Episode 122: The German Bundestag Election Results
Eric Langenbacher
Senior Fellow; Director, Society, Culture & Politics Program
Dr. Eric Langenbacher is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Society, Culture & Politics Program at AICGS.
Dr. Langenbacher studied in Canada before completing his PhD in Georgetown University’s Government Department in 2002. His research interests include collective memory, political culture, and electoral politics in Germany and Europe. Recent publications include the edited volumes Twilight of the Merkel Era: Power and Politics in Germany after the 2017 Bundestag Election (2019), The Merkel Republic: The 2013 Bundestag Election and its Consequences (2015), Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe (co-edited with Ruth Wittlinger and Bill Niven, 2013), Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations (co-edited with Yossi Shain, 2010), and From the Bonn to the Berlin Republic: Germany at the Twentieth Anniversary of Unification (co-edited with Jeffrey J. Anderson, 2010). With David Conradt, he is also the author of The German Polity, 10th and 11th edition (2013, 2017).
Dr. Langenbacher remains affiliated with Georgetown University as Teaching Professor and Director of the Honors Program in the Department of Government. He has also taught at George Washington University, Washington College, The University of Navarre, and the Universidad Nacional de General San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has given talks across the world. He was selected Faculty Member of the Year by the School of Foreign Service in 2009 and was awarded a Fulbright grant in 1999-2000 and the Hopper Memorial Fellowship at Georgetown in 2000-2001. Since 2005, he has also been Managing Editor of German Politics and Society, which is housed in Georgetown’s BMW Center for German and European Studies. Dr. Langenbacher has also planned and run dozens of short programs for groups from abroad, as well as for the U.S. Departments of State and Defense on a variety of topics pertaining to American and comparative politics, business, culture, and public policy.
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Jeff Rathke
President of AGI
Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.
Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.
Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an M.P.P. degree from Princeton University and B.A. and B.S. degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.
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Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
Non-Resident Senior Fellow
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger is non-Resident Senior Fellow at AICGS.
Shortly after the polls closed in Germany, Jeff Rathke, Eric Langenbacher, and Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger discussed the results of the snap elections. They give their reactions to the performance of the parties and what motivated such a high turnout. They also predict how the results will impact the coalition formation in the coming months and Germany’s international role in the coming years.
Host
Jeff Rathke, President, AGI
Guests
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger, AGI Non-Resident Senior Fellow
Eric Langenbacher, AGI Senior Fellow; Director, Society, Culture & Politics Program
Transcript
Jeff Rathke
Welcome, all listeners, to this election edition of The Zeitgeist. We are speaking on Sunday, February 23, 2025, and I’ll even give the time we are speaking, because results are still coming in. It is 4:00 pm here in Washington, DC, about 10:00 pm in Germany. The polls closed at 6:00 pm in Germany. Here to talk through the situation, the results, and what it means are, as always when we talk about German politics, Eric Langenbacher, who is the senior fellow and director of our Society, Culture & Politics Program. Hello, Eric.
Eric Langenbacher
Hello, greetings from Berlin.
Jeff Rathke
And Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger, who is a non-resident senior fellow at AGI, who is with us from Darmstadt, am I not right?
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
You are right.
Jeff Rathke
And he was for decades the foreign editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Welcome, Klaus.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
Thank you. How are you?
Jeff Rathke
Well, very excited to hear what results we’ve got. This is an election campaign that over the last few weeks has taken on some remarkable circumstances or characteristics. First of all, this was an early election—doesn’t happen so often in Germany—but after the coalition of Olaf Scholz collapsed, the day after the U.S. presidential election on November 6, we’ve been headed for an early election.
And this election campaign has taken place under the shadow of two particular developments. The first has been a series of attacks that have left several people dead. There have been three major attacks in the last three months, one in Magdeburg in December, it was a car driven into a Christmas market, which killed six people and left 300 people wounded. In the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg in January of this year, there was a knife attack which left two people dead, one child and one adult, and in Munich just over a week ago a car was driven into a pro-union demonstration, leaving two people dead and 39 people injured. These were all attacks, which were carried out by migrants to Germany, in some cases, people who had failed asylum claims and who were supposed to leave the country, and so there was this upswell of focus on the fact that Germany is still struggling with migration many years after the big years of arrivals.
