In the end, all hope was in vain among the Union parties.

It is true that the mood in the two weeks leading up to the federal election was no longer as gloomy as it was in August, when the CDU and CSU considered a share of the vote of 20 percent or less possible.

But neither the prospect of a debacle of historic proportions nor the possibility of a massive left shift of the political coordinates by a coalition of SPD, Greens and Left were able to mobilize the voters of the Union parties to a sufficient extent.

In unison, the CDU and CSU each lost more than seven percentage points compared to the 2017 federal election to a combined total of 24.1 percent of the second votes. 

Daniel Deckers

in the political editorial department responsible for “The Present”.

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But the times are long gone when the traditional popular parties CDU / CSU and SPD behaved like communicating tubes. The worst result of the union parties since the existence of the Federal Republic corresponded to one of the worst for the SPD. With 25.7 percent of the second vote, the Social Democrats were able to forget the defeat of 2017, when the party only received 20.5 percent of the vote. But the 30 percent mark that the leadership duo Saskia Esken / Norbert Walter-Borjans, who were elected in autumn 2019, had set as their goal, was missed even with an applicant for the office of Federal Chancellor, who was his two competitors Armin Laschet (CDU) and Annalena Baerbock (Greens) outclassed both in the field of competence and personality values. 

In fact, in the person of Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, the SPD used the only chance it had after the end of the Merkel era to present itself as capable of governing. But the unity of its own party, all the mistakes in the election campaigns of the Union and the Greens combined, and even the weakest performance of the Left Party in decades, did not bring the Social Democrats a quarter of the vote. When all votes were counted, the CDU / CSU and SPD received less than half of the second votes for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic. Viewed in this way, with the end of the Merkel era after 16 years of chancellorship, the end of the party and government formations was possibly sealed,how they had emerged in West Germany after 1949 and how they had been reconfigured under the all-German sign after 1990.

This “caesura” (research group Wahlen) did not come out of the blue - on the contrary.

It was the corona pandemic that made the Union parties appear as strong since spring 2020 as they had last before the refugee crisis in 2013, thus obscuring the fact that the CDU and CSU have not been available again as Chancellor since Merkel's announcement in autumn 2018 were seen well below the 30 percent threshold.

But instead of courting the millions of voters who had elected the Union parties to see Angela Merkel as Chancellor, the CDU and CSU sent one confusing signal after another.