German politics at the traffic light: new beginnings in the election of 2021

Abstract

With the announced end of Angela Merkel’s tenure as Chancellor, the 2021 German federal election was particularly charged. In stark contrast to the Social Democratic Party, which became more united as the election approached, the Christian Democrats were not able to consolidate the fissures unveiled by Merkel’s departure. The Greens, emboldened by the polls, for the first time joined the traditional major parties in nominating a chancellor candidate. The result was a campaign period that centred heavily on the three-way race between Olaf Scholz (SPD), Armin Laschet (CDU/CSU) and Annalena Baerbock (Greens). The electoral outcome reduced the large number of coalitions discussed against the backdrop of a fragmenting party system and eventually led to a novel partnership on the federal level, a so-called traffic light coalition between the Social Democrats, Greens, and the Liberals. The formation of this coalition was facilitated by the refusal of Social and Christian Democrats to even consider renewing their ‘grand’ coalition, a newfound self-confidence on behalf of Greens and Liberals as well as the symbolic benefit that this novel alliance brought together the election winners. In many ways, the electoral result and the coalition it engendered represent new beginnings in German politics but significant hurdles to the consolidation of these patterns remain.

Keywords:

• Germany
• elections
• campaigns
• coalitions
• voting behaviour

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Niklas Gaus, Anton Könneke, Petra Lipski and Yannik Yeşilgöz for their support in writing this piece and to Wolfgang C. Müller for helpful feedback. The responsibility for remaining factual errors and biased interpretations is ours alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For other recent articles in the Elections in Context series see Eberl et al. (2020); Little (2021); Pilet (2021); and Prosser (2021).

2 https://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/dam/jcr/8ad0ca1f-a037-48f8-b9f4-b599dd380f02/btw21_heft4.pdf; accessed 8 February 2022.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thorsten Faas

Thorsten Faas is Professor of Political Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin. His work focuses on elections, electoral behaviour and election campaigns; he is a member of the coordination group of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) and of the Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP). [[email protected]]

Tristan Klingelhöfer

Tristan Klingelhöfer is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Chair of German Politics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. His research interests lie at the intersection of intra-party politics, political communication, and political psychology with a focus on post-industrial democracies. [[email protected]]