Germany voted today, and although the final shape of its next government is still unclear, one thing is certain: the Angela Merkel era is ending.
That feels significant beyond Germany. Merkel became chancellor in 2005, which means an entire generation of Europeans has grown up knowing only one German leader. She governed through the global financial crisis, the eurozone crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump’s presidency and COVID-19. She worked with four American presidents, four French presidents and five British prime ministers. Germany itself became increasingly central to European politics during her sixteen years in office.
Tonight, however, Germans have not chosen a direct replacement for Merkel. Their electoral system does not really work that way. They have elected a parliament, and that parliament will eventually produce a government. According to the emerging results, the centre-left Social Democratic Party, or SPD, led by Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, has narrowly finished first with roughly a quarter of the vote. Merkel’s centre-right CDU/CSU has suffered its worst result in the history of the Federal Republic, also finishing at around a quarter but slightly behind the SPD. The Greens have achieved their strongest federal result, while the liberal Free Democrats have also performed strongly.
That means the election has produced a winner without producing a government.
And I think that distinction makes Germany considerably more interesting than the question of whether Scholz or CDU leader Armin Laschet “won”.
Neither received anything approaching majority support. The two parties that once dominated German politics now collectively attract barely half the electorate. Germany’s political centre has not disappeared, but it has fragmented.
The next chancellor will therefore almost certainly have to construct a coalition.
At first, this can look like a weakness of parliamentary democracy. Voters went to the polls today, yet tomorrow morning they still may not know who their chancellor will be. Political parties could spend weeks, perhaps months, negotiating. Smaller parties that received considerably fewer votes than the SPD or CDU may gain enormous influence because one of the larger parties needs them to assemble a parliamentary majority.
Compared with a presidential election, that seems strangely indirect.
But I am beginning to think the apparent inefficiency may be part of the point.
Germany’s political system was designed after the catastrophe of the Nazi period with an enormous concern for preventing excessive concentrations of power. Its proportional electoral system means parties receive parliamentary representation broadly corresponding to their share of the vote, subject to certain electoral rules. That makes it considerably more difficult for one party to transform a plurality of votes into overwhelming legislative power.
The cost is fragmentation.
The benefit is representation.
Those are two sides of the same institutional choice.
If the SPD ultimately leads the government with around a quarter of the vote, Scholz cannot reasonably claim that Germany has overwhelmingly endorsed the SPD’s entire programme. Three-quarters of voters chose something else. To govern, the SPD would need to negotiate with parties representing some of those voters.
That can produce compromise that nobody finds completely satisfying.
It can also produce policy that reflects a larger proportion of the electorate.
This is where coalition politics becomes more interesting than simply counting which party came first.
The Greens and FDP may now become extraordinarily important. Ideologically, they are very different. The Greens emphasise accelerated climate action, greater public investment and a more socially progressive political programme. The FDP is economically liberal, emphasising lower taxes, fiscal restraint and market-oriented policy.
Yet either the SPD or CDU/CSU may need both parties to form a viable three-party coalition.
That creates a fascinating bargaining situation.
The two smaller parties may first need to determine what they can agree on with each other before deciding which larger party they are prepared to make chancellor.
In other words, the party that came first may not control the negotiation.
This is a useful reminder that political power is not identical to vote share.
Power can come from being pivotal.
Imagine parliament contains three actors. Party A has 45 seats, Party B has 35 and Party C has 20. A majority requires 51.
Party C is the smallest.
It may also determine who governs.
That does not necessarily mean the system is unfair. If neither larger party convinced a majority of voters, somebody has to provide the additional consent necessary to construct one.
The smaller party’s leverage is the mathematical consequence of an electorate that refused to give anybody else enough power to govern alone.
That makes coalition negotiations part of the democratic process rather than something occurring after democracy has finished.
There is another striking feature of tonight’s result: the collapse of the CDU/CSU compared with the Merkel years.
That raises an obvious question. Was Germany voting for the CDU for sixteen years, or was it voting partly for Angela Merkel?
Political parties like to believe their support belongs to the institution. Elections often reveal how much belonged to the individual.
Merkel’s political style was unusual. She rarely relied on dramatic rhetoric. She frequently absorbed policies associated with rival parties and moved the CDU towards the centre on important issues. She cultivated an image of stability and competence rather than ideological transformation.
That approach made her extraordinarily electorally successful.
It may also have created a succession problem.
If a political coalition is held together partly by trust in one individual, removing that individual exposes disagreements that were previously easier to suppress.
Armin Laschet has struggled to inherit Merkel’s authority. That is not necessarily because German voters have suddenly rejected conservatism. Some may simply have trusted Merkel more than the party she led.
This is one of the dangers of highly successful political leadership. A leader can strengthen a party electorally while weakening its ability to imagine itself without them.
The same pattern appears in very different political systems. Parties begin organising themselves around a successful leader because success rewards loyalty and continuity. Internal alternatives weaken. Then eventually the leader leaves and the party discovers that personal popularity was not automatically transferable.