The second is more of a geopolitical development. The campaign has been taking place as the Trump administration takes office and rolls out its policies. Here, we see an abrupt change in the U.S. policy toward the war in Ukraine, where the United States is now pushing for a rapid settlement of the war and has moved away, I think it’s fair to say, from the really staunch support of Ukraine. This leaves Europeans unsettled. There is also the parallel question about the United States’ commitment to the security of Europe and in particular through NATO. This external uncertainty and internal turmoil have characterized this election. With that, Eric, what do we see in the numbers that have come out so far?
Eric Langenbacher
Thanks Jeff. We’re still waiting for certainty when it comes to the final or almost final results. There could be some changes and some of these changes could be significant. I’m going to go with one of two projections. This is the one from ARD, one of the two big German public television broadcasters. They have the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union), or the Union parties, at 28.5 percent, which I would point out is an under performance according to their polls, which had them at 30 or 31 percent pretty consistently, maybe a little bit of slippage in the last little while. And that’s not because of the Bavarians; that’s because of the CDU everywhere else, so that’s on Friedrich Merz. The AfD (Alternative for Germany) came in at 20.6 percent now, just over 20 percent; that is kind of what they were polling the last little while. The SPD (Social Democrats) came in at 16.4 percent, a little better, I think, than their polls had indicated. The Greens at 11.9 percent, which is a little worse than their polls. One of the big stories is the Left Party that has surged to 8.6 percent of the vote. People had left them for dead months ago when they were polling at 3 or 4 percent, so that’s something we’ll have to talk about a little later on. Then we have the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), this new party founded just about a year ago by a kind of dissident Left Party member. They’re coming at 4.9 percent, according to ARD, but according to the other prognosis, they’re at 5 percent. That matters, because a party needs to get 5 percent of the vote to be eligible for seats. And as we’ll also talk about later, if the BSW makes it in, that will make coalition formation much more difficult than if they don’t make it in. So that is one real thing to watch in the next few hours until we get a sure sense of what the actual result will be. Then the other big news is the FDP, the Liberal Party, which has consistently been below 5 percent in the polls for a while. And indeed, they’re coming in at 4.5 percent in both of these projections, and that means they will not make it into the next Bundestag, which is kind of a big deal. So that’s what’s happening right now. The other thing that I should note as well is participation. That’s gone way up; it’s spiked. It surprised everyone I’ve been talking to here. I think last time, participation was around 76 percent, 77 percent. This time it’s at 83 or 84 percent. This might be the highest participation rate since before German unification, when I looked at the at the table since 1987. So this is something else that is hugely significant that we’ll need to talk about, why so many Germans are finally participating.
Jeff Rathke
OK, thanks Eric. Now, Klaus, you get to tell us what this means.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
First of all, the public was restless, insecure, and angry, and this all at the same time. Angry at the now-collapsing Ampel (traffic light government, named for the party colors of the SPD, Green, and FDP coalition parties) government, ruthless because of all the things that you described in your introductory moderation. And it and the whole geopolitical situation really made people nervous, so I was not so surprised when I heard the first commentator refer to the participation rate. I thought, this is what you expect in a situation where people have a sense that we are in the Zeitenwende writ large. Now this is a major historical period we are undergoing in Germany/Europe, and people notice that. It’s a geopolitical thing. It’s domestic security, it’s a transformation of the economy, it’s a transformation of our societies, all converged together in this sense of, we look for direction and we are pretty damn sure that the current government has not delivered and we throw the rascals out. Now the result may be, and Eric touched upon this, that two of the Ampel parties maybe find themselves back in a new government led by Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrats. So I said earlier, the Ampel is dead, welcome to the Kenya (CDU, SPD, Greens) coalition. This is one of the ironies of this evening, and of course it all depends if one of the smaller parties, the FDP (the Liberals), or Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, the authoritarian left-wing group built around Sahra Wagenknecht, a former diehard communist from the east. Now, if the two don’t make it, we would have a four-party parliament, we’d have a consolidation. And it would be much easier for Friedrich Merz, whose party had come up with the majority, relatively speaking, of the votes is about the former coalition government. You just would need one extra partner, in the other case it would need two, and this makes the coalition-building process much more cumbersome and difficult.
