Germany is poised to go back to the future, with final polls indicating Sunday’s federal election will return the country to another grand coalition echoing the era of Angela Merkel.
Merkel’s political home, the centre-right Christian Democratic (CDU), is on course to finish first and is likely to reach out to the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) to form a centrist alliance.
Barring upsets, Germany’s next chancellor will be CDU chairman Friedrich Merz.
The 69-year-old has shifted the previously centrist CDU further to the right – in particular on migration – and promises to cut taxes and red tape to stimulate Europe’s largest economy, now in its third year of flat growth. Merz has promised greater defence spending and more palpable German leadership in Europe amid uncertainty over the direction of the Trump administration.
“I hope the [US] remains a democracy and does not slide into an authoritarian, populist system,” he said at a rally. “But it may be that this populism, this autocratic behaviour of the heads of state, will continue for a longer period of time.”
Final polls on Friday showed his CDU – with its Bavarian CSU allies – slipping slightly to 29 per cent.
That is still almost twice the support of the SPD, which headed Berlin’s bickering outgoing coalition until it collapsed last November. Sunday’s snap election, seven months early, could bring the SPD – with just 16 per cent in final opinion polls – a historic defeat.
[ The Irish Times view on Sunday’s German election: a defining momentOpens in new window ]
If the party plays a role in the next government, it is expected to be as a junior partner to the CDU, with outgoing SPD chancellor Olaf Scholz unlikely to feature.
His departure would make the 66-year-old lawyer postwar-Germany’s third shortest-serving chancellor – and force a reordering of SPD top ranks.
At a heated discussion on Thursday evening, Scholz accused the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), five points ahead of the SPD in second place, as “Russia’s party in Germany”.
Several post-election wild cards could complicate the arithmetic in the new Bundestag, the lower house of parliament.
A new, untested election law to cut more than 100 excess seats could alter traditional voting patterns and have a knock-on effect on smaller parties.
Final polls showed two – the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) – struggling to clear the 5 per cent hurdle for Bundestag representation.
If they rally and make it in, that could force any Merz-led coalition to take on a third partner for a majority, likely to be the Greens, polling steadily on 15 per cent.
These uncertainties mean the final election result could differ from the first exit polls, due at 5pm Irish time.
Ongoing uncertainty over a series of immigration-linked attacks has seen the AfD double its support to 21 per cent, but with no obvious parliamentary allies in Berlin.
Campaign endorsements from the US, including from X owner Elon Musk, have boosted the international profile of AfD co-leader Alice Weidel – but given the party no palpable poll bounce.
On Friday, Weidel denied claims by Der Spiegel magazine that a far-right Austrian politician who made a €2.35 million party donation had acted as an illegal strawman for a German billionaire.
“The [Austrian] donor assured us the money came from his private funds,” said Weidel on national television.
In this campaign, the party has built on its mastery of social media by harnessing AI image generation, flooding channels with nostalgic images of non-existent voters in an alternative Germany – sometimes with unintended results.
A Berlin AfD brochure of a smiling blonde family in front of their home had to be withdrawn when voters noticed a dark window in the home shone through the page to give Weidel, on the brochure cover, a perfectly-placed Hitler moustache.
Berlin police sealed off the city’s Holocaust memorial on Friday evening after a 30 year-old Spanish man was stabbed there and seriously injured.
The man was treated in hospital and said to be in a serious but not life-threatening condition. A suspect said to be known to police was arrested near the scene three hours after the attack and questioned. Three witnesses to the attack were treated for shock.
Local media reported the attack followed an altercation at the memorial, a field of 2,710 concrete pillars near the Brandenburg Gate that was opened in 2005.
