German election rekindles old divisions

Why the 2025 vote risks turning eastern Germans’ sense of isolation into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By HANNE COKELAERE
and LUCIA MACKENZIE
in Berlin

A divided Germany has emerged from Sunday’s election.

The vote delivered a resounding defeat of the Social Democrats (SPD) of Chancellor Olaf Scholz and a clear victory for Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic alliance (CDU/CSU) — but not across the board.

In 2021, the SPD won on both ends of Germany’s decades-old and persistent East-West divide. But as the socialists beat a retreat in Sunday’s election, that gap became glaringly visible once more.

In a seismic shift, the country’s electoral map — large swathes of which had colored SPD red in the 2021 election — turned black, for Merz’s conservatives, in the West. But the East colored overwhelmingly blue, for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which recorded its best result yet on Sunday.

That comes with an inherent risk, Joachim Behnke, a political science professor at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, warned ahead of election day. The 2025 vote risks turning East Germans’ sense of isolation into a self-fulfilling prophecy, he said.

With strong results for the far-right AfD and the far-left The Left party in the east, neither of which are likely government parties, and Merz now preparing to forge a coalition between his conservative alliance and the Social Democrats, eastern German politicians look like they’re carrying limited weight in future decision-making.

“People in the eastern states will feel they are not represented” — even more than they already do, Behnke warned.

There’s little trust that centrist parties take eastern Germany’s interests to heart to begin with.

In an election day voter survey, nearly one-quarter of eastern Germans listed the AfD as the party that best defends the East’s interests; one-fifth pointed to The Left. But the likely future governing partners were only listed about 10 percent each, while 20 percent didn’t list any party at all.

The gap became apparent early on election night, as a projection by broadcaster ZDF revealed far more support for the AfD and The Left in the east than in the west — and, comparatively speaking, far less support for Merz’s party.

The conservatives’ vote result confirmed that gap: Even as Merz’s CDU reached 30 or even 40 percent of the vote in constituencies across Germany, it mostly stayed below 20 percent in the east.

A peek under the surface of the electoral map, which only shows the largest party per constituency, revealed a further difference: The CDU just barely stayed ahead of other parties in dozens of constituencies, although its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, won most of its constituencies with a comfortable lead.

But where the AfD won, it often won big.

The anti-migration party made major advances across the country. But nowhere so overwhelmingly as in the east, where it received close to 50 percent of the vote in a number of constituencies.

The party’s eastern success had been several years in the making.

In its strongest heartlands — the far southeastern constituencies in Bautzen, Görlitz and Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge — the party has won both the constituency and list votes in every federal election since 2017, when it first won seats in the Bundestag.

This time, however, the party has managed to also expand its reach to the northern parts of former East Germany and into more urban constituencies that had previously resisted the far right.

Constituencies in Dresden and Leipzig, two cities in the party’s heartland state of Saxony with large student populations, voted the AfD into the top position for the first time in a federal election.

Undeterred by the AfD’s advance, The Left also confirmed its foothold in East Germany ― a traditional stronghold of the far-left party.

The Left had been languishing in the polls just weeks before the election. So much so that the party relied on a big campaign to earn at least three directly elected members of Parliament and secure representation in the Bundestag.

But on Sunday, the party capitalized on a last-minute surge in support, winning nearly 9 percent of the vote and six direct mandates. Apart from its home turf in eastern Germany, the party came out on top in large parts of Berlin and even made some inroads in the West, too.

Even as the AfD and The Left surged, the SPD, dropped to a record low in a national election ― from 25.7 percent in 2021 to just 16.4 percent of the vote now.

The party’s vote share in the east was dismal, and, even worse, it lost dominance in several of its heartlands in the northwest.

Large parts of the Rhine-Ruhr region, one of the Germany’s industrial cores, voted SPD for decades. But the cluster of red on Germany’s electoral map has now shrunk significantly, with constituencies falling largely to the CDU — in one, Gelsenkirchen, AfD became the largest party according to the list vote.

Election night was an even more crushing evening for the liberal Free Democratic Party of Christian Lindner, Scholz’s former coalition partner. Early-evening projections estimated the party was on the cusp of meeting the 5 percent threshold needed to gain access to the Bundestag. But the party’s share slipped as the night dragged on, coming to a stop at 4.3 percent — not enough to gain any representation in the next Bundestag.

It is a striking fall from grace when compared to the FDP’s shining success in the 2021 federal election, when the party posted two-digit results across Germany.

Germany’s youth embodied that shift.

Just a few years ago, Germany’s youngest favored the liberal FDP and the Greens. But the youngest age bracket’s support for those parties took double-digit hits in this national election, according to an Infratest dimap analysis.

Instead, Germany’s young voters backed the biggest winners in this election: the AfD and The Left, with their support for The Left dwarfing the party’s success with older voters.

But the figures also hold a warning for Merz’s conservatives: His party received broad support from Germans aged 45 and older and was a particular favorite among voters older than 70. But its support from Germany’s younger voters, while an improvement on 2021 figures, was lukewarm at best.