The German Election of Chancellor 2017

Germany is getting a new chancellor. Its current leader is heading out of power, but his party probably will stick around in a diminished capacity. And the Trump administration’s efforts to influence the vote don’t seem to have done much.

Sunday’s election, which came months ahead of schedule after the country’s governing coalition crumbled late last year, produced a few surprises and a lot of suspense. Late in the evening in Berlin, it was unclear if the next government would be another wobbly three-party affair, like the one that fell apart last fall, or a return to the more durable two-party governments that had led Germany for most of this century.

Here are five takeaways from the returns.

Merz is the likely new chancellor.
The largest German turnout in decades gave the most votes to the center-right Christian Democrats and their sister party, the Christian Social Union. That almost certainly means the next chancellor will be Friedrich Merz, a businessman who flies his own private plane and has long coveted the top job.

Mr. Merz lost a power struggle to lead the Christian Democrats early in the 2000s, to Angela Merkel, who went on to serve 16 years as chancellor. Voters soured on her legacy, though, including an ill-fated plan to rely more heavily on Russia for natural gas and the decision to keep Germany’s borders open in 2015 and begin welcoming what would be millions of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

After the Christian Democrats fell out of power in 2021, Mr. Merz assumed leadership of the party and drove it to the right on migration and other issues. He was most comfortable campaigning on the economy, promising to peel back regulations and reduce taxes in a bid to reignite economic growth.

Mr. Merz is tall and sometimes stern, with a dry wit. Polls suggest that only about a third of the country believes he will make a good chancellor. Even some of his own voters said on Sunday that they are not enamored of him. But if he can quickly forge a government, he has a chance to step into a leadership vacuum in Europe as it struggles with the strains on its relationship with the United States under President Trump.

Trump and NATO were on the ballot.
When Vice President JD Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference last week chiding the European political establishment for excluding extreme parties, he jolted the once-sleepy election campaign awake. If Mr. Trump’s threats of a trade war and less military protection had already been worrying Germans, the speech and the president’s subsequent U-turn on Ukraine caused a near panic in Germany.

Among German voters, 65 percent are worried that Germany is helpless against President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, according to a poll released on Sunday afternoon.

On Sunday night in a post-election debate between leaders, Mr. Merz quickly brought up the threat that Germany and Europe face because of the new U.S. administration.

“It has become clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this government, is largely indifferent to the fate of Europe,” he said. “I am very curious to see how we approach the NATO summit at the end of June — whether we are still talking about NATO in its current state or whether we need to establish an independent European defense capability much more quickly.”

Musk did not seem to sway voters.
The hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, doubled its vote share from four years ago, largely by appealing to voters upset by immigration. In the former East Germany, it finished first, ahead of Mr. Merz’s party.

The AfD’s vote share appeared to fall short of its high-water mark of support in polls from a year ago, however. Many analysts had been expecting a stronger showing, after a sequence of events that elevated the party and its signature issue.

The AfD received public support from Mr. Vance and an endorsement by the billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk. It sought to make political gains out of a series of deadly attacks by migrants in recent months, including in the final days of the campaign.

But that boon never materialized. Reaction to the recent attacks and the support from Trump officials may have even mobilized a late burst of support to Die Linke, the party of Germany’s far left, which campaigned on a pro-immigration platform, some voters suggested in interviews on Sunday.

The surprise of the night
Two months ago Die Linke was dying. Sahra Wagenknecht, its most popular member, started a new party last year that was more friendly to Russia and tougher on migration. Many followed her, thinking that she was the future. Die Linke languished at 3 percent.

But Die Linke managed to turn things around in just months, thanks to a new pair of charismatic and social-media savvy leaders and the alienation that many young voters feel with mainstream parties. It surged to what appeared to be nearly 9 percent of the vote and more than 60 seats in Parliament.

Its campaign events started attracting so many young people that they became must-see affairs, as much dance party as political rally.

The party leaders became social media stars. Heidi Reichinnek, who is credited for much of the turnaround, told a crowd on Sunday night that they owed their success to the many volunteers who went from door to door talking to people about pocketbook issues. Ms. Reichinnek told supporters they “did everything right.”

Scholz is out, but his party marches on.
Despite polling predicting his third-place finish, Chancellor Olaf Scholz had insisted until the very end that he would somehow retain his job. He was wrong. His Social Democratic Party won a record-low 16 percent, coming in third place. Though Mr. Scholz will continue as a caretaker chancellor until Mr. Merz is sworn in, he is widely expected to step down from active politics.

His party will live on, though. It will very likely slip into the familiar role of junior partner in a government led by the conservatives. The so-called “grand coalition” supported Ms. Merkel through three of her four terms, and it could be Mr. Merz’s best shot for a stable government in a tumultuous time for Germany.