I have not been surprised so much about this huge interest in the election, people are aware of that, but also one consequence of this huge participation for German circumstances in recent years is that the margins, right and left, are strengthened because a lot of voters have come out of the desert, so to speak. People have remigrated back into the political system and that’s what we see today. We see a shrinking of the center, relatively speaking, and strengthening of the margins—left and particularly hard right and it’s not surprising that the AfD is now polling at 20 plus percent and actually they will end up at maybe closer to 21 than 20. Their polls in the past were constantly around 20 of the whole situation now has reinforced the interest of segments of the voters into this group. They will not make it into government, this is clear, but still they are now a very strong force to reckon with.
Jeff Rathke
Yeah. Thank you, Klaus. I think it is remarkable, as you said, that the three parties that have been part of the government over the last three plus years suffered massively in this election. Collectively, they lost about 19 points if you add them all together, which is a stunning rebuke for the government. Maybe let’s start, though, with who the winner is. The winner in terms of the plurality of votes is the center-right, CDU and CSU, so it looks very much like Friedrich Merz will be Germany’s next chancellor, assuming he can put together a coalition—that’s going to be the tricky part. Are we on the same page there? Friedrich Merz is the next chancellor, right?
Eric Langenbacher
Yes, most certainly. But I can’t believe that I’m going to quote Alice Weidel (AfD), who during the Berliner Runde, as it’s called, or more colloquially, the Elefantenrunde, with all the top leaders getting together after the election on election night, which just happened an hour or two hours ago, she told him it was Pyrrhic victory, is what she said to Friedrich Merz. Now that is probably a little strong. But I think that Merz underperformed.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
Absolutely.
Eric Langenbacher
So even though he will be the next chancellor, even though the CDU/CSU is the largest fraction in the next German parliament, they did worse than expected. I can’t help but think that this result, nobody’s a winner. It reminds me of the polls. We had a briefing the other day—I’ve been here in Berlin for all sorts of meetings the last few days, getting ready for the election—and one of the things that I saw was that unlike any other election since unification, actually, probably since the foundation of the Federal Republic, all of the chancellor candidates were negatively assessed. There’s always been one chancellor candidate that was much more positively assessed than others, and usually that would be the chancellor and the party that would win, but they were all underwater. I don’t think anybody won tonight. I think one could argue the AfD also slightly underperformed, certainly didn’t do as well as some of the polls were predicting. The Greens have lost about 3 percent. I don’t think there’s a winner in this tonight, except maybe for the Left Party, but they’re going to be nowhere near government power and just a thorn in the side in the opposition.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
If I may add to this, you are right, Eric, in saying that the CDU underperformed, yes, they did. At one point in the election campaign, Merz wanted to aim for 35 percent. Earlier, he aimed for the upper 30s. Now he is in the upper 20s. It has to do with a lot of things that this performance is not to the satisfaction or can’t be to the satisfaction of him. He makes a lot of things much more complicated. The thing with the vote in the Bundestag at the end of January, when he basically accepted the collaboration of the AfD, did not endear him to the Merkel voters. He is as a person not much liked by women voters. He has a lot of personal baggage. 28.4, 28.6 percent for the CDU is the second-worst result in history. The SPD has the worst result in history, and the Greens don’t have a good result, either. So to make this short, yes, the Left is the surprise winner, the rebirth from the ashes of political history. Here they are, back in Parliament and in good strength and confident. They have new leadership. They have finally got rid—I mean the separation from Sahra Wagenknecht is a blessing for them, because they eventually got rid of this cumbersome nuisance, this pain in the butt political actor, so to speak. And we see what the fortunes in the future for Sahra Wagenknecht will bring. AfD is the winner. 20 percent in the Bundestag, they will be represented with a big number, a big group; it will be more than a fifth of the members of Parliament. That’s pretty strong. And eventually if they even might go up during the legislative period close to 25 percent, they’d be in a much stronger parliamentary position. Our relative winner is the CDU/CSU, but not an earth-shattering success. It’s rather mediocre, and they probably will pray and hope that the two small ones, the Liberals are out and the and the Sahra Wagenknecht group is also are out. Then they will only have to deal with one other partner, and this will be the Social Democrats.
