Germany is experiencing this Sunday an unprecedented election in 16 years, the time that Angela Merkel has been at the head of the Government. Without the veteran chancellor on the ballot and with the uncertainty of how the political landscape will be reconfigured, the Germans will have to choose who will make up the Budestag (Lower House) for the next legislature.
Some 60.4 million citizens are called to vote, around 1.3 million less than in the 2017 elections, from which a repetition of the ‘grand coalition’ emerged between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) -Social Union bloc. Cristiana (CSU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
On this occasion, however, neither party seems willing to reissue that pact. The Social Democrats, who are ahead in the polls after lagging behind throughout the outgoing legislature, wink at the Greens, who aspire to obtain their best historical result, while the conservative side leans ‘a priori’ more towards the Free Democratic Party (FDP).
The SPD figures in the polls with a voting intention close to 25 percent, about four points ahead of the CDU-CSU. The Greens would be around 14 percent, the far-right Alternative for Germany 12 percent, the FDP liberals 11 percent and Die Linke (The Left) 7 percent.
With the exception of the AfD, reviled for pacts in the German political scene, the votes and seats obtained by the rest of the major parties will depend on who governs Germany. The arithmetic predictions anticipate a coalition of at least two parties and the possible pacts have been a recurrent reason for reproach in the campaign.
Candidates
The CDU aspires to retain power from the hand of Armin Laschet, head of the Government of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state, and shaken in recent months by all kinds of controversies. Despite being the favorite to succeed Merkel, since the announcement of her candidacy she has seen her bloc lose around ten points in the polls.
Laschet, however, has tried to defend that the results are “very tight”, in a last attempt to appeal to the high number of undecided. A poll published this week by YouGov, however, showed that 74 percent of voters were already clear about their vote.
Controversies such as controversial laughter in full floods in mid-July have not favored the image of the conservative candidate, who has seen how the candidate of Los Verdes, Annalena Baerbock, first beat him in the polls, and then, in a more sustained way, the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz.
The SPD candidate, vice chancellor and finance minister in the current government, has sold a more stable image than that of his rival in the CDU. His reliable participation in the debates and his proven management experience draw a profile similar to Merkel’s.
Scholz has also benefited from a progressive decline of both Laschet and Baerbock, whose party came to feature with a voting intention of more than 20 percent. Against him, however, he has played his ambiguity on key issues such as his potential allies after the elections, in particular on the treatment he is willing to give Die Linke.
A complex system
To arrive at the time of the pacts, however, it will first be necessary to know the number of seats in each political formation. To this end, German law establishes a multiple distribution system based on two votes: in one of them, voters choose a direct candidate for each of the 299 constituencies, while in the second party lists are examined at the regional level .
The final distribution, however, still has to incorporate the so-called additional seats, in such a way that if a party receives in a state more seats by direct vote than by lists, an equivalent number of seats is added. This compensation means that there is not always a fixed number of seats in the Bundestag.
The new MPs will take office one month after the elections and, until there is a firm government, Merkel will remain the acting Chancellor of Germany. The 2017 elections led to six months of consensus-building talks and, given current volatility, the coalition’s options may not be immediately clear.
Whatever happens, Germany will enter a new era without Merkel, pending to see if it will do so hand in hand with Scholz, Laschet or, to a lesser extent, Baerbock. The chancellor, who will culminate a withdrawal process that she announced in October 2018, has avoided at all times the questions that pose her what her political future may be.
He will be the ninth chancellor of postwar Germany, ruled alternately by the CDU and the SPD. She will join an honor roll that, in addition to Merkel’s name, also incorporates – in chronological order – those of Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Kurt Kiesinger, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schroeder.
