The 2021 German Federal Election

This chapter provides a thematic introduction to the section on political parties. It argues that the German party system is unstable and unsettled, characterised by fragmentation, polarisation and volatility. However, the evidence also suggests that while vote splitting has increased, the vast majority of German voters, with the exception of AfD supporters, remain entirely supportive and largely satisfied with the state of democracy in their country. While German voters may value the notion of political compromise as such, the continuing impossibility to form an ideologically coherent coalition government either left or right of centre may well continue to breed discontent resulting in continued fragmentation and polarisation.

This chapter outlines the background to the SPD’s remarkable election success in 2021, in spite of being in third place in opinion polls just months before polling day. It illustrates how the Covid-19 pandemic shifted the party’s fiscal policy in a way which led to greater internal cohesion as well as boosting its popularity; how the election of two left-wing party leaders ended up being to the benefit of the centrist Chancellor Candidate, Olaf Scholz, and how the party profited from weak opponents. However, it also points to the difficulties the party had  in its first year in office, largely caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This chapter examines the performance of the CDU/CSU during the Federal Elections of 2021. The election was a disaster for the CDU/CSU, as it suffered its worst-ever result in the history of the postwar Federal Republic. The chapter argues that the two parties began the campaign with a range of problems, encompassing the departure  Angela Merkel, a fractious and prolonged battle to replace her, and disunity over the campaign message. In selecting Armin Laschet as Chancellor Candidate, the party compounded its problems, as Laschet’s campaign faltered during the summer months and his performance during the televised debates was lacklustre. The Christian Democrats continue to attract some of their core voters but as these constitute a diminishing share of the electorate there is additional pressure to renew the core message. Although the Christian Democrats face an uphill battle to restore unity in circumstances in which there are competing visions about their future, there is nevertheless a strategic opportunity to develop a competitive programme for government and reclaim lost voters.

Despite achieving a record 14.8 per cent of vote share at a federal election, the reception of Alliance 90/The Greens’ election result was one of considerable disappointment. Largely due to personal gaffes that questioned the integrity of the first-ever Green Chancellor Candidate Annalena Baerbock, the party yet again failed to translate opinion poll highs to the ballot box. In spite of this disappointing result, the Greens became kingmakers alongside the FDP in coalition negotiations and finally returned to government after 16 years in federal opposition. This chapter argues that the 2021 elections were indeed a success for the Greens in their aim to become the leading force of the left-centre. Firstly, this election campaign successfully implemented the Green rebrand designed by Baerbock and Robert Habeck. Secondly, the Greens used their position as kingmakers to create a progressive coalition, which had a distinctively Green flavour. Finally, if the party can learn from the avoidable mistakes of the 2021 election and Green ministers continue to deliver and be positively received by the public, the next election could see the Greens achieve their goal of becoming the leading force of the left-centre.

The FDP had a successful 2021 Bundestag election. Although it had begun the year polling close to the critical five-per cent mark, it ended with a strong result, the fourth best in its long history, setting the stage for a return to power. It had relied on the successful campaign formula of 2017: supplementing its long-standing emphasis on lower taxes, less bureaucracy, and balanced budgets with calls for increased public investment in education and in digitalisation; remaining open to different coalitions; and featuring Christian Lindner. As in the past, the party did well among educated voters, the self-employed, men and those economically secure. It recorded significant gains among young voters. Following the election, it entered into ‘Traffic-Light’ negotiations with the SPD and Greens and sought to avoid past mistakes. This time all went according to plan, then Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, recasting politics in the Federal Republic and creating unforeseen challenges for the Free Democrats.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) had a mixed record of success in the 2021 federal election. Although it shed just under a fifth of its voters compared to 2017, the party maintained its support or even gained strength in East Germany, especially in southeast Germany. Although the party’s influence over public policy is extremely limited given the exclusion strategy pursued by all the mainstream German parties, the AfD is becoming an effective ‘populist issue entrepreneur,’ maintaining issue ownership over EU scepticism and anti-immigrant sentiment while capitalising on (or simply inventing) new issues in the electoral marketplace. Given this, the AfD will likely remain a fixture of German politics for many years to come.

The Left Party (LP) survived the 2021 election. But only just. Its vote share slipped from 9.2% to 4.9% and it only remained in parliament thanks to a rarely invoked ‘direct mandate’ clause. The drivers of the LP’s poor performance can be found in three interlinked areas. Firstly, the party failed to produce a clear and coherent policy package that would have made it distinctive from its competitors. Secondly, the party had leadership issues. On the one hand, the party’s leaders were unable to cut through with the wider electorate. On the other hand, when the LP did manage to make it into national discussions it was often as quarrels between LP politicians were attracting attention. Finally, the Left Party struggled to find a way into debates around the key issue that shaped the election; which politician was going to replace Angela Merkel in the Chancellery? 2021 therefore represents something of a nadir for the party. If this is repeated in 2025 then the LP may well be facing crises that are less political and more existential.