And there is one thing I would rather like to emphasize. German voters—and numbers again tell the huge interest in this—want clear direction. They gave a verdict on the Ampel coalition. They want the rascals out. They want a new team that turns the fortunes of the country and the economy around, and they’ll probably end with a lot of the same people again for the next four years, with two exceptions. Scholz is out. The chancellor will be out. He will just be a regular member of parliament. And Lindner, the leader of the German Liberals, has already announced if and when the party doesn’t remake it to the Bundestag, his time of politics will be over. And it will be over. So, two senior figures are out, though there will be new people on the block, but with the same parties. This may anger a lot of people. The voters wanted a clear-cut change, but they didn’t vote in a way that they will be presented with a clear-cut change.
Jeff Rathke
The CDU/CSU have eked out a victory. It is not a triumph because it doesn’t give them a clear mandate. As we’ve talked about already, the fate of the smaller parties will determine whether we have a two-party coalition that comes together or something more complicated. But I want to pick up on what Klaus just said, and that is the most likely coalition partner in this scenario would be the Social Democrats, correct?
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
Mmhmm. Yes.
Jeff Rathke
And as you also said, Olaf Scholz will no longer be the leader of the Social Democrats in government if they are part of the next cabinet. So how is the composition of the Social Democratic membership of the Bundestag going to play a role here? Should we expect to see a more left-wing Social Democratic Party in the Bundestag, which might make it harder to conclude a coalition agreement with Friedrich Merz, or is it going to be a chastened, moderate Social Democratic caucus? Is it early? Can we tell yet, or do we have to wait to see?
Eric Langenbacher
We have to wait to see. But when you think about the big names that are being talked about for ministries in the next coalition, it’s people like Lars Klingbeil, people like Rolf Mützenich, and these are not the social-justice warrior, super-progressive types, so I don’t know.
Jeff Rathke
Mützenich, I might have a different interpretation—
Eric Langenbacher
On some issues, but overall, I find them to be pretty pragmatic and moderate, in my view, at least. I don’t think the SPD is going to be particularly progressive, but I might be wrong.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
The point is that the SPD has now lost a big number of members of the group. They have to digest what it means to their politics, what it means to the policies. Let’s say migration, a big issue also in the west in the Ruhr Valley districts, do they care to the ordinary voters or more to the guys in the university and the social welfare apparatus. This is very important for them. And I would also suspect that a good number of those reelected are no great fans of Friedrich Merz, no great fans, and a lot of them, not all, but a lot of them took this vote I alluded to earlier at the end of January, this tacit acceptance of the AfD, of voting with a motion, a resolution on tougher immigration. They took this as a disgrace, as a break of a taboo. And they feel personally disgusted. They won’t overcome this lightly. Others have vented their outrage just for campaign purposes, what you would expect. But a lot of them take it seriously. So there is a lot of animosity around both sides. Merz wants to go with the SPD because he has no other choice, and he may even have now to go with the Greens as well.
Jeff Rathke
And I want to pick up on that, too, because during the campaign, there was, especially from the Bavarian CSU a real campaign of demonizing the Greens and their leader Markus Söder—that is the CSU leader, Markus Söder—essentially ruled out any cooperation with the Greens after this election, but as you just pointed out, Klaus, the numbers may make it the only option for a mainstream coalition could be the CDU with the Social Democrats and the Greens. Is that a chasm that can be bridged? And how difficult of a coalition formation process will we experience if there are three parties involved? I ask in particular because, as we started off with the international picture, time is not standing still while Germany forms a government, you have a deteriorating situation in Ukraine. You have U.S. policy developing in a different direction. All of this is very precarious for Germany and for Europe. Can it afford to take four or five months to form a government?
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
No, of course, not. Friedrich Merz said a minute ago or two, his aim is to conclude the negotiations on forming a new government until Easter, roughly two months. That’s very ambitious, very ambitious. The thing is, you have policy differences, you have difference of style, and now you have all this baggage of animosity that had been growing and growing through the campaign. You rightly mentioned Söder, the chairman of the Bavarian sister party CSU, who demonized just for campaign tactics the Greens. He beat on them hard, and from his standpoint it worked, because he kept down the Free Voters of Bavaria. They are populist-oriented. And the voters really supported the CSU. CSU performed pretty well in Bavaria today.
