“They wanted to halve us, but the opposite has happened!” Alice Weidel told her supporters on election night in Germany. The date was February 23, 2025, and her Alternative for Germany had just taken 20.8% of the vote, almost double its showing in 2021.
The party finished second. Friedrich Merz’s conservative CDU/CSU alliance won with 28.6% in the preliminary count, according to Deutsche Welle. The Social Democrats of outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz fell to 16.4%, their worst federal result in more than a century, and the Greens took 11.6%. The Free Democrats missed the 5% hurdle and dropped out of the Bundestag. Scholz said he would not serve in the next government.
A seat count that does not add up for Merz
Of the Bundestag’s 630 seats, the CDU/CSU will hold 208 and the AfD 152. The SPD gets 120, the Greens 85 and the Left Party 64. A majority needs 316. Merz therefore needs a partner, and the likeliest one is the SPD. He said he hoped to have a government by Easter at the latest.
The AfD is not on his list. Since the 1950s, Germany’s mainstream parties have kept to the Brandmauer, the “firewall” against working with the far right in government. Weidel held out her hand anyway and said that shutting her party out would amount to “voter fraud.” Merz answered her directly in the televised debate of party leaders: “You want the opposite of what we want and that is why there will be no cooperation.”
Strong in the east
Nationally the AfD got roughly 20%. In eastern Germany it came first. In Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia it took the largest share of the second-ballot vote, and in many constituencies more than 30% of that vote went its way. In Thuringia, the home state of Björn Höcke, the party got more than 38%, twice the CDU’s share. Höcke was convicted twice in 2024 for using a banned slogan of the Nazi-era SA.
The party also won a majority of second-ballot votes in two western constituencies for the first time: Gelsenkirchen and Kaiserslautern. SPD candidates still took the first votes in both cities.
German security authorities classify the AfD as partly far-right extremist, and some of its chapters and members are watched by the domestic intelligence agency. In the weeks before the vote, hundreds of thousands of people protested against it. Elon Musk backed the party during the campaign, and US Vice President JD Vance also came out in its support.
Short of its own hopes
Deutsche Welle reported that the result still fell below what the AfD had wanted. Many members had quietly hoped to draw level with the CDU or beat it, and the election-night party was subdued. Weidel nonetheless signalled she is available as the party’s chancellor candidate in 2029. “We will overtake the CDU/CSU. And then we will get a mandate to govern,” she said on the party’s own TV channel.
The vote came seven months early. Scholz’s three-party coalition fell apart in November, and the Independent noted that the campaign was dominated by worry over a stagnant economy and pressure to curb migration. Analyst Nicolai von Ondarza called the incoming government “a government of last chance” to blunt the AfD’s appeal.
Sources
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