Exit polls indicate CDU/CSU set to be largest party but success of Alternative für Deutschland likely to complicate formation of a government

Summary

Germany’s conservative CDU/CSU, led by Friedrich Merz, won around 29% of the vote in the snap general election, making Merz the frontrunner to form a ruling coalition.

The far-right AfD surged to 20%, nearly doubling its 2021 result, but remains politically isolated as major parties refuse to cooperate with it.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats suffered their worst result since WWII, while his coalition partners, the Greens and FDP, also lost support.

Merz faces challenges forming a government, addressing economic woes, and countering the AfD’s growing influence.

  • LovingHippieCat@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 months ago

    Edit at the top: turns out, any party that is below 5% doesn’t make it into the Bundestag, so the multiple leftist parties that fell below that 5% were waisted when it comes to getting seats. The country though still has the majority left leaning vote percentage wise. I’m only keeping the original comment for posterity, some of it is wrong as has been pointed out by the Germans in the thread.

    Interestingly, if all the center-left and the leftists parties all added up their percentages of the vote, they get roughly 51.2% of the vote. Now I’m not super knowledgeable on how that affects their Bundestag, but if that means that said 51.2 percent have a majority of seats, they could join together to make a coalition government and keep the far right out of power.

    Course that won’t happen because us leftists love infighting and refusing to compromise with our fellow leftists for the greater good while the right easily falls in line.

    Also interestingly, this could mean that the far right/conservative party is going to be put into power in Germany winning the minority of the vote overall for the second time that I know of. And we all know what happened last time.

    Edit: And again, this is all preliminary so it could change and as another commenter mentioned the AfD is a pariah and is still unlikely to be a part of the government due to the conservatives saying they won’t be. But who knows, people lie.

    • stetech@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      Well said. Just a nitpick, of the two bigger parties (ignoring anything <3% here) which didn’t succeed in entering parliament, one is starkly not leftist (FDP, free democrats, i.e. “free market”), and the other is arguably financially left, but socially right (BSW, alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, a very young party that split off from the Left (the leftist party which made it into Bundestag) due to internal differences.