The surveys of the past few weeks have not been mistaken. The conservatives of the CDU/CSU won, this Sunday, February 23, the legislative elections in Germany, with 28.6 % of the votes, according to official figures, and ahead of the far -right AFD party, which thus achieves the best score in its history, with 20.8 % of the votes. An unprecedented result for a far-right party to a federal ballot since the post-war period.
Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservatives, who is likely to replace the social democrat Olaf Scholz as the Chancellor, excluded any government alliance with AFD. After welcoming the “historic result” of her party, which doubles her result four years ago, Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right formation, still set out to the conservatives “to participate in a government and to fill the will of the people,” she told the public television channel Ard.
The outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz did not read the many undecided to support his Social Democratic Party (SPD), which harvested only 16.4 %, against 25.7 % in 2021. He says he assumes “the responsibility” of a “bitter” defeat, unprecedented for the oldest party in Germany since the end of the Second World War. Another loser of this ballot: the Greens, allies to the Scholz government, which harvested 11.6 % of the votes.
To form a government, which he wants “as quickly as possible”, Friedrich Merz will have to go in search of one or two allies. In the German parliamentary system, negotiations can take several months before succeeding. FDP liberals, former partner of the Scholz government, failed to reach the minimum required threshold of 5 % to enter the Bundestag.
SUBTRY CAMPAIGN
The electoral campaign for these legislative elections, after the implosion in November of a coalition in power, took place in an inner climate weighing, after several deadly attacks involving foreigners in recent weeks, which have shaken opinion and favored the movements of the right and the extreme right. The last one took place on Friday evening. A young Syrian refugee is suspected of having seriously injured a knife tourist in the holocaust memorial in Berlin. He wanted to “kill Jews”, according to justice.
Brief and intense, the campaign was also marked by the reversal of the United States with the centrist parties in Germany, a historic ally of Washington. AFD thus benefited from supported support for weeks from the entourage of Donald Trump: his adviser Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has continued to promote Alice Weidel on his X platform.