Germans voted for a change of leadership on Sunday, handing the most votes in a parliamentary election to centrist conservatives, with the far right in second, and rebuking the nation’s left-leaning government for its handling of the economy and immigration.
Early returns and exit polls almost certainly mean the country’s next chancellor will be Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democrats. But he will need at least one or — in a possibility that Germans were hoping to avoid — two coalition partners to govern.
“We have won it,” Mr. Merz told supporters in Berlin on Sunday evening, promising to swiftly form a parliamentary majority to govern the country and restore strong German leadership in Europe.
The election, which was held seven months ahead of schedule after the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unpopular and long-troubled three-party coalition, will now become an essential part of the European response to President Trump’s new world order. It drew what appeared to be the highest voter turnout in decades.
Mr. Merz, 69, has promised to crack down on migrants and slash taxes and business regulations in a bid to kick-start economic growth. He also vowed to bring a more assertive foreign policy to help Ukraine and stronger leadership in Europe at a moment when the new Trump administration has sowed anxiety by scrambling traditional alliances and embracing Russia.
Mr. Merz, a businessman, was once seen as a potentially better partner for Mr. Trump, but in the campaign’s final days he mused about whether the United States would remain a democracy under Mr. Trump. He strongly condemned what Germans saw as meddling by Trump administration officials on behalf of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
“My top priority, for me, will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we can gradually achieve real independence from the U.S.A.,” Mr. Merz said in a televised round-table after polls closed. “I would never have thought I’d be saying something like this on TV, but after last week’s comments from Donald Trump, it’s clear that this administration is largely indifferent to Europe’s fate, or at least to this part of it.”
The first wave of returns and exit polls suggested that his Christian Democrats and their sister party, the Christian Social Union, would win a combined 29 percent of the vote. It was a low share historically for the top party in a German election, and the second-lowest showing ever for Mr. Merz’s party in a chancellor election.
Both are signs of the multiplying fissures in the nation’s politics and the weaknesses of the centrist mainstream parties that have governed Germany for decades.
There was great suspense on Sunday evening about the coalition Mr. Merz would be able to assemble, but he was clearly hoping for a rerun of the centrist governments that ran Germany for much of former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 16-year tenure: the Christian Democrats in the lead, with the Social Democrats as a lone junior partner.
It was unclear if that would be possible. Two parties were hovering around the 5 percent of support needed to get into Parliament: the pro-business Free Democrats and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which is a pro-Russia splinter from the old German left. If both cleared the 5 percent threshold, Mr. Merz could be forced into a more difficult three-party coalition, unable to form a majority with just one partner.
That could mean the repeat of a potentially unwieldy and unstable government for Germany, reconfigured but with some of the same vulnerabilities as the one that recently collapsed.
The complication comes because Mr. Merz has promised never to join with the second-place finisher, the AfD, which routinely flirts with Nazi slogans and whose members have diminished the Holocaust and have been linked to plots to overthrow the government. But the returns showed that the AfD is a growing force in German politics, even if it fell short of its ambitions in this election.
The AfD nearly doubled its vote share from four years ago, largely by appealing to voters upset by the millions of refugees who entered the country over the last decade from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere.
Its vote share appeared to fall short of its support in the 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 of migration.
The AfD received public support from Vice President JD Vance and the billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk. It sought to make political gains out of a series of deadly attacks committed by migrants in recent months, including in the final days of the campaign.
But that boon never materialized for the AfD or for Mr. Merz, who drove his party to the right on migration in a bid to cut off a flow of voters to the AfD. 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.
For all of that movement, the most likely coalition partner for Mr. Merz appears to be the one analysts have predicted for months: Mr. Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats, even though they experienced a steep drop in support from four years ago.
Other possible partners include the Greens, who appeared to be poised for fourth place in the voting. Negotiations with possible partners began soon after polls closed on Sunday.
Interviews and early returns suggested voters were angry at Mr. Scholz’s government over high grocery prices and inadequate wage growth.
Many voters, even those who backed the Christian Democrats, said they were not enthusiastic about Mr. Merz personally. But they hoped that he could forge a strong government to solve problems at home and abroad and keep Germany’s far right at bay.
“The biggest risk for Germany at the moment is that we will have an unstable majority,” said Felix Saalfeld, a 32-year-old doctor in the eastern city of Dresden, who voted for Mr. Merz’s Christian Democrats. “That’s why it’s best if the CDU/CSU gets a lot of votes and we can somehow form a coalition with as few people as possible, even if it’s not my party.”
Mr. Merz will likely face a daunting task in attempting to reinvigorate a slumping economy that has not grown, in real terms, for half a decade. He also will seek to lead Europe in trade and security conflicts with Mr. Trump and an American administration that has rapidly been reshuffling its global alliances. Voters said they would look to the next government to cushion the pain of post-pandemic inflation.
“Everything is getting more expensive, and at the same time, wages are not rising,” said Rojin Yilmaz, 20, a trainee at Allianz in Aschaffenburg, a city where an immigrant with mental illness killed a toddler and an adult in January. Mr. Yilmaz voted for Die Linke.
In interviews in Dresden, a bastion of support for the AfD, some voters said they had lost faith in other parties to address immigration and other issues.
“I voted for the AfD,” said Andreas Mühlbach, 70. “It is the only alternative that is able to change things here.”
With support for the AfD on the rise, Martin Milner, 59, an educator and musician in Potsdam who split his ticket between the Greens and Die Linke, said he hopes German’s defensive democracy holds fast against the right-wing threat.
“I’m hoping that this system will show itself to be resilient enough,” Mr. Milner said, “that it can manage the problems we have without drifting to one extreme or the other.”
Reporting was contributed by Christopher F. Schuetze, Melissa Eddy and Tatiana Firsova from Berlin; Sam Gurwitt from Aschaffenburg; Adam Sella from Potsdam; and Catherine Odom from Dresden.
