Election of the Day: Germany
By 
Welp, here we go. Polls close in a couple of hours in Germany. A shift to the right is a foregone conclusion; two of the three members of the recently collapsed “traffic light coalition”, the Free Democrats and the SPD, stand to lose a number of seats, with the FPD in real danger of missing the five percent threshold. (The Greens are roughly holding steady.) While there’s lots of vibesy talk of an AfD surge, their polling has been very consistent at just around 20% with the CDU/CSU at 30%. Assuming polling is largely correct, the composition of the next Bundestag will be significantly shaped by how many of the small parties cross the threshold. Polling suggests Die Linke is likely to make it (they’ve been at 7-8% in recent polling) while the Free Democrats and BSW (a populist, culturally conservative off-shoot of Die Linke) are polling right at or just below 5%.
From this morning’s New York Times:
No party is expected to get enough votes to govern alone and outright. The most important question will then be how many parties are needed to form a government.
Together, Mr. Merz’s center-right Christian Democrats and the far-right AfD are likely to have the broadest majority. But because the AfD is tainted by neo-Nazi associations, Mr. Merz and all mainstream party leaders say they will not form a government with it. Instead they will join together in what’s called the “firewall,” aimed at keeping extremists out of power.
That leaves the Social Democrats, though they are on the center-left, as Mr. Merz’s most likely partner. If the two of them don’t have enough support to form a majority, a third party will be needed.
The experience of the incumbent government showed just how difficult and unstable a three-party group can be. It’s an outcome that many analyst say would leave Germany almost back to when the last three-party government collapsed.
If the AfD has an even stronger than expected showing — somewhere above 20 percent — and provokes an unwieldy effort to work around it, questions of how long the “firewall” by the mainstream can hold are likely to intensify.
Even among nationalist, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, the AfD is considered one of the more extreme. Parts of the AfD are closely monitored by German domestic intelligence agencies, which have labeled them extremist and potential threats to the Constitution. Party members have toyed with reviving Nazi slogans, downplayed the horror wrought by the Holocaust and have been linked to plots to overthrow the government.
Yet the party has been embraced by Trump administration officials. During the Munich Security Conference this month, Vice President JD Vance called on Germans to stop marginalizing far-right parties, saying, “there is no room for firewalls,” and he met with Alice Weidel, the AfD candidate for chancellor.
Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump adviser, interviewed Ms. Weidel on his social media platform X and endorsed her by video link before AfD supporters assembled at a rally, telling them that Germans had “too much of a focus on past guilt.”
The strength of the AfD’s showing, then, could prove a bellwether not only for German politics but also for political trends across Europe since Mr. Trump’s election to a second term.
And it may be judged as a gauge of whether those endorsements from Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk helped legitimize the party and gave it broader appeal, or potentially backfired, given the Trump administration’s newly antagonistic relationship with Germany and Europe.
A scary moment for Europe right now, and the world.