
Not long now until Germans go to the polls on 23 February 2025. This is the most heated German election campaign I have experienced. It might also be the one that has drawn the most international media attention in recent history. Hardly a day has gone by when I haven’t been asked to write or say something about it.
Writing about the election for non-German audiences isn’t always easy, though. I’m constantly battling to either bypass or explain the many idiosyncrasies of the German system, some of which have deep historical roots. The (West) German constitution of 1949 took great care to pick up the good intentions of the Weimar Republic without repeating its mistakes. That system is, in essence, still with us today, albeit with additional quirks it picked up along the way.
So with all of this in mind, I thought a brief guide to how Germans vote might be in order.
Let’s start with who or what Germans actually vote for. This regularly causes confusion. Elon Musk, for instance, suggested at the end of last year that German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier would ‘lose the next election.’ Steinmeier certainly can’t lose the February election because he won’t be on the ballot paper.
Germans don’t vote for their President directly… not anymore. When the 1949 constitution was drafted, it was decided that the general public couldn’t be trusted with this much responsibility. This was because, after the First World War, the Weimar Republic had direct elections for the Reichspräsident, which Paul von Hindenburg narrowly won in 1925. It was Hindenburg who eventually appointed Hitler as chancellor in 1933.
So, to close that avenue of risk, the public doesn’t vote for the head of state anymore. Instead, a special Federal Convention does every five years. Steinmeiers's term runs out in 2027, and as he’s had the maximum number of two consecutive terms, he can’t run again then. So he can’t lose the next election, either.
The President now also has much-reduced powers compared to the Weimar years. He or she is more of a figurehead and supposed to be a neutral voice of wisdom, not unlike the role the monarchy plays in the UK but without the hereditary element and quite so many palaces.
In as much as there is any concentration of power, it’s with the chancellor who acts as head of government. He or she also isn’t directly elected by the people. Though not a constitutional requirement, it’s become common practice that each political party that thinks it has a chance to win the election nominates a ‘chancellor candidate’ so that people know who they get. This is often not the party leader. The current chancellor Olaf Scholz, for instance, is not the leader of his Social Democratic Party (SPD), but he is their chancellor candidate again. So people know if they vote SPD, they get Scholz.
What is on the ballot paper instead of the leaders’ names is a merger of a system of proportional representation (PR) and first-past-the-post (FPTP). Again, the idea is to avoid the pure PR system that had caused the Weimar Republic so many headaches. Each party then got a seat allocation in parliament that corresponded with the percentage of votes they got. At its peak, there were 14 parties in the Reichstag. Today, it’s half that (depending on how you count – I’ll get to parties shortly).
If you applied a pure PR system to Britain today, the Labour Party would have 34 percent of the seats, not the 63 percent it has got. Most notably, Reform UK would have 14 percent rather than just under 1 percent. You would probably have ended up with a Grand Coalition of Labour and Conservatives as the only viable way to a majority. Imagine that and you begin to see the drawbacks.
A pure FPTP system also didn’t seem the right fit for Germany, though. For one thing, it could be argued that it’s less democratic. The UK figures cited above created a ‘landslide’ victory for Labour on a third of the vote. But in a country as varied, divided and particular as Germany, it also could have produced loose cannon deputies or local strongholds for extremist parties.
So now Germany has a complex blend of PR and FPTP. Your ballot paper basically allows you to have two votes. The first is for a specific person, basically your constituency candidate. The second is for a party. The candidate who wins a constituency directly gets a seat in the Bundestag (as Germany’s parliament is now called; most former ‘Reich’ things are now ‘Bundes’ things, ‘Bundes’ meaning ‘federal’).
Once the directly elected people have their seats, parties fill the remaining seats from previously published lists of candidates. The extra seats they get to fill are in proportion to the vote share they received as a party. So, say Scholz’s SPD gets 15 per cent of the vote. Let’s assume 8 percent of this seat allocation is filled up with direct SPD candidates from vote one (on the left of the ballot paper). So it fills the remaining 7 percent of seats from its list in the order it was published (see the top candidates in small print under vote 2 on the right of the paper). That’s why the top spots are always coveted — for the larger parties, they are basically job guarantees.
There is more to it than this simplified description because the system produces all sorts of issues, especially as smaller parties often manage to get more direct candidates than they should get seats on vote share alone. There is also a five-percent hurdle to get into the Bundestag in the first place. So if you get 3 per cent of the vote and win no constituency outright, then your party doesn’t get in. So there are a lot of extra rules, but I won’t bore you with those here.
