Opinion/Analysis by Keith Rankin.

Germany’s important election last week struggled to make the news cycle, even on Germany’s own Deutsche Welle(DW), Germany’s equivalent of Britain’s BBC. Especially (but not only) in the international media, most of the focus was on a single party (AFD, Alliance for Germany) that was never going to have the most votes and was (almost) never going to become part of the resulting government.

Germany is the world’s third largest national economy, and traditionally dominates the politics of the European Union; an important example of this dominance was the Eurozone financial crisis of the first-half of the 2010s; a crisis that was (unsatisfactorily) resolved, thanks to a problematic and controversial program of fiscal austerity.

At present, Germany, like New Zealand, is experiencing an economic recession. (Provisional annual economic growthwas -0.2% in 2024 and -0.3% in 2023.) The cause is similar, too, in both countries: the same ‘balance the Budget’ mentality that gave the world the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Election Result

The ‘winner’ of the German election was the CDU/CSU Alliance (see Wikipedia for a better presentation of the results), which works a bit like the Liberal/National Coalition in Australia. (The Christian Social Union functions in Bavaria much like Australia’s National Party functions in rural Queensland.) CDU/CSU (like National in New Zealand) comfortably prevailed with 28.5 percent of the vote, entitling that alliance to 33 percent of the seats in the Bundestag (Parliament).

The new Chancellor (equivalent to Prime Minister) will be Friedrich Merz; a 69-year-old version of our own Christopher Luxon, as far as I can tell. He is strongly anti-Putin and pro-Israel. He has come to power well and truly under the international media radar; and will be in a strong position to exert near-absolute power, given that he will always be able to turn to the AFD (who got more votes than the Social Democrats; 20.8%) for support in the Bundestag for any measure that is not palatable to Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. In the new Parliament, the Greens and the Left merely make up the numbers.

Merz’s Christian Democrats will form a coalition government with the losing SPD (Social Democratic Party, like Labour in New Zealand) who came third with 16.4 percent of the vote; 19 percent of the seats. Together these two parties of the establishment centre hold 52% of the new parliament, despite having less than 45% of the vote. (The outgoing minority government was a centrist coalition of the SPD and the Greens; the election was held early because the ACT-like Liberal Party – the FPD, Free Democrats – withdrew from the coalition. The FPD vote shrunk from 11.4 percent in 2021 to just 4.3 percent of the vote this time.)

The result in Germany proved to be very much like that of the United Kingdom in 2024: a slide in support for the two major parties (‘the establishment centre’), a consolidation of power to the self-same establishment centre, and a shift of that establishment centre to the right. (See my chart in Germany’s stale (and still pale) political mainstream, Evening Report 27 February 2025, for a timeline of decline.) While both countries technically underwent a change of government, in both countries the establishment has entrenched its power, and in both countries the political assumptions of the power centre have shifted to the right.

Clearly this is problematic for democracy, because historically disastrous popular support for the ‘broad church’ parties of the establishment centre has coincided with increased power to those parties, as well as policy convergence between them. Further, based on legislative electoral requirements, neither Germany nor the United Kingdom (nor the United States for that matter) will have a new government until 2029. At a time when a week is a long time in international politics, 208 weeks is an eternity. World War Three, a distinct possibility, may be in its second or third year by then.

Voting System

Germany represents the prototype upon which New Zealand’s MMP voting system is based. There are some differences though, and some recent changes.

Germany calls its all-important ‘party vote’ the ‘second vote’, disguising its importance. It is possible that many German voters do not fully appreciate its significance. The electorate vote is called ‘first vote’, and winners (by a plurality, not necessarily a majority) are elected ‘directly’. The second (party) vote is understood as a top-up vote to ensure proportionality.

Party lists are regional in Germany. And ‘ethnic parties’ may get special privileges.

In one respect the German version is more proportional than the New Zealand version of MMP, in that it no longer allows overhang MPs. (However, the most recent result is not proportional in the important sense that two parties together with less than 45% of the vote have 52% of the seats.) In MMP, one can easily imagine an overhang situation being frequent if the ‘major’ parties, which win most electorates, only get between 16% and 29% of the party vote.

In 2013, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court decided that overhang seats were too big a threat to proportionality. So, they introduced ‘levelling seats’. In effect, it meant that if one party gets an overhang, then all parties get an overhang. The result was, in 2013, that a parliament that should have had 598 members (Deputies) ended up with 631, an effective overhang of 33. In 2017 that effective overhang grew to 111, and to 137 in 2021.

For 2025, they decided to abandon overhang representation altogether, by not guaranteeing direct election through the first vote. And they fixed the size of the Bundestag to 630 Deputies, up from a base-size of 598.

