The February Election Scrambled German Politics in Ways We’re Still Decoding
Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU won roughly 28.5 percent of the vote on February 23, 2025. Stop there for a moment. That sounds decisive until you remember that Germany’s electoral system demands coalition mathematics, and 28.5 percent in Berlin translates to genuine constraint, not mandate. The party that dominated German politics for sixteen years under Angela Merkel returned to power, but on fundamentally different terms. This wasn’t a restoration. It was a reorientation forced by circumstances the CDU did not create alone.
The real shock was the second-place finish. The AfD took 20.8 percent, its strongest federal performance in history. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a structural break in the German party system. When a party with roots in far-right movements captures one-fifth of the national vote, the entire political context shifts, regardless of how many other parties refuse to work with it. Every coalition decision the Merz government makes now happens in the shadow of that result. Every budget line, every security commitment, every foreign policy statement carries weight it wouldn’t have in a normal election cycle.
The Social Democrats Disappeared. That Matters More Than You Think.
Olaf Scholz’s SPD collapsed to 16.4 percent. The worst federal result since 1945. Let that anchor you to what actually happened here. The party that led the German government just four months earlier, that claimed to represent working-class interests and stability, essentially lost its claim to either. In the previous coalition model, the SPD held meaningful leverage. They could extract concessions, shape cabinet composition, defend their constituency priorities within governing arrangements.
That leverage evaporated. When Merz negotiated his coalition agreement, the SPD sat outside the conversation entirely. The Greens and FDP became more relevant coalition partners than Germany’s historic social democratic party. This has real consequences for security policy. It means Merz faced fewer internal coalition pressures resisting expanded defense spending. The constituencies traditionally skeptical of military expansion now have weaker parliamentary representation. The new government’s security architecture developed without having to accommodate the party that most explicitly campaigned on restraint and dialogue with Russia.
Defense Spending Became the Coalition’s Central Battleground
Germany’s constitutional debt brake, the Schuldenbremse, had been considered nearly untouchable for years. It restricts government borrowing to 0.35 percent of GDP, except during emergencies. Merz’s government arrived proposing over 100 billion euros in new spending for defense and infrastructure. Translation: the new government immediately signaled it would frame defense expansion as a constitutional emergency. That’s a decision with European implications.
The debate wasn’t really whether Germany should spend more on defense. NATO’s 2 percent GDP target had become baseline expectation across the alliance. Merz signaled openness to 3 percent, which means roughly 120 billion euros annually, a figure that dwarfs anything Germany committed during the Scholz years. The real argument was about mechanism. How do you mobilize that spending while respecting constitutional constraints? Do you invoke emergency provisions? Do you restructure budgetary categories? Do you temporarily suspend the debt brake?
These sound like technical questions. They’re actually about political philosophy, about what Germany considers legitimate grounds for breaking its own fiscal rules. About whether European security counts as sufficient emergency to override constitutional guardrails written precisely to prevent the kind of deficit spending that destabilized the eurozone a decade ago. Merz’s answer differed from his predecessors’. He was willing to treat security threat as constitutional moment.
What This Means for European Security Architecture
Germany under Merz has signaled a security posture distinct from the Merkel-Scholz era in both scale and rhetoric. Merkel managed Germany’s security commitments through careful diplomatic language and alliance consensus-building. Scholz inherited the Russian invasion of Ukraine and grudgingly expanded defense spending while maintaining rhetorical caution about escalation. Merz arrived with a different read entirely: Germany should lead European security rather than follow consensus.
The 3 percent defense spending proposal makes this concrete. France spends roughly 1.9 percent. Italy roughly 1.5 percent. Most European NATO members remain below 2 percent. Germany at 3 percent becomes a defense outlier, investing at levels comparable to Poland or the Baltic states rather than its Western European peers. That’s a deliberate choice about role and identity. It says Germany will be a security provider rather than a security consumer. It signals willingness to bear a disproportionate burden in European deterrence.
The coalition agreement also reflected this shift in NATO positioning. The new government prioritized industrial defense production capacity, long-term procurement commitments, and joint European weapons development. These aren’t symbolic gestures. They’re investments that lock Germany into a security posture for years. German defense contractors will expand. German military spending becomes a structural feature of budget planning rather than a temporary response to crisis.
The Constraint Nobody’s Talking About Explicitly
Here’s what makes this genuinely complicated: Merz’s security ambitions require coalition partners with their own domestic pressures. The Greens have constituencies skeptical of rearmament. The FDP has fiscal conservatives nervous about debt. The AfD’s 20.8 percent sits outside the coalition but can’t be ignored. Every coalition decision happens with awareness that a significant portion of the electorate opposes the government’s entire direction.
The Federal Returning Officer Official Results tell one story. The political negotiations after those results tell another. Merz had to construct a majority coalition from parties that disagreed on security spending, fiscal policy, and European integration. The security architecture that emerged reflects those compromises. It’s bolder than Scholz would have pursued. It’s probably more cautious than Merz personally preferred. That’s coalition governance.
For European partners, this matters because German security commitments now come with domestic fragility built in. The AfD’s growth means electoral volatility will likely continue. German coalitions will probably remain complicated. Policy reversals become possible if coalition dynamics shift. This doesn’t make German security commitments worthless. It means they require ongoing validation through performance and results. Germany can’t commit and assume consensus will hold.
Where This Leaves Us
The Merz government represents a genuine shift in German security posture, but it’s constrained by coalition mathematics, constitutional requirements, and electoral fragmentation. Germany will likely spend more on defense. It will probably deepen security partnerships with Poland and the Baltic states, probably strengthen NATO’s eastern flank. But these commitments will develop through tight budget negotiations and coalition compromises, and they’ll remain vulnerable to electoral shifts.
The European Council on Foreign Relations Germany Analysis captures some of this complexity in real time. What specific aspects of German security policy under Merz interest you most? The industrial production questions? The NATO integration details? The domestic coalition pressure points? Worth thinking through, because how Germany shapes its role shapes how Europe responds to its security environment more broadly.