants who have committed crimes, though critics and the party's own extremist wing use the term to mean mass deportation of migrants and their descendants.

The party's chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel, has capitalised on the issue through ubiquitous television appearances, this campaign featured nine televised debates, an unprecedented number. Professor Ziller observed that whenever debates turned to economics, social justice or inequality, "the AfD deflected it and said the main problem is not economics, it's migration, and the government didn't do a good job." The strategy has resonated beyond the party's core: a significant portion of the estimated 20% of voters still undecided on the eve of the election cite migration as their primary concern.

Foreign pressure and the transatlantic rupture

Germany's next government will inherit a foreign policy landscape altered by the return of Donald Trump to the White House. As Ukraine's second-largest military aid provider after the United States, Berlin faces a US president who has called Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator and fractured the Western united front against Russia. The AfD advocates repairing gas lines and relations with Moscow, scrapping climate measures, and holding a referendum on EU membership if the bloc cannot be reformed from within, positions that align uncomfortably with Trump's own scepticism toward European security commitments and multilateral institutions.

The transatlantic rupture deepened when US Vice-President JD Vance met Weidel in Munich and publicly called for an end to the long-standing taboo against engaging with the far-right. German political leaders across the mainstream spectrum were shocked; the Brandmauer is not merely a tactical choice but a foundational principle of post-war democracy. Merz himself was accused of weakening it in January when he accepted AfD votes to pass a non-binding migration motion in the Bundestag, prompting protests in several cities on Saturday. The firewall's fragility is now an open question, both domestically and in Washington's eyes.

The threshold battle and a smaller parliament

A reform passed in 2023 reduces the Bundestag to a fixed 630 seats, eliminating the overhang and compensation mandates that had swollen the previous chamber to 736 members. The change sharpens the stakes for smaller parties: the FDP, part of the collapsed government, and the left-populist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) both risk falling below the 5% threshold required for parliamentary representation. If they exit, coalition arithmetic simplifies considerably, a two-party CDU-SPD majority becomes mathematically plausible. Meanwhile, The Left party (Die Linke), written off months ago, has surged in recent polling and appears set to become the fifth-largest force behind the Greens, securing its place in the new chamber.

What the numbers conceal

Polls close at 18:00 local time (17:00 GMT), with a clear picture of seat distribution likely by late evening. But the headline figures will mask deeper fractures. The AfD's western breakthrough in deindustrialised cities reveals a class dimension that mainstream parties have failed to address: voters who feel abandoned by both the SPD's labour-market reforms and the CDU's austerity instincts. The Greens, polling around 12-13%, retain strength in affluent urban districts but have lost ground in the east and among working-class voters. The FDP's potential disappearance would remove the only consistently pro-business, deregulationist voice from parliament, shifting the centre of gravity leftward on economic policy even under a conservative chancellor.