If the new German system was in place in New Zealand in 2023, then two of the Te Pati Māori electorate seats from 2023 would have been forfeit, going instead to second placed candidates; proportionality in 2023 entitled Te Pati Māori to four seats, not the six which they have. However, we should note that, if New Zealand was using the present German version of MMP, there would be no special Māori electorates, but the Māori Party would be exempt the five percent party threshold. Ethnic-privileged parties in Germany are incentivised to focus on the party vote, not the electorate vote. In Germany there is a Danish ethnic party (South Schleswig Voters’ Association) which is exempt the threshold. Its leader, Stefan Seidler, did not win his electorate. But his party got 0.15% of the nationwide vote, meaning it qualified for 0.15% of the 630 places in the Bundestag; one seat, for him.

New Zealand voters seem to have more tactical and strategic political nous than do German voters. Thus, it has been very rare for a party in New Zealand to miss out qualifying for Parliament because of getting between 4% and 5% of the party votes (noting that both countries operate a 5% disqualification threshold). In Germany, party-vote percentages just below 5% are not uncommon. In New Zealand, voters, conscious that they want to play a role in coalition-building, actively help parties near the threshold to get over the line. (Indeed, I voted New Zealand First in 2023, because I was 99.9% sure that the only post-election coalition options would be National/ACT or National/ACT/NZF; I favoured the three-party alternative, so I used my vote strategically to help block a National/ACT government.)

Indeed the latest German result was a bit like the latest New Zealand result, but with a party resembling New Zealand First (BSW) getting 4.972% of the vote, so getting no seats at all. BSW getting just a few more votes would have meant a substantial erosion of the two-party power result which eventuated. It is extremely difficult for new non-ethnic parties to get elected in Germany.

In 2025, two parties scored just under five percent of the vote. As well as the BSW, the (ACT-like) Free Democrats who had been part of the previous government, and who had indeed precipitated the early election, scored 4.3%. Indeed, fifteen percent of the votes were ‘wasted’ – that is, cast for ultimately unsuccessful parties. In New Zealand the wasted vote is typically around four percent. Indeed, this high wasted vote turns out to be a more serious challenge to proportionality in German than uncompensated overhang seats.

Both Germany and New Zealand have the contentious (in New Zealand) ‘electorate MP’ rule; the rule that’s misleadingly dubbed in New Zealand as the ‘coat-tail’ rule. (Misleading, because most MPs come in on the coat-tails of their party leadership, and always have.) In Germany the rule is stricter than in New Zealand. In order to avoid disqualification by getting less than 5% of the party vote, New Zealand requires that the party get one electorate MP. In Germany the rule (initially the same as New Zealand), since 1957 has been a requirement for three electorate MPs. In Germany in 2021, the Left Party got 4.87% of the vote and three electorate MPs; they just squeezed in, on both criteria!

Overall, United States’ Vice-President JD Vance’s pre-election comments about democracy in Germany were valid. German politics continues to exclude the non-establishment parties of both the right and the left, despite support for these parties having been increasing for a while, and now representing the majority of German voters.

Media Framing

German television electoral coverage, if DW is anything to go by, is superficial; indeed, is quite insensitive to the national and local dramas taking place. I watched the coverage live. In the hour before the Exit Poll results were announced, the discussion barely mentioned the potential dramas taking place, despite both the BSW and FDP parties pre-polling only just under the five percent threshold. The state of the economy was mentioned in a perfunctory way; clearly it was not a big issue for the political class on display.

At 6 o’clock exactly, the exit-poll results were read out, as if they were the election result. As indeed they turned out to be, more-or-less; the same as the pre-election polls. The subsequent uninterested attitude towards the actual counting of the votes was disappointing. There had been a bit of this in the 2024 UK election as well; as if the exit poll was the election result. In the UK case, Labour’s actual result (for the popular vote) was well under the exit poll result, while the Conservatives did significantly better than their exit poll tally; those facts, though, were for the nerds and psephologists.

In my observation, early votes and exit polls favour the parties supported by the political class; election day votes much less so. So, in New Zealand in 2023 it was initially looking like there would be a two-party coalition of the right. But, to the attentive, as the night wore on, the National Party percentage fell from 41% to 38%, meaning that NZF would have to be included in any resulting coalition.

I suspected something quite similar would happen in Germany, and I was only partially wrong. The exit poll results, and the subsequent counts, were presented to just one decimal place; indeed, the presentation of the numbers was very poor throughout. So, it was hard to see to what extent BSW was improving as the votes were counted.

In the exit poll, two parties – FPD and BSW – were shown as being on 4.7%, and the AFD was on 19.5%. So, the two 4.7% parties were largely written out of the subsequent discussion. We did see an early concession by the FPD, who – representing a segment of the political class – understood the polling dynamics rather well. And we did see the AFD’s Alice Weidel being asked if she was disappointed to get under 20%. Ms Weidel put on a brave face, but she did seem disappointed. When the votes were actually counted, her party got 20.8% exactly on Weidel’s prior expectations.