Merkel appears to have avoided the authoritarian version of this problem because she is leaving voluntarily. That itself deserves attention.
After sixteen years as one of the world’s most powerful political leaders, she is simply stepping down.
There is no constitutional crisis. No claim that only she can protect Germany. No attempt to alter term limits — Germany does not impose a fixed term limit on its chancellor, but Merkel could theoretically have sought another mandate. No allegation that an election without her must be illegitimate.
She decided not to run again, and the political system continued.
After writing about Guinea last week, the contrast is almost impossible to miss.
Alpha Condé changed Guinea’s constitutional arrangements to obtain a third term. Soldiers then removed him.
Merkel had no formal term limit preventing another campaign.
She left anyway.
Political institutions are shaped by written rules, but they are also shaped by norms: things politicians technically could do but choose not to do because democratic legitimacy depends on restraint.
That may be one of the least dramatic but most important forms of political leadership.
Knowing when power is available is different from knowing when to stop seeking it.
Germany’s election also demonstrates how difficult the old left-right political spectrum is becoming.
The SPD and CDU remain the largest parties, but voters are increasingly dividing around questions that do not fit perfectly into the traditional class-based politics that created Europe’s major parties.
Climate change is an obvious example.
The Greens are no longer simply a small environmental protest movement. They are becoming a major political force because climate policy affects energy, transport, taxation, industrial strategy and foreign policy simultaneously.
Younger voters may organise their political priorities differently from generations whose identities were shaped primarily by organised labour, religion or Cold War divisions.
The FDP appeals strongly to another section of younger and economically liberal voters through digitalisation, entrepreneurship and individual freedom.
The result is not necessarily political polarisation.
It is political differentiation.
That distinction matters.
Fragmentation can occur because voters are becoming more extreme. It can also occur because they have more choices capable of representing narrower combinations of preferences.
Germany currently appears to contain elements of both, but its mainstream coalition possibilities remain remarkably centrist.
The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, remains represented in parliament and has performed particularly strongly in parts of eastern Germany. That is a serious political development. Yet mainstream German parties continue to reject governing coalitions with it.
This creates another debate about democratic representation. If millions of people vote for a party and every other party refuses to cooperate with it, are those voters being excluded?
Mathematically, perhaps.
Democratically, not necessarily.
Democracy gives voters representation. It does not guarantee the party they choose participation in government.
Coalition formation is itself an exercise in political choice. Parties can reasonably decide that ideological or constitutional differences make cooperation unacceptable.
The alternative principle — that every sufficiently popular party must be included in government — would make coalition politics almost impossible.
Again, electoral support creates political power, not an unlimited entitlement to exercise it.
The coming negotiations will also show how much policy can change without an election producing a dramatic ideological revolution.
Germany faces enormous decisions: how quickly to decarbonise Europe’s largest economy, how much government should borrow and invest, how to manage relations with China, how to strengthen European integration, how to respond to Russia, and what role Germany should play militarily.
The Greens, SPD, FDP and CDU approach those questions differently.
Who controls the finance ministry may therefore matter almost as much as who becomes chancellor.
This is another way parliamentary politics differs from presidential politics. We focus heavily on the person at the top because personalities make politics easier to tell as a story.
But governments are systems.
A coalition agreement can constrain a chancellor.
A finance minister can constrain spending.
A foreign minister can influence international priorities.
Parliament can constrain all of them.
Perhaps that makes leadership less dramatic.
It may also make political change less dependent on one individual.
That is probably the larger contrast between Germany and several of the countries I have written about recently.
In Afghanistan, the state collapsed partly because institutions were unable to survive the disappearance of external support and political confidence. In Haiti, the assassination of the president produced a succession crisis. In Guinea, soldiers abolished the constitution after a president manipulated it. In Tunisia, conflict between institutions culminated in the president suspending parliament.
Germany has just experienced the departure of a leader who has dominated its politics for sixteen years.
And the most remarkable thing happening tonight is how unremarkable the transfer itself feels.
There is uncertainty over who governs next.
There is not much uncertainty over whether the political system will continue functioning.
Those are very different forms of uncertainty.
The first is democracy.
The second is instability.
Perhaps mature political institutions are not those that always produce clear outcomes. They are institutions in which uncertainty about who wins does not create uncertainty about whether everyone will obey the rules after someone wins.
Germany may spend weeks negotiating its next government. Commentators will complain about paralysis. Parties will bargain over ministries and policies. Compromises will be made that contradict campaign promises.
It will probably look messy.
But democratic politics is supposed to manage disagreement, not eliminate it.
If German voters have divided themselves among several parties, perhaps a complicated coalition is not a malfunction of the electoral system.
Perhaps it is an unusually accurate reflection of what the voters actually said.
They did not give anyone a mandate to govern alone.
So nobody should.