The chapter explores the underlying party system dynamics that shaped the coalition formation process in Germany following the Federal election of 26 September 2021 and led to the formation of Germany’s first federal-level Traffic Light coalition. It discusses how the Federal Republic’s Mixed-Member Proportional electoral system shapes the German party system and makes coalition government the norm and then deploys an analytical frame, based on six assumptions informed by the formal coalition literature, to explore the real-world coalition process that led to the formation of the Traffic Light coalition. The chapter concludes with the argument that Germany is moving from a politics of centrality to a politics of fluidity.

While foreign policy was not a major issue during the 2021 election campaign, the elections were a watershed for Germany’s role in international affairs. They put German foreign policy under new leadership, after 16 years under Chancellor Merkel, and came at a time when the growing international demands on Germany and the deepening foreign policy divides in domestic politics were ever more difficult to navigate. On the international level, Germany’s Western partners expected German foreign policy to make stronger contributions to defending the liberal international order, including crisis management and security. In the domestic arena, the direction of German foreign policy was contested both between foreign policy elites and the general public and on the level of party politics, mainly between parties at the centre and at the extremes of the German party system. This thematic introduction maps out the international and domestic context of German foreign policy at the time of the 2021 elections, arguing that the incoming coalition government under Chancellor Scholz is in a tight spot between international pressures and domestic constraints.

Despite the overall positive German-American relationship over the post-war decades, periodic tensions have arisen, most recently during the Trump administration. The change in government to the Biden administration in the United States and to the SPD-led Traffic-Light coalition in 2021 augured well for a new era of comity. Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, however, has prompted a fundamental shift in German foreign policy with unclear implications for the bilateral Germany-U.S. and broader Transatlantic relationships.

This chapter evaluates the development of Germany’s Russia policy. Since 2014, Germany has pursued contradictory policies that tried to manage and deter Russia’s hostile behaviour, while simultaneously increasing its energy dependence on it. Foreign policy played a minor role in the 2021 election, but Russia was a prominent and contested topic, revealing a three-way split: CDU/CSU and SPD defended the status quo, while the Greens and FDP pushed for a tougher line, and AfD and The Left Party called for détente. The election and subsequent coalition agreement did not lead to a fundamental change, which was forced on Berlin only by Russia’s war of 2022. Chancellor Scholz pronounced an ‘epochal shift’ (Zeitenwende), but the ambiguity in its implementation damaged the position of the government among its more hawkish partners, especially in Eastern Europe. At the present time, the future strategy towards Russia is still unclear. While going back to business as usual is not an option, it remains unsolved how to combine confrontational policies with the traditional emphasis on military restraint, trade and diplomacy.

Relations between Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) had hit a new post-war low towards the latter stages of the Merkel era. ‘Brexit’, however, made matters much worse. German politicians, commentators and the wider public were astonished that the UK could contemplate leaving the European Union (EU) and were in disbelief at the result of the 2016 referendum. Changes in the leadership of the two countries have allowed for a degree of optimism regarding the prospects to improve, renew and even to rehabilitate the partnership between the two countries now outside of the EU structures. The ‘Windsor Agreement’, resolving tensions over the Northern Ireland Protocol between the UK and the EU, will help. This contribution unpacks the wider consequences of the political alignments between Germany and Britain and considers the future of the bilateral relationship.

Germany is in a time of social upheaval. When the new ‘Traffic-Light’ coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP under the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz came to power, an era ended. The incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had been Chancellor for sixteen years, had decided not to stand for another term. The race for the chancellorship was on. While Merkel had long been accused of mainly avoiding substantive policy debates in Germany, the expectation of the 2021 federal election campaign was that it would be a fireworks display of substantive discussion. But that was only partly the case; instead the election was mainly about the candidates for Chancellor and their performance in the election campaign. Nevertheless, it was also crucial in political debates how Germany would position itself in terms of policy reforms after the Merkel era. This thematic introduction provides an insight into the role of popular issue salience in 2021 German national election and how it compared to the 2017 federal election year. It also outlines, based on a Twitter data analysis, which content-related priorities the German parties set in their digital campaigns during the federal election campaign.

This chapter explores the role economic policies played before, during, and after Germany’s national elections in September 2021. It discusses the salience of economic policies relative to other issues and compares the major political parties with particular attention devoted to public debt, investment, and tax policy. Finally, the chapter describes how issue saliency and political parties’ positions on economic policies shaped the policy and personnel compromises that formed the new government. We argue that while economic policies were essential to the public, they were less salient compared with other factors. The low saliency helped create a kind of ‘board-room’ politics conducive to compromise and finding common ground. Furthermore, the distribution of ministerial appointments and the creation of the Energy and Climate Fund as a workaround to the debt-brake constraints allowed three political parties with very different views on the economy to have their cake and eat it too.

