What’s at Stake in Germany’s Elections
The future of Ukraine, of Europe, freedom of speech, and Germany’s economy
Who wins the German elections this Sunday could lead to a future where Russia invades the rest of Europe—followed by China invading Taiwan, or the US co-opting Greenland. A world where speech is only free when vetted by the government; a world where Germany becomes a poor country, the laughing stock of the world. A world where the values of the West are thrown to the ground and trampled.
What are the stakes?
Who is most likely to win?
What does that tell us about the future of Germany, Europe, and the World?
Quick Primer on German Elections and Parties
From 2005 to 2021, Angela Merkel’s center-right CDU (Christian Democratic Union) led all German governments, in partnership with different parties. It usually partners with its sister party, the CSU (Christian Social Union) that operates in Bavaria. Aside from that, it had three coalitions with the center-left SPD, and one with the liberal FDP (Free Democratic Party).1 When Merkel stepped down, the next government was the “traffic lights coalition” formed by the red SPD, the yellow FDP, and the Greens. The tension between these parties ended up triggering a snap election, which will be held tomorrow.
It is the policies of Merkel’s CDU and the traffic light coalition that have led Germany to face the risks of today.
The World’s Stakes in This German Election
1. The Russian Threat
Russia invaded Ukraine unprovoked, to grab its land and people.2 Until that invasion, the world had left imperialism behind, replaced by a system where every country tries to improve itself rather than steal from the neighbors.
If Russia succeeds, it’s only a matter of time until it continues its campaign.
Starting with the Baltic Countries, maybe Finland after that. Then, definitely Poland, whose people Putin hates as a competitor of Russia.
The dream is to recreate the Soviet Union, and in case Germans don’t remember, that includes a piece of their country.
And if they don’t remember well, this is the impact of Soviet management, 35 years after reunification:
Before WW2, the eastern side of Germany was more developed than the west. It is the Russian influence over 45 years that has led East Germany to be backwards compared to the West. Germany should fend off Russia to make sure its influence never even gets close to its borders.
When is it easier to fight your enemy: When it’s weak, mired in a neverending war with a strong neighbor that shares your values? Or when each one of your neighbors has been made to bend their knees, one by one, until you’re the last one standing? This reminds me of a quote that Germans know all too well:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
Except this time:
First they came for the Georgians, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Georgian.
Then they came for the Crimeans, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Crimean.
Then they came for the Ukrainians, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Ukrainian.
Then they came for the Balts, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Balt.
Then they came for the Poles, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Pole.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
In graph form:
Germany has made amazing strides, nearly doubling its defense budget in the last decade, now passing the threshold of 2% of GDP spent on the military, as required by NATO.
But it’s not enough.
The target of 2% of GDP means ~€90B per year. But the ongoing military budget is ~€52B, 40% short of what is needed. The €38B gap is made up in part by a special fund of €100B that will run out in the next couple of years. It’s hard to make this allocation indefinite, because the German Constitution limits structural deficit to 0.35% of GDP—the famous debt break. And the remainder of the military budget was made up of obscure accounting allocations from other ministries like the foreign service.
Some German parties say Germany should not increase military spending to 2%. Others say they should, like the probable winner of the election, the union of the CDU and CSU, which I’ll therefore call Union.3 Its leaders think the 2% threshold is a lower bound, not an upper bound. How will Germany get there?
If it’s through debt, it means amending the constitution.4 Otherwise, it should be achieved by limiting other types of spending. No omelet without breaking eggs. Whether it’s through more debt or less social spending, what’s clear is that Germany does need to get to the 2%.
More importantly, it needs to spend the vast majority of that helping Ukraine. It is not.
As a share of its GDP, Germany is only the 16th in terms of bilateral aid allocated to Ukraine. If it doesn’t ramp that up immediately, in a few years it might find Putin at its doorstep.
2. World Order
Ukraine, of course, doesn’t just matter for Europe. It matters for the world.
Russia has revived an imperialism that was mortally wounded in 1945. China is observing intently: Its Georgia is Taiwan. But China won’t stop there: The Koreas, the Philippines, Okinawa, Vietnam… all appear on the menu. If China sees it’s OK to take over your neighbor, it will do it.
