The electoral system used for German Federal elections since 1953 is a Mixed Member Proportional electoral system. This system includes a First Past The Post round for the number of representatives and then a round for additional representatives through a Party List system. That means Germans get “two votes”, with the second one being more significant as it determines the number of seats in the Bundestag. The additional representatives help the system seem representative enough for all members of the German public to be considered represented. It also works as more seats, specifically 331 Bundestag seats, are reserved for elected members of the Party List, and 299 seats are reserved for the FPTP constituency.

This year, the 21st German Federal election took place on Feb. 23, 2025. This election came after the traffic light coalition collapse in November 2024 and after Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic Party lost his vote of confidence and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier confirmed that the elections would be held earlier than the planned September 2025 elections. 41 parties participated for votes in the elections with polling from the Forsa Institute indicating that the most promising candidate parties were the CDU/CSU, AfD, SPD, Greens, Left Party, and the FDP. The results were as follows:

The projections were showing that one of the two conservative parties would be ruling Germany with either the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union or the Alternative für Deutschland being expected to win. The general public was equally concerned by the projections for both parties, given that they were both right-wing parties, and the rise of right-wing politics and democratic backsliding in Europe has been an issue of notable concern. The CDU/CSU, formerly led by Angela Merkel, swept the polls with 208 Bundestag seats and became the main ruling party. This has been a long-established party in Germany, so it did not come as a shock to the public. However, viewers were shocked by the election turnout, which was the largest it had been in 40 years, and one could argue the results represented the people’s opinions. According to the BBC, more than four in every five of Germany’s 59.2 million voters turned out to cast their vote.

While the CDU/CSU majority was expected, the big turnout was due to the concern individuals have for the rise of the right and a desire to keep the AfD from gaining seats. AfD received 20.8% of the votes, demonstrating that the party dominant in the famously non-liberal east had begun to gain popularity and spread to the west, disrupting the establishment of the CDU/CSU. According to the BBC, “political loyalty to the old mainstream parties has gone”. However, it is true that no extremist party can co-operate with any other ruling party since the end of World War II because of a “firewall” operated by Germany’s main parties.

The party’s leader, Alice Weidel, insists that neither the party nor its policies are racist. The AfD is recognized as a far-right, right-wing populist, and national-conservative political party in Germany, with one of its main characteristics being Euroscepticism. So what does this mean for German politics?

From Georgia Meloni’s national-conservative and right-wing populist Brother of Italy party’s historic rise in Italy to the ultra nationalistic neo-fascist Spartants and nationalist conservative Elliniki Lysi in Greece, we have been seeing a rise in parliamentary representation of conservative politics throughout Europe. What does this representation mean in reality? Are they just representing the shift in opinions that the public has a right to express?

In reality, this shift in European politics does represent a certain number of the population as seen in the 20,8% AfD turnout, but it also represents the minimization of democratic ethics and policies that were supposed to rule the 21st century. AfD represents the reimagination of immigration with its central policies supporting the deportation of foreign nationals and the idea of “remigration”. The leader proposes abandoning the Euro and globalization and returning to in-house economic policies that would introduce the German mark. All these ideas would require that Germany leave NATO. All these ideas may just seem unusual and merely opinions, but taken in conjunction with public statements about Germany’s past, one can find that this election’s results could be a major regression for the democratic liberal values Europe totes. Alice Weidel’s comments on Hitler being a communist emphasizes this Nazi revisionism.. Björn Höcke, an AfD member, commented in 2023, that the Berlin Holocaust memorial was a “monument of shame” with comments in support of stopping to atone the Nazi past. He also stated that “This EU must die so that the true Europe may live”. Many AfD members have used Nazi terms that are banned in Germany such as “Umvolkung”, a phrase used to support the “great replacement theory,” said by Maximilian Krah to describe his immigration strategy.

All this glory to history seeks to revive the past and rebuild a country with closed borders, both literal and metaphorical. This shows a turning point for German politics, emphasized by the large percentage of the population that supports this idea. Thus, while these election results and political parties may be the manifestation of opinions, they will affect the ideals of democracy in Europe and the EU, which stand for globalization, interconnectedness, and liberty for all individuals.