Gaining but not yet governing

This past Monday, Germany held its most significant election since 1990. Back then, the question at hand was how the country would reunify after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The question in 2025 is how long the established parties can remain unresponsive to voters and yet claim democratic legitimacy.

The election results tracked with pre-election polls. The Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), the nominally center-right establishment party, came in first with 28.5 percent of the vote. In a historic defeat, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), the senior partner in the governing coalition until now, took third place with only 16.4 percent of the vote, a loss of 9.3 percentage points compared with the previous election. This was the first time since the Federal Republic's founding in 1949 that the two traditionally major parties did not finish in first and second place.

The biggest news of the election was the success of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which came in second with 20.8 percent of the vote. Founded only twelve years ago, in 2013, the AfD more than doubled the 10.3 percent vote share that it received in the previous election in 2021.

The state-by-state results further illustrate the AfD’s strength. In all five states of the former East, the AfD won resounding victories, capturing a vote share close to 20 percentage points higher than the second-place party. In the former West, the AfD more than doubled its vote share over the previous election in every one of the 11 states except Berlin.

Clearly, the largest German voting block desires a conservative government, with the AfD as a strong coalition partner of the center-right CDU. But, if repeated declarations of the CDU and all the other parties are to be believed, voters will not get what they voted for. The establishment parties maintain a “firewall” against partnership with the AfD, branding it as far right. Thus, despite the voters’ unmistakable demand for change, this election’s most likely result is more of the same. Instead of the left-leaning coalition of the SPD, the free-market oriented Free Democrats (FDP) and the environmentalist Greens that voters so decidedly rejected, there will now probably be a left-leaning coalition between the CDU and the SPD.

So why did so many voters defy the cultural elite’s consensus that voting for the AfD is akin to supporting the worst of extremists?

Over the course of the three-and-a-half decades since the end of the Cold War, a shared establishment progressivism—encompassing the nominally center-right CDU, the SPD, the Greens and the FDP—has become entrenched. Its project is to build a global future of peace and prosperity by increasing the authority of international law, delegating power to international institutions, opening borders to mass immigration, and subordinating free markets to environmental concerns.

At the same time, political progressivism's failures have mounted. The European Union has steadily eroded its member states’ national sovereignty, further diminishing the accountability of European governments to their voters. Many years of uncontrolled mass immigration have fostered considerable angst among everyday voters about the loss of the German way of life and national identity. Meanwhile, net-zero emissions policies, electric car mandates, and other measures to fight climate change have led to budget-busting energy costs, job losses, and growing signs of industrial decline, as symbolized by the troubles of the previously vaunted German auto industry.

In this election, German voters clearly stated that they are tired of being told that their desire to maintain their way of life and their prosperity is somehow extremist. They also reject their political leadership’s increasing authoritarianism, and its ever more numerous restrictions on free speech and thought.

Similarly, populist anti-establishment parties are gaining ground throughout Europe. Though accused of right-wing extremism, they largely represent traditional conservatism. They have arisen out of voters’ desire to preserve their national heritage in the face of unresponsive political establishments that are committed to the progressive political vision I described above. Echoes of the recent U.S. election are unmistakable.

Because of its past, Germany is a special case. Some prominent AfD leaders have made remarks that imply a lack of understanding of Nazism’s full evil. Sometimes, the AfD has failed to distance itself from such sentiments as forcefully as it must.

That said, the AfD is a traditionally conservative party more than anything else. Its party platform summarizes its stance: “We are open to the world, but we want to be and remain Germans. We want to preserve and sustain human dignity, the family with children, our Western Christian culture, our language and tradition in a peaceful, democratic and sovereign nation-state of the German people. … [W]e want to complete national unity in freedom and a Europe of sovereign democratic states that are bonded with one another in peace, self-determination and good neighborliness.”

That German political elites equate such sentiments with right-wing extremism is, to say the least, troubling.