BSW was completely ignored. There was simply no interest in the possibility that they might reach the 5% threshold, even when the vote count had them upto 4.9%. In the end BSW reached 4.972%; so close! Out of sight, out of mind! In the official results the BSW were lumped with ‘Other Parties’. The DW election panel were too unaware to make any comments about the party itself, its philosophies, or how its possible success might influence the process of forming a coalition government. (Of particular importance was that, with just a few more votes, BSW might have given Eastern Germany a voice in a three-way coalition government.)

For DW, their perennial concern is the place of Germany within Europe and the World; they had little time to give the outside world a glimpse into the domestic lives and politics of ordinary Germans. And we heard nothing about the ‘ethnic vote’, the privileged Denmark Party notwithstanding. I suspect that many if not most of the recent immigrants who do much of the work in Germany either could not vote or did not vote. The election was about them, not for them; denizens, not citizens.

However, DW did invite on a gentleman who mildly focussed the attention of the discussants by suggesting that one of the priorities of the new Chancellor – Friedrich Merz – would be to acquire nuclear weapons! I don’t think the rest of the world had any prior insights into that; ordinary Germans were probably equally in the dark.

Who is Friedrich Merz? Who knows? It turns out that he dropped out of politics for a while, to play a leading role in BlackRock, the international acquisitions company which until recently owned New Zealand’s SolarZero (refer Update on SolarZero Liquidation by BlackRock, Scoop, 29 January 2025). Our media told us that the election was all about the “far-right” AFD Party; that is, the far non-establishment-right. We in New Zealand heard nothing about the far establishment-right; the shadowy man (or his party). Some now fear Merz will be an out-and-out warmonger. Even Al Jazeera, which can be relied upon to cover many stories about places New Zealand’s media barely touches (and in a bit more depth), had the portraits of Olaf Scholz and Alice Weidel on the screen, on 22 February, the day before the election, despite the certainty that Merz world become the new Chancellor.

In that vein, I heard a German woman interviewed in Christchurch, on RNZ on 25 February. She, disappointed with the election result, spent her whole edited four minutes railing about the AFD, as if the AFD had won. There was no useful commentary, by her or RNZ, of the actual result of Germany’s election.

Are we so shallow that we don’t care; that some of us with the loudest voices only want to rail against a non-establishment party, and to see the democratic support for alternative parties as being somehow anti-democratic?

East Germany

People of a certain age in New Zealand will remember the former East Germany; the DDR, German ‘Democratic’ Republic. Most people in Germany itself will have had knowledge of it, including the Berlin-based political staff of DW who were mostly in their thirties, forties and fifties. But the ongoing issues of Eastern Germany were barely in their mindframes.

In Eastern Germany – the former DDR – (especially outside of Berlin), support for the AFD was close to 40%, for BSW over 10%, and the Left much higher than in Western Germany. In the former East Berlin (which I visited in 1974), the Left seems to have been the most popular party. Support in the East for the establishment parties combined was between 25% and 30%, and with a lower turnout.

BSW, it turns out, is Left on economic policy and Right on social policy. And, in the German discourse, is categorised by the political class as ‘pro-Putin’. If BSW had got 5% of the vote, Merz could have tried to bring them into his government; or Merz might have turned to the Green Party instead of a ‘pro-Putin’ party. But I cannot see even the German Greens being able to govern as a junior partner to a belligerent establishment-right CDU-led government. BSW’s failure to get 5% of the vote may turn out to be one of the great ‘might-have-beens’ of Germany’s future history.

As JD Vance stated, this Eastern German situation poses a danger for democracy in Germany and in Europe. Eastern Germany is where the German state is at its most vulnerable. The majority of voters there have voted for ‘pro-Putin’ parties; and, significantly, parties prioritising the problems of economic failure over the big-politics of extranational power-plays.

The new German government, it would seem, is set to aggravate (or, at best, ignore) the problems of Germany’s ‘near-East’, while setting out to inflame the problems of Europe’s ‘far-East’.

The Debt Brake

This is Germany’s equivalent of Ruth Richardson’s 1994 ‘Fiscal Responsibility Act’ (now entrenched in New Zealand law and lore). This is the major single reason why New Zealand has had so many infrastructure problems this century, and why so many young men and families emigrated to Australia in the 1990s, with some of these emigrants coming back to New Zealand in recent years as ‘501s’.

The Merkel debt-brake is the self-inflicted single major reason why many European economies are in such a mess today; and Germany in particular. Germany is congenitally deeply committed to all kinds of financial austerity, with government financial austerity being the most ingrained. Rather than circulating as it should, money is concentrating. The debt-brake is “a German constitutional rule introduced [in 2009] during the Global Financial crisis to enforce budget discipline and reduce [public] debt loads in the country” (see Berlin Briefing, below).