I hope you’re still with me as I briefly outline the parties on offer. Well, I don’t have space for all of them here. For the 2025 election, 29 parties will be on ballot papers across the country, but not all of them will appear everywhere — note the gaps in the ballot paper above. To illustrate why, let’s look at Germany’s conservatives, who are currently the favourites to come first. They are basically split across two parties.
There is the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union, Angela Merkel’s party. They will be on offer everywhere except Bavaria. In Bavaria, the CSU, the Christian Social Union, will appear on the ballot paper instead. The CSU is the CDU’s slightly more conservative and a lot more Bavarian sister. The two will reunite in the Bundestag and act as one under the name ‘CDU/CSU’ or ‘Union’. The roots for this lie in the long history of Bavarian exceptionalism, on which I should probably write a different ZEITGEIST piece at some point.
The CDU/CSU always field just one chancellor candidate between them, and this is usually, though not always, a CDU person. Right now, his name is Friedrich Merz – incidentally, a longstanding Merkel rival – and he is most likely to be Germany’s next chancellor. The CSU’s role tends to be that of a very powerful wing within the conservative field. Since neither side wants the conservative Union to break, CSU rebellions often mean they get their way.
The CDU/CSU’s main rival during the Cold War was the SPD. Together the two opponents usually got more than 80 percent of the vote. One or the other would win and then usually form a coalition with the much smaller Free Liberals (FDP) to get a majority. The CDU/CSU and the SPD were called ‘Volksparteien’ or ‘People’s Parties’ because it was effectively a two-way race between them, with the FDP acting as kingmaker.
This changed with the arrival of more parties in the Bundestag. In the 1980s, the Green Party emerged out of the antinuclear movement. Then a leftwing party with changing names rose as a successor to East Germany’s ruling party. Today, this is split between Die Linke, which runs on very left-liberal ideas (comparable to the Jeremy Corbyn wing of Labour) and the brand new Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which split off from die Linke last year as a leftwing-conservative option. On the right, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) emerged as a eurosceptic party in 2013. It has since shifted further right and become mostly an anti-immigration party.
So who will Germans vote for on 23 February? Well, there is still a lot of time, but polls have been predicting a victory for the CDU/CSU around the 30% mark. That’s a long way off a majority, so they would need at least one coalition partner. They have ruled out the AfD due to Germany’s Nazi past. All other parties have too. This is called the ‘Brandmauer’ or ‘firewall’. Incidentally, this doesn’t look quite as solid anymore right now as the CDU/CSU has said it doesn’t mind getting AfD support to get legislation through the Bundestag, especially on immigration, where most other parties stand further to the left.
So that leaves as other options for coalitions: the SPD and the Greens, each on around 15 percent at the moment. For the SPD this result would be an absolute blow, by the way — the worst result since the 19th century if you discount the time they were banned under the Nazis. A coalition with either or even both of these parties would be difficult for the conservatives since they would probably block the promises they made to voters on stricter immigration. FDP, Linke and BSW might all struggle to get over the 5 percent, in which case a larger seat share would fall to those who do. So things won’t necessarily be any more straightforward after the election.
Now, if all that remains in your head after reading this is that German politics is complicated, you’re not wrong. Try summing the above up in a 2-minute radio interview for an audience with little presumed knowledge, and you see the dilemma I often find myself in. But for all that, I wouldn’t change my ringside seat for all the beer in Bavaria.
A very interesting piece, thanks, Katya. It seems that the peculiarities of election systems are mostly based on specifics of a country’s history once they decide to extend the franchise to all, or most, adults. The system in Germany post WW2 was an adaptation of the Weimar system, with safeguards to prevent another Hitler from seizing power, and it has worked pretty well, though perhaps the extension of Germany post-Wende has placed the system under strain because of the former DDR-Länder’s lack of (or at least different) democratic traditions. Our own FPTP system evolved over time, and was always said to produce decisive government in an age of ‘homogeneity, consensus and deference,’ as Walter Bagehot claimed at the end of the 19th century, and political commentators were still claimed in the later part of the last century. But democracy is under threat all across the developed world, causing many to wonder whether those models which once served so well are still fit for purpose. The coming Bundestag elections will indeed be a stern test.
Thanks very much for this informative piece. Looking forward to that future article about Bavarian exceptionalism!