| This election was called after the collapse of the unpopular three-way coalition between the Social Democrats (SPD), Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens. Outgoing SPD chancellor Olaf Scholz precipitated the vote after he unexpectedly fired his finance minister, the FDP’s Christian Lindner in November, prompting the pro-business party to withdraw from the government. That was the denouement of months of infighting over how to deal with Germany’s budget deficit, and in particular Scholz’s determination to remove the “debt brake” – a constitutional rule that limits the government’s ability to fund investment through borrowing. But immigration has also been a central theme, with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party of Angela Merkel and the mainstream right, taking a harder line as the far-right AfD capitalised on a series of terror attacks by foreign nationals. Jon Henley has a more detailed explainer here. The Trump administration’s enthusiasm for the AfD and assertion that they must be included in coalition negotiations if they did well drew an outraged response from many mainstream politicians and prompted protests in Berlin. But while they may have played some part in driving historically high turnout, those interventions do not appear to have had a decisive impact in either direction. Ahead of expected coalition talks with the SPD, Merz told supporters last night: “The world out there is not waiting for us and for lengthy negotiations.” But the talks could take months. “Germany hasn’t really had a functioning majority government since November,” Deborah said. “The head-spinning developments of the last few months have only increased the stakes. Germany has been completely preoccupied with itself. Europe needs leadership, and Nato needs a clear line from Berlin.” What do we know so far? With all constituencies declared, the CDU/CSU had 28.5%, the AfD 21%, and the SPD 16%, their worst result since the 19th century. “It was a historic loss for the SPD,” Deborah said. “They are in the wilderness. The situation has reminded a lot of people here of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris - there was a much more popular and viable candidate in [defence minister] Boris Pistorius waiting to jump in - but Scholz insisted he was the only man who could lead the party, and they paid a bitter price.” The Greens took 12%, and Die Linke (The Left, a populist party with roots in the old East Germany’s Communist party) were on 9% – an unexpectedly good result for them and perhaps the biggest surprise of the night. Deborah had an excellent piece on why they might do well last Tuesday. “They were able to mobilise a lot of young voters angry over Merz’s flirtation with the AfD,” she said. “He will have to contend with the fact that their clear-eyed condemnation of him brought them success.” The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), another left-leaning populist party, fell just short of the 5% threshold to take parliamentary seats. So did the FDP, who got 4.3%. Turnout was remarkably high, at 83.5% – the highest since reunification in 1990. All of that means that Merz is overwhelmingly likely to be chancellor. But he will be leading a fractured country: one measure of that fact is that he won with the second-lowest vote share for the CDU/CSU in their history. A full results breakdown is available here. What might a coalition look like? The failure of the BSW and FDP to hit 5% is crucial, because it simplifies the parliamentary arithmetic for Merz: he can govern with only the SPD as junior partners, whereas if either party had reached the threshold, he would have had to draft the Greens to join as well. “This was the question for everyone in Germany who cares about politics,” Deborah said. “No matter who it is you’re dealing with, three coalition members is by definition harder than two. It’s just a lot more unwieldy. Everyone who is worried about the AfD was biting their nails to see whether these smaller parties got in.” So serious is the AfD’s threat, she added, that even some of those on the left who reject Merz’s agenda might have been hoping that he would be able to govern without the Greens. As well as the greater instability of such a coalition, that is also because of the AfD’s success in painting the Greens as villains. What do these results mean for the AfD? The AfD’s co-leader Alice Weidel (pictured above) said last night that “our hand is outstretched”, but nobody expects that Merz will take it. As well as all the other mainstream parties, the CDU/CSU have ruled out working with them in coalition under any circumstances. Nonetheless, they will be the largest opposition party and a significant voice over the next few years. Many fear that that could provide an ideal platform for them to broaden the appeal of their message. The result is likely to help the AfD make the argument that the “firewall” against working with them is an anachronism. “It’s one thing if a party has 10%,” Deborah said. “If it has 20%, and one in five voters are in essence excluded from the democratic process, then there is a real problem for the mainstream. What began as a protest vote has morphed into a real relationship with the party among some supporters.” That shift is causing many young Berliners to feel despair, Ashifa Kassam reports in this piece. But as she also notes, the AfD did well among 25-34s, getting 22% of the vote, more than any other party, against only 10% in its traditional base of 70+ voters. What kind of a chancellor will Merz be? “He is no Angela Merkel,” Deborah said. “She had the grudging respect of a lot of people in the SPD and Greens. Merz is more hot-tempered, more right-wing. For so long German politics was synonymous with Merkel, and then you had the somewhat soporific moderate Olaf Scholz - Merz is a much more divisive figure.” Merz has insisted that the debt brake must remain in place. He is also likely to seek stringent policies on immigration. In this piece for the Observer, Musa Okwonga argues that “the far right’s xenophobia is is not at the fringes of German society: it can be found in voices at its very centre. The loudest such voice is Merz.” Merz’s view – strongly contested by Merkel, an old political foe, among others – is that the only way to fend off the AfD is to take a hard line on the subject. One indication of how far he is willing to go came in his attempt last month to force through an “influx limitation law” – an effort he knew could only pass with the support of the AfD. The bill failed, but it was widely viewed as a spiritual break of the “firewall” keeping the AfD out of power, if not a technical one. But there will be hopes in Brussels that he can take the strong leadership role in the EU that Germany has traditionally occupied, as Jennifer Rankin writes here. And in Kyiv, his victory is likely to be welcomed. Merz has strongly rejected the Trump administration’s attempted interventions in German politics and described an “epochal rupture” with the United States; and he has promised that under his leadership Germany will take a more prominent leadership role in Europe’s support for Ukraine. Kate Connolly’s analysis piece sets out the key items in his in-tray – and notes that calibrating Berlin’s relationship with the White House will probably dominate at first. Merz gave an early indication of how difficult that may be last night: Trump, he said, had made it “clear that [his] government is fairly indifferent to Europe’s fate”. | 