THE forthcoming Bundestag — German parliament — elections on September 26 will be a nail-biting affair and the outcome will have repercussions not only for national politics but also for Germany’s role internationally. 

The new Bundestag’s first task will be to elect a Chancellor. Since her election to the chancellorship in 2005, Angela Merkel has been a conciliatory and stabilising figure.

Although her party — the Christian Democratic Union (CDU-CSU) — was the largest in the Bundestag, it never had an overall majority. Throughout her chancellorship Merkel has been obliged to rule in coalition with one or two of the other parties. Her decision to resign this year, after 16 years in the post, has left a gaping hole, with no obvious successor to fill it. 

None of the competing candidates has the charisma, broad support or experience to step easily into her shoes. Under the German proportional representation voting system, it is also almost certain that again there will not be a single dominant party in the Bundestag; it will be a question of what sort of coalition can be cobbled together and the new chancellor will have to be prepared for compromises and horse-trading.

As the battle heats up in the final weeks, the rhetoric is becoming more aggressive. In an attempt to halt the rise of the Greens, the CDU’s Friedrich Merz – a possible future Minister of Finance — upped the ante by accusing the party of wanting “to expand the state apparatus in order to interfere in all aspects of private and family life (…) The party is‚” he said, “in essence an authoritarian party.”

The escalating climate emergency and this year’s catastrophic flooding in Germany, in the face of which the authorities appeared to be woefully unprepared, should have given the Green Party a boost, and made its chancellor candidate, Annalena Baerbock, an unexpected frontrunner.

However, with the surfacing of doubts as to the accuracy of her CV and recent accusations of plagiarism in connection with her new book “Now. How We Renew Our Country,” her reputation has been seriously dented. The most recent polls indicate that the Green Party now commands only 19 per cent voter support.

The impact of the Covid pandemic has also hit Germany’s economy hard, even if not on such a drastic scale as other European countries. The economy is now in danger of overheating and experts are talking about an inflation rate of up to 4 per cent this year. If that does happen, it will bring the new government into conflict with the European Central Bank, which demands that EU members keep their inflation rate below 2 per cent.

This election is taking place against a background of diminishing support for all the mainstream parties. The dominant CDU-CSU is at present polling at around 25 per cent and the Social Democratic SPD at 20 per cent, with the centre-right FDP remaining steady at around 12 per cent.

The new upstart on the block, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) founded in 2013, has been steadily gaining ground on the other parties. It is populist, unashamedly right wing, Eurosceptic, nationalist and xenophobic. In the 2017 elections to the Bundestag, it won over 20 per cent of the vote in the old eastern states of Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Brandenburg and was able to count on significant support in a number of western states too.

It has highest support in the more rural parts of the country with high unemployment and where there has been a high incidence of hate crimes. In voter intention surveys it is predicted to garner 11 per cent of the votes. 

The Left Party (Die Linke), has recently gone through a series of bruising internal battles and leadership changes that could see it struggling to jump the necessary hurdle of 5 per cent vote share in order to achieve representation in the Bundestag. Recent voter surveys suggest it will obtain under 7 per cent.

Candidates to become the new chancellor are Armin Laschet (CDU-CSU), Olaf Scholz (SPD) and Annalena Baerbock for the Greens. Given that both candidates of the two main parties are rather lack-lustre older men, the Greens’ Baerbock looked, initially, as if she could pip both to the post. But although a Green chancellor would be a surprising breakthrough, there would be little likelihood of a radical change in policy from that of Merkel.

The German Green Party is very much more conservative than Britain’s Greens, particularly on foreign and economic policy issues. But given the recent reputational damage to Baerbock, her chances of becoming chancellor now appear unlikely. Nevertheless, the situation will certainly remain volatile during the final weeks of campaigning.

In terms of which chancellor candidate people prefer, the SPD candidate Scholz currently has a clear lead. This week (mid- August), he was on 29 per cent and the Green’s Baerbock on 26 per cent, with the CDU’s Laschet trailing in third place on 15 per cent. However, 30 per cent of voters don’t like any of the candidates which signifies a clear repudiation of the political establishment.

While we can’t expect any radical policy changes, whichever party comes out on top in these elections and whoever becomes chancellor, the make-up of any coalition could produce a shift in priorities.

Certainly, the incoming government of whatever party will be faced with two main challenges: maintaining EU unity in the face of the increasingly fraught relationships within the EU after Brexit and the rise of a populist right — and the foreign policy implications of Joe Biden’s aggressive stance on China and Russia. In the end, though, any policy shifts will be dependent on how quickly the German economy itself can recover.