Germany‘s conservative CDU/CSU party under Friedrich Merz has won arguably the most important German election since the country reunified in 1990.
Merz’s conservatives received just under 29 percent of the vote in Sunday’s national elections, making them the largest party alliance. Merz is set to replace Olaf Scholz as Germany’s next chancellor. However, the result means that the conservatives will not be able to govern alone. Germany now faces weeks to months of backroom negotiations as Merz, a multimillionaire former corporate lawyer and banker, tries to form a government coalition with one or more of his political opponents.
The far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, an anti-Islam party that has advocated the expulsion —or “remigration” of immigrants and non-ethnic German citizens deemed to have not integrated well into society — doubled their support compared to the 2021 election, winning just under 21 percent of the vote. Elon Musk has actively supported the AfD, appearing, via videolink, at one of the campaign rallies, and hosting an interview with AfD leader Alice Weidel on X. That doesn’t appear to have made much of an impact on the vote. The AfD has been polling at around 20 to 21 percent of the vote for months now, well before Musk started meddling.
Merz has sworn he will not form a coalition with the AfD — equating that to “selling the soul” of his party — and all the other parties in parliament have pledged to uphold the Brandmauer, or firewall, to the far right.
If that firewall holds, Sunday’s results mean Merz’s CDU/CSU alliance has two options to form a government: A so-called “grand coalition” with Olaf Scholtz’s centrist SPD, or a more unwieldy three-way coalition between the conservatives, the SPD and the Greens. Merz would have liked to join forces with the pro-business FDP, which was part of the outgoing government, but the party failed to secure 5 percent of the vote, the hurdle required for representation in parliament.
In a surprise, the far-left Die Linke party, which had been declared dead just a year ago, defied all expectations by winning 8.5 percent of the vote.
During the campaign, Merz made restricting immigration and “internal security” his priorities and has pledged to tighten controls on Germany’s borders and more quickly expel refused asylum seekers. He will also be looking to restart Germany’s stagnant economy through a combination of tax cuts, benefit cuts, an elimination of bureaucratic red tape, and a change in the country’s debt ceiling limits.
The state of Germany’s film and TV industry is far down on Merz’s to-do list. The outgoing government passed a new film funding law at the 11th hour, ensuring the country’s film subsidy system, which backed such Oscar season contenders as Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 and Mohammad Rassalouf’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, will continue to operate. The industry is still pushing for a new tax incentive model to make Germany competitive with the rest of Europe and bring in international productions, and a law to require streaming platforms that operate in Germany to invest a fixed portion of their revenues in local productions.
