Germany

A downcast mood hung over Germany ahead of the snap elections. The week before 83 per cent of voters admitted in a survey to having a pessimistic outlook on the situation the country is in. But turnouts were remarkably high: 84 per cent of voters went out to cast their vote, up from 36.5 per cent in 2021. One thing all voters can agree on is the desperate need for change.

The CDU, the centre-Right party of Germany, has been given another chance at power. At 28.5 per cent, the party has won back some voters, compared to the 24.1 per cent they got in 2021 after 16 years under Chancellor Merkel. However, that is still underperforming when you consider how hated the prior left-wing coalition government was.

Related … Germany’s next chancellor warns Nato could soon be dead

Friedrich Merz, who is poised to become Germany’s next chancellor, has warned Nato could be finished and Europe must prepare to build an alliance “independent” from the US.

In stark comments, Mr Merz, 69, leader of the centre-Right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), suggested the continent may have to “quickly” establish an “independent European defence capability”.

After exit-polls predicted Mr Merz would win the election, Donald Trump hailed the result as a “great day for Germany and for the United States of America”.

The centre-Right Christian Democrat Union party has won the German election according to an exit poll released on Sunday evening.

Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader, is projected to win 29 per cent of the vote, after a campaign dominated by economic stagnation, migration pressures and growing uncertainty over how best to secure the future of Ukraine.

The far-Right Alternative for Germany party, which had high-profile backers including Elon Musk, has come second place with 19.5 per cent. It marks the strongest result for a far-Right party since the Second World War.

Germany is preparing for the general elections this Sunday, February 23, with the possible consolidation of Alternative for Germany (AfD) as the country’s second-largest force in a surge that challenges the traditional political balance. It deeply worries the socialist-conservative establishment within Germany—and at the European level.

As Germany’s federal elections approach this weekend, chancellor Olaf Scholz and his Social Democrats (SPD) are bracing for their worst results since 1887. The SPD is battling with its equally unpopular coalition partner, the Green Party, for a humiliating third place, behind the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD).

In the run-up to Sunday’s crucial election, the Guardian took a long journey through Europe’s heartland to talk to voters

Creaking, overcrowded, neglected, Germany’s railways, once a source of national pride, have taken a battering to their image in recent years. Amid wider concerns about the health of Europe’s stagnating largest economy, the state of its trains has become something of a metaphor for a more general sense of malaise.

On Sunday Germans will go to the polls in one of the most important elections in recent times, with an emboldened far right hoping to more than double its share of votes. In the run-up, the Guardian travelled more than 850 miles on trains across Germany to hear what its citizens have to say about the state of their nation.

The Guardian is beside itself with anxiety over the Afd.

In the Thuringian city of Weimar, opposite the theatre where the National Assembly hashed out Germany’s constitution in 1918, stands the museum of the history of the Weimar Republic. ‘A spectre is rising in Europe – the spectre of populism,’ a plaque reads. ‘Forces long thought overcome seem to be returning to threaten the basis of democracy. The Weimar Republic and its neighbours knew the phenomenon only too well.’