Voters in Germany went to the polls on 23 February 2025 in an election called seven months early after the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition. The result handed the conservative CDU/CSU, led by Friedrich Merz, around 28.5 percent of the vote, enough to return them to the chancellery after sixteen years out of power.
The election was a seismic event for the centre-left: the Social Democrats fell to a historic low of around 16 percent, and their Green partners also slumped, allowing the far-right AfD to finish second nationally for the first time with roughly 21 percent. Merz had vowed he would never work with the AfD, leaving a grand coalition with the SPD as the only viable path.
The vote unfolded against an extraordinary backdrop: three weeks earlier, Vice President JD Vance had lectured German leaders at the Munich Security Conference on the wisdom of working with parties like the AfD. Merz, a combative businessman-politician, inherited a European economy in recession, a war on Germany’s eastern border, and a transatlantic alliance in doubt, and his first challenge was to form a government capable of confronting all three at once.