BERLIN — Germany’s conservatives won the national election on Sunday but a fractured vote handed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) its best ever result in second place and left conservative leader Friedrich Merz facing messy coalition talks.
Merz, who has no previous experience in office, is set to become chancellor with Europe’s largest economy ailing, its society split over migration and its security caught between a confrontational U.S. and an assertive Russia and China.
After the collapse of incumbent Olaf Scholz’s unloved coalition, Merz, 69, must forge a coalition from a fragmented parliament in a process that could take months.
His conservative bloc and other mainstream parties rule out working with the AfD, a party which has been endorsed by U.S. figures including billionaire Elon Musk.
Merz took aim at the U.S. in blunt remarks after his victory, criticising the “ultimately outrageous” comments flowing from Washington during the campaign, comparing them to hostile interventions from Russia.
“So we are under such massive pressure from two sides that my absolute priority now is to achieve unity in Europe. It is possible to create unity in Europe,” he told a roundtable with other leaders.
Merz’s broadside against the U.S. came despite President Donald Trump welcoming the conservative victory.
“Much like the USA, the people of Germany got tired of the no common sense agenda, especially on energy and immigration, that has prevailed for so many years,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Hitherto seen as an atlanticist, Merz said Trump had shown his administration to be “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”.
Merz’s “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we can achieve real independence from the USA step by step”, he added.
He even ventured to ask whether the next summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which has underpinned Europe’s security for decades, would still see “NATO in its current form”.
Following a campaign roiled by violent attacks for which people of migrant background were arrested, the conservative CDU/CSU bloc won 28.5% of the vote, followed by the AfD with 20.5%, said a projection published by ZDF broadcaster at 9:46 p.m. (2046 GMT).
The AfD, which looks set to double its score from the previous vote and saw Sunday’s result as just the beginning. “Our hand remains outstretched to form a government,” leader Alice Weidel told supporters, adding “next time we’ll come first.”
Merz is heading into coalition talks without a strong negotiating hand. While his CDU/CSU emerged as the largest bloc, it scored its second worst post-war result.
It remains unclear whether Merz will need one or two partners to form a majority, with the fate of smaller parties unclear in a way that could jumble parliamentary arithmetic.
A three-way coalition would likely be much more unwieldy, hampering Germany’s ability to show clear leadership.
Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) tumbled to their worst result since World War Two, with 16.5% of the vote share, and Scholz conceding a “bitter” result, according to the ZDF projection, while the Greens were on 11.9%.
Strong support particularly from younger voters pushed the far-left Die Linke party to 8.7% of the vote.
The pro-market Free Democrats (FDP) and newcomer Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) party hovered around the 5% threshold to enter parliament.
Voter turnout at 83% was the highest since before reunification in 1990, according to exit polls. Male voters tended more towards the right, while female voters showed stronger support for leftist parties.