The climate crisis unfolded in real time during the 2021 Bundestag campaign, as western Germany experienced sudden, catastrophic flooding. The climate issue presented a complex and in some ways unexpected array of challenges and opportunities to the German political parties. In this chapter I will analyse the evolving role of the climate issue in the campaign, in the coalition discussions afterwards, and in the first months of the new, ‘Traffic Light’ coalition government.

The COVID-19 pandemic which started in early 2020 was a major challenge to Germany. This contribution traces first how the Grand Coalition under Chancellor Merkel coped with that challenge, given Germany’s complex and negotiation-oriented decision-making process and the uncertainties involved in handling an unknown virus. Given the importance of the Länder in the implementation of measures to fight the pandemic, the Conference of Minister Presidents (MPK) became a major forum for finding solutions that combined coordination with regionally varying problem load. While party competition was initially subdued due to a ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect and rising support for the government, election programs showed that parties expected the pandemic to play an important role in the 2021 election campaign. But opinion poll as well as exit poll data demonstrate that voters had other priorities when casting their vote, preferring to look ahead rather than back. The chapter ends with some reflections on this surprising finding.

Immigration has historically played a crucial role in understanding voter and party behaviour in Germany, especially in the aftermath of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis.’ Whether immigration remains relevant in understanding German political behaviour is yet to be seen. The events of 2020—in particular, a global pandemic and catastrophic floods—resulted in a multidimensional and contested issue environment which could change the way both parties and voters consider the issue of immigration. We address this question in this contribution, using text-as-data approaches to examine how German voters, parties, and the incoming coalition spoke about immigration in the 2021 election. By analysing electoral manifestos of six political parties, we show that immigration remained an oft discussed and critical issue for many parties. Further, we show that parties varied substantially in how they spoke about the topic, varying whether they primarily discussed immigrants as refugees, members of specific origin groups, or through their legality status. We further show that immigration-concerned voters with different party loyalties considered and discussed immigration in distinct ways, suggesting a linkage between party and individual-level depiction of immigration. Finally, we assess the discussion of immigration within the coalition document of the incoming Traffic-Light government to identify their clear rhetorical shift to a more liberal immigration regime. Taken together, we demonstrate that immigration remains a nuanced yet critically important issue in contemporary German politics.

Gender presented itself as a cleavage issue during the 2021 campaign for the German Bundestag. On their respective electoral platforms, centre-left and left parties in particular signalled a substantive break with Angela Merkel’s strategy of ‘leading from behind’ on women’s rights. Gender, moreover, kept inserting itself into the campaigns in two implicit and unexpected ways: One, by way of the pandemic, forcing all parties to engage with gendered effects in terms of professional and household care work and a renewed gendered division of labour. And, two, by way of the Green Party, whose first-ever Chancellor Candidate selection was qua internal regulations infused with gender equality norms. As gender appeared mainstreamed, albeit to different degrees, on the centre-left spectrum, gender played a more marginal role in the centre-right and extreme right party spectrum, with the AfD rhetoric providing a notable exception in terms of employing a strong anti-gender agenda.

This chapter analyses LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) issues in the German election of 2021. It covers (a) the status quo, with a brief historical overview of past LGBTI policies up to the election, (b) how the German political parties positioned themselves towards LGBTI people in their campaigns, and (c) patterns of electoral behaviour and representation, observing how voters responded to LGBTI issues and the inclusivity of the 20th legislative period of the Bundestag. It concludes with an overview of prospects for the Traffic Light coalition. In many respects, Germany has played catch up to its peers during this contemporary era of change surrounding LGBTI rights, heavily influenced by international norms and policy ideas that developed elsewhere. I argue that the 2021 elections mark a new chapter for LGBTI issues in Germany, in terms of content, issue salience, and representation, with the potential to transform Germany from adopter back to innovator on LGBTI rights.

This chapter examines the central findings of the book and reflects on their substantive implications for contemporary German politics. It returns to the subtitle—Negotiating a New Era—and traces this theme through the four major sections of the study. Our findings demonstrated the openness and fluidity in electoral behaviour. The erosion of the traditional cleavages of society has led to a fading number of party loyalists and increasing number of floating voters. Delayed decision-making based on a wider set of issues has increased competition for voters and strengthened the importance of strategic campaigning. Parties, meanwhile, compete in a crowded, fragmented and polarised electoral marketplace. Despite foreign policy not being a key campaign issue, the election had a wide-ranging impact on foreign relations and the new government has been confronted with how to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Finally, Germany’s first three-party coalition, and its first non-Christian Democratic government in sixteen years, will bring sea changes to key policy areas but also face challenges in holding together a very diverse set of parties.