The Election Result and Its Structural Implications
Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU secured approximately 28.6 percent of the vote on February 23, 2025, the party’s strongest performance since 2013. Substantial, yes, but that number alone doesn’t tell you much. The more interesting story is what the broader parliament looks like around it: a center-right party reasserting dominance while confronting a fractured legislature that makes coalition-building far messier than it was during Angela Merkel’s peak years.
What really demands attention is not the CDU/CSU’s strength but the configuration of forces surrounding it. The Alternative for Germany finished second with roughly 20.8 percent, its best-ever federal result, and that single fact reshaped the coalition possibilities available to Merz. When a far-right party captures one-fifth of the federal vote, it doesn’t just occupy space in parliament. It restructures the entire geometry of acceptable political combinations, pushing at the boundaries of what constitutes a viable governing coalition and what stays beyond the pale of mainstream competition.
The Greens, having governed alongside the SPD in Scholz’s cabinet, saw their support fall meaningfully. This opened a path for Merz toward a different coalition partner. The mathematical possibility of a CDU/CSU-SPD grand coalition emerged not as anyone’s ideal first choice but as a structural necessity, given the AfD’s strength and the genuine policy incompatibilities between center-right and left-libertarian priorities that had complicated coalition talks in prior cycles.
Coalition Formation and the Exclusion of the Greens
By April 2025, Merz had wrapped up coalition negotiations with the SPD, producing a government that excluded the Greens for the first time since 2005. That two-decade span is worth sitting with. The Greens had become structurally woven into German governance, their participation treated by many analysts as practically inevitable. Their exclusion signals that CDU/CSU leadership, facing pressure from an ascendant AfD and real economic constraints at home, decided that a more economically orthodox approach mattered more than the consensus-building apparatus that had characterized previous grand coalitions.
This carried concrete consequences for German climate and energy policy. Without Green party members holding cabinet portfolios, the new government could pursue infrastructure investment according to different priorities than those driving the previous administration. Energy transition concerns would still shape policy, but filtered through SPD preferences and CDU/CSU fiscal priorities rather than through dedicated Green ministries. The structural question worth asking: how does excluding a party with meaningful electoral support and established policy expertise actually affect governance capacity across multiple domains? The answer lies in institutional design, not personalities.
The €500 Billion Investment Fund and Constitutional Innovation
In March 2025, the new government announced a €500 billion infrastructure and defense investment fund, paired with a significant constitutional maneuver: bypassing Germany’s long-standing debt brake that had constrained fiscal policy since its 2009 adoption. This wasn’t just a policy choice. It was a structural reassessment of what German governance actually requires in a changed international environment. The debt brake had become nearly synonymous with German fiscal orthodoxy, a constitutional principle so embedded in German economic identity that questioning it seemed almost unthinkable for any center-right government.
The decision to circumvent this mechanism reveals something important about how international security pressures reshape domestic political possibilities. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Germany to confront its chronic underinvestment in military capacity. Structural declines in industrial competitiveness demanded infrastructure renewal. Suddenly, a constitutional stricture that had organized economic debate for fifteen years became negotiable. This wasn’t Merz abandoning conservative fiscal principles so much as a reordering of priorities, where national security and economic resilience came to outweigh constraints that had previously defined German fiscal space. A center-right government ended up pioneering the argument that transformed circumstances required transformed constitutional interpretation.
The fund’s dual focus on infrastructure and defense also exposed the internal coalition dynamics between CDU/CSU security hawks and SPD social investment advocates. The compromise structure, large enough to satisfy both camps, reflected a governing arrangement where neither partner could impose its full agenda. Grand coalition mathematics meant outcomes would consistently reflect negotiated middle positions rather than ideological clarity.
Migration as the Organizing Framework of Governance
Throughout 2025, migration policy became the dominant framework around which almost every other political debate rotated. Politico Europe’s German Government Tracker documented CDU/CSU approval ratings hovering near 30 percent through the year’s later months, a figure that looked stable but carried important information about the limits of the coalition’s political capital. The Merz government’s migration policies satisfied neither the constituencies demanding liberalization nor those calling for maximum restriction, occupying a middle terrain that didn’t decisively win over either wing of the electorate.
This reflects a deeper problem in contemporary center-right European politics: migration has become the lens through which all other policy disputes get filtered and reinterpreted. Economic policy, healthcare, education, infrastructure investment, all of these become secondary to how each affects migration flows or integration capacity. A government’s actual accomplishments in pension reform or energy investment recede behind its symbolic positioning on border security. For the Merz chancellorship, this meant the €500 billion investment fund, genuinely significant from a fiscal standpoint, generated less political salience than incremental changes to asylum processing procedures.
The AfD’s presence above 20 percent created a structural incentive for the government to address migration concerns aggressively enough to prevent further vote hemorrhaging to the far right, while simultaneously constraining how aggressive that positioning could become without violating European legal commitments or alienating SPD coalition partners. The result was a governance pattern where migration policy stayed chronically salient but never got conclusively resolved, virtually guaranteeing it would organize political debate through subsequent election cycles.
What German Coalition Politics Reveals About Center-Right European Realignment
The Merz chancellorship’s first hundred days reveal something important about contemporary European center-right governance: it operates under structural constraints radically different from those that organized politics during the 1990s and 2000s. The rise of far-right parties, the fragmentation of mainstream center-left alternatives, and the emergence of security and economic challenges demanding both military spending and infrastructure investment have rewritten the political arithmetic. Where once a center-right party might govern alone or with a single junior coalition partner, complex grand coalitions are now the price of avoiding policy paralysis.
The debt brake maneuver and the migration policy focus both demonstrate that contemporary center-right European governments increasingly define themselves less through ideological consistency than through their capacity to manage multiple constituencies and respond to external pressures. The Merz government was less a coherent ideological project than a management apparatus designed to navigate between security demands, economic constraints, and an electorate fragmenting in multiple directions at once. That’s not a failure of center-right politics. It’s the actual contemporary operating logic.
The Federal Returning Officer’s 2025 election results confirm that no alternative coalition configuration would have produced greater coherence or ideological clarity. Any other viable combination would have required either excluding major parties or governing with partners whose preferences diverged even more dramatically than SPD and CDU/CSU preferences did. The grand coalition represents a structural necessity emerging from how German electoral competition has reorganized itself around the AfD’s emergence and the fragmentation of traditional party alignments, not merely a tactical choice.
What questions about European center-right governance do you see as most pressing moving forward? How do we distinguish between tactical adjustments and fundamental structural transformation in coalition politics? These questions will likely organize European political analysis for the remainder of this decade.