This is the lens to use when considering Trump’s crazy talk about making Canada the 51st state, co-opting Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, or the stupid and childish renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.
Following this logic, if every country claimed what it thinks belongs to it historically or geographically, we would have Italy claiming the entire Mediterranean, Spain claiming Latin America, Mongolia claiming half of the world, and the UK all of it. Is this really the world we want to live in? A world where progress is measured in death, conquests and who is the heaviest gorilla? Or do we want a world like the last few decades, where the life of every person on Earth gradually improved through peace and trade?
As the richest country in Europe, and a former Russian colony,5 Germany is in the best position to nip this trend in the bud: If Russia is humiliated on Ukrainian soil, its imperialist instincts will be chastised on the world stage, and peace and prosperity might keep flourishing into the future. If not, we might return to the 20th century.
3. Germany’s Economy
It’s easier to spend money on the military when your economy is growing healthily. Germany’s is not. In fact, it suffered a recession in 2023 and 2024.
The business mood is “as bad as I have ever seen it”, according to Peter Leibinger, the new leader of the Federation of German Industries.
The main concerns are:
Red tape
High taxes
Costly social security contributions
Energy costs
Competition from China
And the part of the economy that is suffering the most is industry. The CEO of Thyssenkrupp, a steelmaker, has said Germany is “in the midst of deindustrialisation”. Indeed, Germany’s manufacturing base is crumbling.
Red tape can certainly be improved, and should be, at the German and EU levels. Social security contributions are probably hard to change, yet they account for the lion’s share of government spending. So how can it then reduce taxes, while at the same time increasing military spending? Taxes are unlikely to go down by much. Energy, however, is a lever the government has to improve the economy:
The sectors that employ lots of energy, like steelmaking, fertilizer production, or paper manufacturing, account for 16% of German industrial output, but consume almost 80% of industrial energy. In the case of fertilizer, the cost of energy is 90% of its total costs. You can imagine what happened when energy costs shot up when Russia invaded Ukraine, or even more recently:
€150 per MWh in Germany in January 2025. Compare that with the US’s $40-80.6
If the German government was able to reduce energy costs, it could save about 15% of its industrial output. And it can do that without hurting the environment.
4. Good Environment AND Good Economy
Let’s take the fertilizer example. With 90% of costs coming from energy, importing fertilizer is basically importing energy in solid form.
Today, German fertilizer industries are forced to consume expensive German electricity and then buy expensive CO2 offsets. Given these costs, their prices go up. Meanwhile, foreign competitors like Chinese firms consume dirty coal energy and don’t buy offsets, so their fertilizer costs are cheaper, they can undercut German competitors, and run them out of business. At that point, Germany is basically importing dirty Chinese energy while killing its homegrown industry. Does that sound intelligent to you?
Luckily, the EU has thought of that and has approved the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, a policy to ensure that imported goods also account for carbon emissions in their price. This tool will gradually take effect over 2025 and 2026. The next German chancellor should accelerate this as much as s/he can.
But there’s an even better solution: cheaper energy.
Now, renewables are gaining momentum in Germany. That’s good! As I’ve shared, wind is good, and solar is not just better, but will get nearly 10x cheaper in the coming decade.
But you can see fossil fuels still make up a huge share of Germany’s energy. Meanwhile, nuclear is the best source of energy: safe, clean, emits the least CO2, causes less radiation than a banana, sustainable, reliable… And in Germany, it is also cheap, because its nuclear power plants are already amortized. Yet somehow the German watermelons led by the Greens decided to close Germany’s nuclear power plants against the will of the people.
Meanwhile, Japan has reversed course and now supports nuclear energy, just like the US, the Netherlands, Italy, and more recently Spain. The president of the EU commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, recently declared that the EU should not close nuclear power plants because they’re one of the cheapest and best ways to reach net zero (CO2 emissions).
Yet somehow, the German Greens dumbly continue to oppose nuclear power. If they didn’t:
CO2 emissions would dwindle in Germany, improving global warming
Germany would be less dependent on foreign energy
Energy costs would plummet
German industry would grow back
The German economy would grow again
This would liberate funds to tackle other challenges, like military support for Ukraine
Could we reopen some nuclear plants? Absolutely. We just need a commitment to open them for at least a decade, or operators won’t be interested. Too much hassle.