Germany still has a parliamentary session under the old Parliament, before the new parliament convenes. Michaela Küfner (see Berlin Briefing, below) suggests the possibility that the old “lame duck” Parliament could remove the debt-brake from the German constitution, because she sees the make-up of the new more right-wing parliament as being less amenable to address this ‘elephant in the room’. Seems democratically dodgy to me, even talking about pushing dramatic constitutional legislation through a ‘lame duck’ parliament; like Robert Muldoon, pushing through a two-year parliamentary term for New Zealand in the week after the 1984 election!

(Two-year parliamentary terms are not unknown, by the way; the United States has a two-year term for its Congress. This is almost never mentioned when we discuss the parliamentary term in New Zealand. In the United States at present, there will be many people for whom the 2026 election cannot come fast enough; an opportunity to reign-in Donald Trump.)

Future German relations with the United States

On 27 February (28 Feb, New Zealand time) – before the fiasco in the White House on 28 February – I watched Berlin Briefing on DW. This programme is a regular panel discussion of the political editorship of Deutsche Welle.

The context here is that Friedrich Merz made an important speech the evening after the election; a speech that had the Berlin beltway – “people behind the scenes here in Berlin” – all agog. Merz said: “For me the absolute priority will be strengthening Germany so much so that we can achieve [defence] independence from the United States.”

The discussion proceeded as follows:

“How important is this anchoring in Nato of the idea of the United States as ‘The Great Protector’?” Nina Haase, DW political correspondent: “I don’t think there’s a word, ‘massive’ is not enough; people behind the scenes here in Berlin … they talk about are we going to part with the United States amicably or are we going to become enemies [my emphasis] … Europe has relied on the US so much since the Second World War is completely new thinking; just to prepare for a scenario with, if you will, would-be enemies on two sides; in the East with Russia launching a hybrid attack     and then [an enemy] in the West as well.” They go on to talk about the possible need for conscription in Germany.

The political correspondents were talking like bourgeois brat adult children who had expected that they should be able to enjoy a power-lifestyle underwritten by ‘big daddy’ always there as a financial and security backstop; and just realising that the rug of entitlement might be being pulled from under them. Michaela Küfner (Chief Political Editor of DW) goes on to talk about an “existential threat from the United States”, meaning the withdrawal (and potential enmity) of the great protector. “Like your Rich Uncle from across the ocean turning against you”, she said.

Nina Haase: “Pacifism, the very word, needs to be redefined in Germany … Germans are only now able to understand that you have to have weapons in order not to use them.” She was referring to earlier generations of pacifists (like me) who saw weapons as the problem, not the solution.

Ulrike Franke: “Everything needs to change for everything to stay the same”, basically saying Germany itself may have to pursue domestic Rich Uncle policies to maintain the lifestyles of the (entitled) ten percenters.

Michaela Küfner, towards the end of the discussion: “The AFD is framing [the supporters of] the parties which will make up the coming coalition as the political class who we will challenge”. And she noted, but only at the very end of the long discussion, that the effectively disenfranchised people in Eastern Germany are “a lot more Russia-friendly”.

Maybe Merz has a plan to build employment-rich munitions factories in Eastern Germany, to address both his security concerns and the obvious political discontent arising from unemployment and fast-eroding living standards? But Merz will have to abandon his innate fiscal conservatism before he can even contemplate that; can he do a Hoover to Hitler transition? Rearmament was Hitler’s game; his means to full employment after the Depression.

Implications for Democracy

I sense that Friedrich Merz will become the face of coming German politics, just as Angela Merkel once was, and as Trump and Starmer are very much the faces of government in their countries; becoming – albeit through democratic means – similar to the autocrats that, in Eastern and Middle-Eastern countries, they [maybe not Trump] rail against.

We might note that if we look carefully at World War One and World War Two, the core conflict was Germany versus Russia. Will World War Three be the same? And which side will ‘we’ (or ‘US’) be on? In WW1 and WW2, we were on Russia’s side. (Hopefully, in the future, we can be neutral with respect to other countries’ conflicts.)

Democracy is under strain worldwide. The diminishing establishment-centre – the political and economic elites and the people with secure employment and housing who still vote for familiar major parties – is clinging on to power, and for the time-being remains more powerful than ever in Europe.

In the Europe of the early 1930s, it was the Great Depression as a period of abject political failure that resulted in the suspension of democracy. All the signs are that the same failures of democratic leadership – worldwide from the 1920s – will bring about similar consequences.

For democracies to save themselves, they should bring non-establishment voices to the table. In 2025. Germany will be another important test case, already sowing the seeds of political failure. We should be wary of demonising the far non-establishment-right while lionising the far establishment-right.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

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