Thomas Poguntke argues that the shock results of recent elections in two German Länder show how Germany's party system has lost its capacity to integrate radical challengers. As a result, coalition formation now increasingly requires alliances which do not work – and this feeds popular disaffection

Earthquake elections in eastern Germany

On 1 September 2024, two Land elections took place in the east German Länder Saxony and Thuringia. These elections may well mark the end of the German party system as we know it. The election results indicate that no politically viable coalitions are in sight. In political science terms, we could argue that polarised pluralism has come to haunt the formerly stable and efficient German party system.

The democratic centre of the party system is eroding, while various political fringes are getting stronger. Furthermore, the parties that govern in Berlin – the so-called traffic-light coalition – all lost in the elections. So, too, did the post-Communist party, Die Linke (the Left), which governed in Thuringia with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Alliance 90/The Greens (Greens). Equally significant is that the main moderate opposition party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), could not secure a substantial win in Thuringia.

The main results

What exactly happened? First, the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the elections in Thuringia with a 9% lead over the CDU under leader Björn Höcke. Minister-President of Thuringia Bodo Ramelow's party Die Linke, on the other hand, lost a stunning 17.9 percentage points.

Second, the AfD came remarkably close to overtaking the governing CDU in Saxony, where it won 40 of the 120 seats in the Land Diet.

Right-wing populist party AfD won the elections in Thuringia with a 9% lead over the Christian Democrats

Third, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), founded by the eponymous former leader of Die Linke in early 2024, won a considerable vote share in both Thuringia and Saxony, mainly at Die Linke's expense. The BSW will be needed for government formation in both Länder.

All other parties have vowed to exclude the AfD from any majority formula. This puts the CDU in the awkward position of needing at least one of the two parties with roots in the Communist past – Die Linke and BSW – to form a government. To complicate matters, the CDU has officially declared that it will not cooperate with Die Linke, despite the fact that it had tolerated Thuringia's Die Linke administration during the previous legislative term.

Loss of the winning formula

The German party system has been losing its stable anchorage for some time. There are many reasons for party system upheaval, including social change, value change, and political events such as German unification. However, we should not overlook the functioning of the party system per se.

The German party system has lost its winning formula, namely governing from the centre, and integrating the political fringes. This worked in the 1950s, when the Christian Democrats absorbed several smaller parties of sometimes dubious political provenance. It continued to work in the 1960s and 1970s, too, when the Social Democrats integrated the bulk of the radical New Left.

The German party system has lost its winning formula: governing from the centre, and integrating the political fringes

The system, however, began to fail in the 1980s. It took the SPD a decade to accept that the Greens might be an acceptable coalition partner for federal government. In 1987, SPD Chancellor-candidate Johannes Rau had no choice but to campaign for an overall majority, which was clearly out of sight. This act secured the governing Christian-Liberal government a safe victory.

When a red-green coalition for federal government was finally on the cards in 1991, German unification wrote another script.... Exclusionism has been the dominant mode ever since.

From integration to exclusion

The next new party, the post-Communist Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (later renamed Die Linke), initially provided a haven for diehard supporters of the previous East German regime. It was met with resistance across the board. The Christian Democrats ran a vigorous campaign against the party and it took the SPD until 2021 to consider a federal coalition with Die Linke – regional coalitions notwithstanding.

The exclusion of Die Linke was instrumental in keeping Angela Merkel in power and the Social Democrats in an unwanted Grand Coalition. It blocked the alternation function of the party system – just as the exclusion of the Greens had done in the 1990s.

The dominance of the grand coalition formula, in conjunction with the increasingly centrist course of the CDU under Angela Merkel, was one of the reasons the AfD emerged in 2013. Indeed, the AfD chose its name in response to the alleged lack of alternatives in the established party system.

Initially, the AfD may have been a difficult but not entirely unacceptable coalition partner. In its early years, the party campaigned mainly on a Eurosceptic agenda. Yet, all other parties' immediate reaction was exclusion. In conjunction with the exclusion of Die Linke as a possible coalition partner for the SPD, a grand coalition remained the only option for federal government until 2021.

Promiscuous coalition building

At the same time, government formation in the German federal states became increasingly difficult, because no party would join forces with AfD, which had moved clearly to the right in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis. A decline in vote share for the former Volksparteien (SPD and CDU with its Bavarian partner CSU) necessitated promiscuous coalition building. Most, if not all, mainstream parties were forced to form coalitions, including the formerly ostracised Die Linke. As Giovanni Sartori would have likely predicted, this resulted in further growth of the AfD.

Exclusionism has reached its limits. Ironically, the CDU now feels compelled to start negotiating with the populist BSW

With the 1 September elections in eastern Germany, exclusionism has reached its limits. It is not without irony that the CDU now feels compelled to start negotiating with the populist BSW, with whom the mechanisms of integration are unlikely to work.

The BSW is tightly controlled by its founder and leader Sahra Wagenknecht, who checks prospective members rigorously. Currently, the Land parties in Thuringia and Saxony have about 75 members each. Programmatically, the BSW is conservative in socio-cultural terms and economically on the far left. When it comes to the two central issues preoccupying German voters, the BSW is not all that different from the AfD. Like the AfD, the BSW advocates for harsher measures on immigration and it is clearly pro-Russia.

Forced into this dysfunctional alliance, the CDU risks alienating its core voter base yet further, and exacerbating the polarisation of Germany's political landscape.