The leader of the front-running party in Germany, the CDU, says he will reopen nuclear power plants if he wins. That would be good: Germany is the last big country left to reverse course on nuclear. If it does, the country will improve, and the world will get a strong signal that nuclear is back.
5. Immigration
Last week in Munich, just before Vice President of the US JD Vance gave a speech complaining about immigration in Germany, an Afghan rammed into a crowd with his car, injuring 39 people, two of whom are still in critical condition. Just two weeks earlier, another Afghan stabbed a toddler and an adult to death, injuring two others. Two days ago, a person who doesn’t speak German stabbed a tourist in Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. A Saudi rammed into another crowd in a German Christmas market, killing six and injuring 200.
Just around that time, a study appeared claiming this:
Migration to Germany does not lead to higher crime rates at the places of immigration.
When looking at the data, the methodology makes no sense.7 Also, the crime rates of immigrants are not only due to the fact that they tend to be younger and more male. The country of origin, however, does matter:
This type of crime might not be a problem when there are a handful of refugees. But about 17% of people who live in Germany were born abroad—and this number doesn’t count the children of immigrants, who don’t usually cause much less crime than their immigrant parents:
German politicians have at least two paths forward. One is to hide and ignore the problem. This is exactly the type of rhetoric that angers people, who then go on to vote for the right-wing AfD party.
The other is to handle the situation like the Swedes:
I believe immigration is net positive. But certain immigration is better than other. Even more importantly, it’s impossible to figure out which immigration is better if the data to analyze these issues is not available, or if the speech to discuss these problems is muffled.
6. Freedom of Speech
This topic is extremely relevant, too, but I will expand on it next week. The gist here is that Germany is curtailing freedom of speech in a more and more aggressive manner every day, and this has serious consequences for the country’s future.
Who Will Win the Elections?
This is the projection of Germany’s federal election results this Sunday
This map probably reminds you of the map of Germany’s phantom borders I showed you earlier:
This is the polling:
What does that mean?
The Union (the center-right Christian Democratic Union plus the Bavarian center-right Christian Social Union) will probably beat all other parties.
The right-wing AfD (Alternative for Germany) will likely come second for the first time in its history.
All the “traffic light” coalition parties will probably suffer. The Greens are likely to crash from their 14.7% result in 2021, the center-left SPD will probably lose a third of its representation, while the liberal FDP might not even get into the parliament.
How does that translate into parliament seats?
If this is true, Union will have a plurality of votes, but not a majority. It should have enough votes to be able to pick a partner to rule between the SPD, the AfD, and the Greens. Except no partner is a perfect fit for them:
Germans have grown tired of the grand coalition with the SPD: Two thirds don’t want it. The SPD has overseen the closure of nuclear plants, the latest rounds of immigration, the increase in electricity costs, the shrinking of industry, the economic stagnation… Many of these were due to the Greens, but still, Germans are manifesting in surveys that they want a change.
The Union is even more at odds with the Greens, who they see as hurting the economy, and completely misaligned with regards to immigration.
The AfD and Union are aligned in some aspects: They both think immigration has gone too far and that the environmental push has hurt the economy too much. They’re both also pushing for more free speech, which I agree with.8 But the AfD’s pro-Russian stance and their skepticism against belonging to NATO and the EU are huge red flags.
The FDP seems quite aligned with the CDU and CSU, and a natural ally: It’s pro-NATO and Ukraine, against Russia, pro-EU, pro-free markets, against red tape, wants to push renewables and is open to nuclear, supports controlled, merit-based immigration, and defends free speech. But it’s unlikely to have enough seats to govern alone with the CDU/CDS.
I started this article having a strong opinion on what’s good for Germany, Europe, and the World, but without knowing much about the parties’ different positions, or who I’d prefer to see in power.
Based on everything I’ve learned, these are my conclusion:
The Greens are a threat to Germany’s economy and environment. I would not vote for them.
The AfD’s stances on Russia and against NATO and the EU are eliminatory for me. I don’t know enough about their stances on immigration and free speech to opine on those.
