It’s a quirk of German politics: Even though he’s the strong odds-on favorite to become chancellor, Friedrich Merz is in for a nervous election night.
If he’s to have a strong grip on power after the Feb. 23 vote, he needs to be able to form a coalition he can work with. This requires Germany’s smaller parties to suffer, and for some to suffer so much they won’t even be represented in parliament.
Merz has been pretty candid about the ideal scenario: His center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) must do “so well in the election” that “only one coalition partner is needed, definitely not two,” he said last year.
Even better, he would have his pick of which single coalition partner to work with so he can play them off against one another.
“I want to strategically ensure that we have at least two options ― and only need one,” he said in a debate on Sunday. As for which options, he added: “possibly the Social Democrats, possibly the Greens.”
Of course, politics rarely works out so neatly.
For a start, although the CDU and its Bavarian sister, the Christian Social Union (CSU), are performing decently in opinion polls, they might not be doing as well as they need to.
“The big question is why is the CDU not gaining more support than it currently has?” said Robert Grimm, politics and social research director at polling company Ipsos in Germany. “Thirty percent is not a lot for the CDU.”
For another thing, Merz’s high-wire act doesn’t depend only on the performance of his own party, nor even on that of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) ― which is currently second in the polls, but has been ruled out as a coalition partner by the country’s mainstream parties. Instead, it hinges on how many smaller parties win seats in the Bundestag.
The bottom line: The fewer parties left standing, the better for Merz’s coalition outlook.
Here’s a look at the potential fortunes of Germany’s smaller parties, and how that could determine the next chancellor’s fate.
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Beyond Merz’s CDU, the AfD, the SPD and the Greens, three parties are fighting for their political lives. The far-left Die Linke, the hard-left Alliance of Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), which entered government after the 2021 election, are all polling precariously close to five percent, the threshold they must reach to win seats in the 630-seat parliament.
If they don’t make it, their unclaimed seats will be distributed proportionally among the parties that do win representation — bolstering a future governing coalition.
In other words, a few percentage points could make the difference between another political force on the opposition benches, or a total wipeout for the little parties — and additional seats for a CDU-led majority.
On election night, then, Merz’s team not only needs a CDU/CSU win — it will also be crossing its fingers for Die Linke, BSW and FDP to suffer devastating losses.
To lose, and lose badly.
Decisive constituencies
On election day, Germans get to cast two votes: one for a party, and one for a candidate in their constituency, who can win a direct ticket into the Bundestag if they’re the local top vote-getter.
Both votes offer parties a route into the Bundestag. If a party gets at least 5 percent of the party vote, it’s in no matter what. If it falls short of the 5 percent mark, but wins three direct mandates, it wins the right to a chunk of seats (proportional to its share, anyway). That loophole saved Die Linke in 2021, when it fell a bloodcurdling 0.1 percentage point short of the 5 percent mark, but scraped through thanks to the three constituency seats it won.
Despite historical successes, particularly in the former East Germany, Die Linke’s popularity has declined in recent elections. Nowadays, the far-left party, a successor to the Socialist Unity Party that governed former East Germany, is hovering around the 5-percent mark, which means its survival could depend on winning three constituency seats this time around as well.
Enter “mission silver hair”: Three prominent (graying) men who’ve been charged with winning the direct vote in their constituencies, and so unlocking access to the Bundestag.
But that’s a tall order. In 2021, Die Linke managed to win constituency seats thanks to a huge number of split votes. Supporters of the Greens and the Socialists cast their first votes for far-left candidates because they wanted to boost the chances of a red-green coalition that would include Die Linke.
Now, however, “it’s quite the opposite,” said Joachim Behnke, an expert on electoral systems and political science professor at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen. This time around, Greens and Social Democrats voters who split their votes between the two will “damage [their] own party’s chances of being a coalition partner of the CDU.”
A YouGov projection of first-vote results appears to confirm that analysis, suggesting Die Linke could win just two out of the three “silver hair” constituencies — not enough to unlock representation.
To add insult to injury, YouGov’s analysis also suggests Die Linke could lose Berlin Lichtenberg, a seat the party has consistently held since its 2007 founding, to the far-right AfD. While Die Linke are in the running for a handful of seats that are on a knife edge, according to the model, it will be a nailbiter night for them.
Still, Merz shouldn’t count his chickens before Sunday: The party’s membership has surged in recent weeks, and an uptick in the polls — the party hit 7 percent in POLITICO’s Poll of Polls — suggests the 5 percent threshold is not out of reach.
Divide and conquer
In a development that could help Merz, Die Linke’s electorate has hemorrhaged somewhat to the hard-left Alliance of Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which itself might struggle to hit the electoral threshold.
It’s the first time the Russia-friendly party, which broke away from Die Linke in late 2023, has entered the race to grab Bundestag seats.
The alliance rose to prominence in 2024, winning six seats in the European Parliament and earning double-digit vote shares in three state elections.
But according to YouGov’s projection, none of its candidates were modeled as coming in first or even second place in any of Germany’s 299 constituencies, and recent polls show BSW at 5 percent — meaning it’s perilously close to failing to make it to the big time.
“It’s not a clear trend, but the BSW is definitely weaker than we expected,” Behnke said.
Amid a certain “disenchantment” with the party, Die Linke supporters who backed Wagenknecht at first may now be switching back to the more traditional far-left party, he added.
Frenemies
Politically speaking, the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) of Christian Lindner could have been Merz’s favorite coalition partner, if only it were strong enough to reach a majority between them. Alas, the party’s prospects are bleak — and so the knives are out.
In past elections, the CDU/CSU and FDP cooperated to encourage voters to split their ballots. But this time around, Lindner and Merz have made increasingly acerbic attempts to hoover up undecided conservative voters. An Ipsos survey suggests the liberals could lose a considerable share of their former voters to Merz’s conservatives, thereby possibly handing him the coalition he wants.
Merz has warned that a vote for the FDP would ultimately be a wasted vote. If the party gets four percent of the vote, he said, those “four percent are four percent too many for the FDP, and four percent too few” for the CDU/CSU.
Things are looking promising for Merz.
Much like the upstart BSW, the liberals have no real contenders for a direct mandate. The last time they won the first vote in a constituency was in 1990, and that constituency no longer exists.
The FDP targets party votes. It has historically managed to get broad support from across the country and in last year’s successful performance, particularly in the south-west, the party achieved 11.4 percent of the national party vote.
But ever since Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired Lindner, setting the stage for the snap election, the FDP has been polling around four percent. Now it risks a devastating fall from ruling coalition member to Bundestag absentee.