Eric Langenbacher
They’re up 5 percent compared to their result back in 2021. That’s excellent.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
This is good, several people have noticed or seemed to have noticed that Söder’s already toned down the rhetoric against the Greens. Now, he has said no way with Habeck as the economics minister. You can find a different portfolio for Habeck, but there’s a lot of animosity to bridge. But it seems to me the rhetoric has already been moderated, toned down a little bit. There’s a lot of talk about respect, Merz at several occasions, speaking, “Mr. Bundeskanzler, Mr. So-and-So…” The aggressiveness has been grabbed out of the room, all of a sudden, it’s gone. And they are re-civilizing the conversation and that’s what it needs to do.
Eric Langenbacher
Except I have to point out that I heard two CSU politicians on the TV tonight, Dobrindt and Söder during the Elefantenrunde, both say they don’t want cooperation with the Greens. To which Habeck responded, he said, “Well, that will be for Chancellor Merz to decide.” So I think it’s going to be really interesting to see what kind of internal fissures there are within the Union parties over the next few weeks.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
Yes. It is not an easy thing, but as we have noticed now several times, it is probably, given political conditions that have been laid down and political markers by Merz that we don’t cooperate, collaborate, vote, and engage with the AfD period, that’s the only option that they have, of course they don’t have as the new partner the hard left, not the hard right. Nobody else is in the room, so that’s what you have.
Eric Langenbacher
Well, Klaus, there is another possibility and that would be Union/SPD minority coalition tolerated by the Greens. That might be the best solution.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
Might be the best thing, but again there is a marker laid down by Friedrich Merz, Eric, he said, we need a strong, capable Handlungsfähig, I mean, energetic, agile, capable of making tough decisions in the weeks and months and years to come. I mean, you mentioned Donald Trump. You mentioned the new situation, the rapprochement of America and Russia leaving Europe and particularly Germany in the cold and not to speak of Ukraine, but certainly we now have Scholz who has said we can’t make it without the United States and the United States says, go, go away.
Jeff Rathke
We’re going to wrap up in a minute, but I want to talk about the thing that Klaus just mentioned, which is the Germany’s international role. Will his challenges at home in forming a government and in holding it together—we’ve seen over the last few years for Olaf Scholz how difficult it has been to hold together a three party government—will that impede Friedrich Merz from fulfilling a leadership role in Europe, especially on these major issues of international security?
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
I was going to say it certainly won’t help, but then I look to France and see how President Macron is behaving. He is sandwiched domestically. His group, his party are from the right and from the left. His personal popularity is at all-time lows. People mock him, ridicule him, hate him, you name it, and he’s acting as if he is the de facto leader of Europe. So you can do it, if you have energy, the ideas, and the courage and you simply grasp the situation. Friedrich Merz will be the chancellor of Germany. Germany, no matter how bad the economic malaise is and how bad the economy is doing at the moment, that’s still the powerhouse of Europe, and people expect a lot. It’s clear to him that he has to act strongly and vigorously, and people have to rely on him.
My personal feeling is, and I’m really saying that it’s a kind of regret. Olaf Scholz started his chancellorship with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and he gave this, for German circumstances, spectacular speech in the Bundestag, the so-called Zeitenwende speech. But he never fulfilled the Zeitenwende agenda, 50 percent, 40 percent, 30 percent he brought in on a way. Merz needs to now fulfill that Zeitenwende agenda militarily, security, economically, energy wise. And this has a domestic component and a non-domestic component, Europe and the wider world. It’s absolutely imperative for me and for Germany and for Europe and for Ukraine that Merz is the leader that a lot of our partners want Germany to be. It has been lacking for a while and I don’t say this in a partisan manner, but I say it because German leadership is definitely needed. It’s inevitable. And at least theoretically, in principle, Merz seems to me to know this. Scholz for a lot of reasons couldn’t perform the way he had outlined it, almost three years ago in the Zeitenwende speech. But the domestic situation, the murky outcome of this election is a big obstacle. Now it’s time for Merz to prove that he has leadership capabilities and qualities.