The CDU and FDP both seem quite sensible to me, and I’m aligned with them across the main topics, even if I don’t fully see eye to eye on all
I don’t know enough about the SPD’s. I like their stance on Ukraine and their increase in military spending, but they’ve presided over an energy and economic catastrophe, and the direction of the country in terms of immigration and free speech are not encouraging.
Therefore, it looks like the CDU/CDS’s lead in the elections is good for the country, for Europe, and the world. In an ideal world, it would have enough representatives to govern alone. If not, it would be great if an alliance with the FDP had enough votes. Another reasonable option would be a fourth grand coalition with the SPD. A minority government, if viable, would be interesting too. What should be avoided are agreements with the Green or the AfD, unless either the Green change their stance on nuclear energy, or the AfD change their stances on Russia, NATO, the EU, among others.
I am not an expert in German contemporary politics. My expertise lies instead in the big trends of the world. But Germany influences them, so I wanted to form an independent opinion on what Germany should do, and conclude from that what the best election results would be for the arc of history. But I might have missed specifics of the country’s domestic politics. If you find mistakes, please call them out. Otherwise, do you disagree with my conclusions? What do you think should happen? What will happen?
The first coalition was with both the CSU and the SPD
The claimed provocation is that Ukraine wanted to join the EU and NATO, which threatens Russia’s integrity. But Russia already had a bunch of NATO participants on its borders—notably the Baltic Countries, and Poland bordering Belarus, while Turkey lies on its southwestern flank. No, the reality is that Putin just wanted more land and more Russian-speaking people as irredentism for the old beautiful days of the Soviet Union he remembers from his youth. These ideas are outdated. The sooner he is out of power, the better for Russia’s future and the world.
The union of the CDU and CSU is called Union. The CSU operates only in Bavaria, and the CDU in all the other states.
This should be easier than it sounds as the debt break was introduced in 2009.
How else can you define East Germany?
Euros and dollars are worth nearly the same lately, so they’re fully comparable.
Among other things, they had aggregated statistics instead of disaggregating them by person, and they controlled for all the factors that would explain the crime, such as unemployment and where they lived. Of course, the immigrants that cause more crime will be less likely to work and more likely to live in seedy places. The fact that these factors can account for the increased crime rate doesn’t mean these immigrants are less prone to crime.
I’ll talk more about this in next week’s article.
Thomas, I mostly like your writing and analyses a lot, although I disagree with some of your foundational political views, but read you anyway to broaden my horizon. So first - thanks a lot for your work.
With this piece though, there are so many inaccuracies - I will need to take more time tomorrow to point some of them out. I admit I might be biased (as a left/green voter in Germany), but I will try to dive into the specific points deep enough to see where I am biased and where it might be you.
But for now: The CDU always made a coalition with the CSU (as the "Union"), as this is the general agreement of both parties. The Union was in power for over 16 years before the last three years of "Traffic Light Coalition" and, although providing some sort of stability, that came with a huge cost to innovation, making Germany completely dependent on Russian oil and gas, which led to the surge in energy prices after the invasion of Russia in Ukraine. The last three years have been a major overhaul of many parts of society and economy, and I agree that many of these policies have not been going as smoothly as many would have wished. However, the responsibility for the recent recession lies at least by a large part on the former Union-led governments.
Also, all energy providers say it would not be feasible nor economical to restart nuclear power plants or return to nuclear power - that train has long left the station. It might have been possible 3 years ago - I will dig into that. Union and FDP know that its not by now and are still claiming it is, but that is populistic.
As for freedom speech - I am curious for your article on that, as I find the recent outrage from the US very amusing. I feel free af to use my right to speak up in Germany, we have more freedom of the press than the US according to the WPFI, the only things you are not allowed to publicly express are personal insults and hate speech - which I agree with. I guess that is just a cultural difference between the US and Germany (and some other parts of Europe), but we value for many to feel safe expressing their opinion more than for few to express every crazy hateful thought they want to. What might be a problem is that the norms of what you can say or think might be shifting - with identity politicians and activists inciting rage over unpopular views (this is coming from all political extremes). I will read your next article with great interest.
Tomas, can you please slow down that map of Germany so that I can actually look at what is going on? It refreshes every second and I can’t see what it’s actually showing me.