13 March 2025 - 3:00pm
“The Left is gone,” declared Friedrich Merz just before the German election. Confident of victory for his centre-right CDU/CSU, the likely next chancellor predicted: “There will be no Left-wing majority and no more Left-wing politics in Germany.”
Most Germans did indeed vote for Right-wing parties, but Left-wing politics isn’t going anywhere. In fact, the Left-wing minority might derail the new government’s flagship policy before it even takes office.
In an effort to boost European defence capabilities and pull the German economy out of its downward spiral, the two parties most likely to form the new government want to spend big. They intend to borrow up to €1 trillion to get the German military fighting fit and to invest in the country’s crumbling infrastructure, and it will be debated in the German parliament today. But the Greens, whose support would be required to reach the necessary supermajority for such eye-watering borrowing, have vowed to block the spending package.
Germany is in a self-imposed fix. The parties of the deeply unpopular ruling coalition led by chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left SPD alongside the Greens get to call the shots in the next government, despite having lost the election.
Merz needs Green help because, under Germany’s previous chancellor Angela Merkel, a so-called debt brake was written into the constitution that severely restricts borrowing. Any changes to it and any special budgets to run outside of regular expenditure must be approved by a two-thirds majority — and for that Merz will have to turn to the forces he’d declared dead merely weeks ago.
This dynamic is self-imposed, too. All political parties uphold a firewall against the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which came second with nearly 21% of the vote. That leaves the centre-right election winner with only parties to the Left to work with.
Even a regular majority is only possible with the most spectacular loser of the election: the SPD, which received its worst result since the 1800s. Being Merz’s only viable coalition partner has put the party in a position to strong-arm him in exchange for compromises on illegal immigration. Some of its politicians have even demanded that deportations are only used as a last resort, and that long-term residents in Germany get a vote regardless of whether they are citizens. The spending package itself looks more like SPD policy than Merz’s – he had promised fiscal prudence before the election.
The Greens have been ridiculed by Merz relentlessly, with the CDU leader at one point ranting against “Green and Leftist nutjobs”. Now they have little reason to wave through his reforms, arguing that the new government doesn’t “care about the future, climate protection and generational fairness”. Merz is under enormous pressure, then, to find out what they want and give it to them before the new parliament convenes on 25 March.
In the new Bundestag, the AfD will double its share of representatives, and the far-Left Die Linke will also get 10% of seats. Together, they will have over a third of deputies and therefore the opportunity to block supermajorities like the one Merz seeks. He would then have to convince the stridently anti-military Die Linke, as well as the SPD and the Greens, of his plans.
Merz was right: there is no majority for Left-wing politics in Germany. Just over a third of voters opted for the SPD, Greens and Die Linke combined. But with the firewall against the Right firmly in place, the conservatives will shift to the Left in exchange for power, repeating the cardinal error of the Merkel era rather than correcting it as they had promised voters.
Many Germans will feel that no matter how much they vote for change, every one of their governments looks like the last: divided, with an inbuilt centre-left drift that has long ceased to represent the will of the majority.
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. Her latest book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe will be released in May 2026.
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