Jeff Rathke
We’re going to go around. Eric, what’s the biggest surprise or the most noteworthy thing you’ve experienced or that you take away from this election thus far.
Eric Langenbacher
I’m not as scared of the AfD as I was before, right? Yeah, they had a historic outcome. They doubled the share of their vote, but if you look at public opinion polls, you’ll see that 75 percent of Germans would never vote for the AfD, which might change given circumstances. But their ceiling is low is the first thing. The second thing that I learned through numerous briefings with people close to the party is that we have this image that this party is this juggernaut and they’re internally united.
Jeff Rathke
Sorry, you’re talking about the AfD, yeah?
Eric Langenbacher
Yeah, the AfD. But I think that that we’ll start to learn very soon, now that they have this big contingent, that there are massive cleavages within the party. And in particular, it was highlighted to me that the western AfD is very different from the eastern AfD. The western AfD might be more willing to compromise so that they could gain government power. I don’t think the eastern AfD would. For me, it just makes me think that they’re not as powerful as many people may think.
Jeff Rathke
OK, Klaus.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
The biggest surprise for me is the rebirth of the radical left, the hard left. They have new personnel. One of their key figures is pretty charismatic; it’s energetic. The Left has profited from the turmoil within the SPD and within the Greens and is presenting itself as a force for social redistribution, leftist economics, leftist migration. And that’s roughly 9 to 10 percent of voters appreciate it.
What worries me though—this is not as a surprise but worries me—it’s really the downward trend of the SPD in terms of a rock-solid formation that is underpinning our governance and governance structures in the country and also in a situation where the main opposition party, the CDU/CSU, should be the major profiteer of the dismal performance of the government just brings in a meager result, which also brings up the question of what kind of Volkspartei, catchall party, is it in the future if that’s a trend that will continue, can it recover under Merz? I wish it were, not, again, not for partisan reasons, but simply it’s important that Germany rest on a solid foundation and the solid foundation at the center and not the extremes.
Jeff Rathke
Right. For me, one thing that stands out, I was in Munich last week at the Security Conference and of course a lot of attention was devoted to the vice president’s speech and his more or less endorsement of the AfD. He met with the AfD’s top candidate Alice Weidel. He admonished the European and especially German politicians that they needed to work with the far right. At the same time, Elon Musk threw his personal engagement with the AfD, his endorsement of the AfD on his social media platform, and the attention that the AfD has gotten through social media. Nevertheless, their numbers didn’t budge. And this at a time when in pretty rapid succession, you had three attacks, which led to significant loss of life and violent attacks that were committed by people who had come into the German asylum system. Amid all of those circumstances, the push from outside seems like it didn’t move their numbers at all. That suggests a limit for them.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
It had one effect, Jeff, if I just may interrupt, one effect, the intervention by Musk, the sales of Tesla cars in the country have gone down considerably.
Jeff Rathke
Yeah? I did not know that.
Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
And on a more serious note, you can see the tension in the transatlantic relationships, and there’s admonishing and the constant beating up on Germany have an effect that is easily foreseen. The animosity here is growing and the anti-American sentiment is fertile again, so to speak, is coming back to the forefront. And you see it with someone with an Atlanticist as stalwart as Friedrich Merz, he was probably in the Berliner Runde, Eric alluded to several times, he was probably the strongest in his in his anti-Trump rhetoric. That’s what you can expect. It will not be easy. They may find a way to manage German-U.S. relations. But I’m not so sure that this will that will bring us back to harmony. I doubt it.
Jeff Rathke
Alright. We’re going to wrap it up there. Thank you, Klaus and Eric, for joining us and sharing initial impressions from this election evening and we look forward to remaining in touch as the final results are confirmed in the coming hours or perhaps days. And to working with you all to understand better what this is going to mean for Germany, for its relations with the United States, for Europe and the transatlantic relationship. Thanks so much. Have a good evening. Get some rest and we’ll be back in touch with you again soon and we’ll look forward to hearing from all of our listeners at The Zeitgeist and having you with us next time. Thanks so much.
