The February Surprise That Wasn’t Quite a Surprise
On February 23, 2025, German voters handed Friedrich Merz and his CDU/CSU alliance their strongest federal result in over a decade. The coalition captured approximately 28.6% of the vote, a genuine mandate by contemporary European standards. If you’ve been following German politics, you probably expected the center-right to perform well. What might have caught you off guard was how the entire architecture of German coalition-building shifted beneath everyone’s feet.
The real story wasn’t just that Merz won. It was who came second and what that meant for how Germany’s new government would actually govern. The AfD finished with roughly 20.8% of the vote, their strongest-ever federal result. That’s not just a political data point. That’s a structural constraint on every coalition negotiation that followed. When roughly one-fifth of your electorate has voted for a party that every other party refuses to work with, your coalition options narrow dramatically. The political economy of German governance had shifted.
Here’s where I want you to think like a budget analyst rather than a poll-watcher. A 28.6% result sounds solid in isolation, but in a fragmented parliament, it’s actually a thin margin. Merz needed partners immediately. The question wasn’t whether the CDU/CSU would lead the next government. The question was which coalition math would determine the agenda for the next four years.
The Greenless Coalition and What Money Really Reveals About Politics
By April 2025, Merz had secured a coalition agreement with the SPD, Germany’s center-left Social Democrats. Here’s what made this genuinely noteworthy: it was the first time since 2005 that Germany’s government formed without the Greens at the table. That’s two decades of political history that suddenly broke.
Why does this matter beyond the ceremonial handshakes? Follow the incentives. The SPD, having come in third, could have leveraged a three-way Ampel (traffic light) coalition with the Greens and CDU/CSU. That’s traditionally how German center-left and center-right power-sharing works. Instead, Merz negotiated a straightforward two-partner coalition. This tells you something crucial about what the SPD leadership actually wanted: they wanted to distance themselves from the Greens while maintaining government relevance. They wanted to look tough on certain issues. And Merz was willing to offer them ministerial positions and policy concessions to make that mathematics work.
The coalition agreement itself is where political economy becomes concrete. In March 2025, just weeks into Merz’s chancellorship, the new government announced a €500 billion infrastructure and defense investment fund. Think about what just happened here. Germany, the country famous for strict fiscal discipline and its constitutional debt brake limiting new borrowing to 0.35% of GDP, just authorized massive spending by essentially sidestepping that very brake through a special fund structure.
This wasn’t accidental. This was the coalition’s way of signaling that spending priorities had shifted. The money was nominally for infrastructure and defense, but the real message was about who benefits when government decides to open the fiscal spigots. Construction companies, defense contractors, and infrastructure developers suddenly had access to capital they hadn’t seen in years. The SPD got to say they fought for workers and modernization. The CDU/CSU got to say they prioritized security. Everyone’s political incentive aligned.
Migration, Approval Ratings, and the Limits of Coalition Power
Fast forward to late 2025. According to Politico Europe: German Government Tracker, CDU/CSU approval ratings hovered near 30% despite having just won an election. That’s not actually unusual in Germany’s political system, but it reveals something important about what happened in those first hundred days.
Migration policy dominated the domestic debate. Merz, who built his political identity on stricter immigration enforcement, made tough rhetoric on asylum a centerpiece of the coalition agreement. But here’s where incentives get complicated. The SPD needed to show they weren’t abandoning their party’s traditional concern for refugee rights and humanitarian issues. The coalition’s public statements often pulled in opposite directions. Merz would call for stronger border controls. SPD ministers would emphasize integration programs. Voters watching this performance understood that neither party fully controlled the agenda.
The approval rating stagnation reflects that tension. You can’t be everything to everyone, and by late 2025, the Merz coalition was trying. They promised security spending without raising obvious taxes. They promised migration control without dismantling the asylum system entirely. They promised infrastructure investment while managing fiscal concerns. The result was a government that looked competent but uninspiring to much of its base.
What Merz’s First Hundred Days Tell Us About Center-Right Europe
Now let’s step back and ask what Germany’s political realignment means for European center-right politics more broadly. For decades, the template for European center-right governance was relatively stable: Christian democratic parties like the CDU/CSU would occupy the center, drawing support from business, professional classes, and religious communities. They’d form coalitions with liberal or green partners, manage slow-burn fiscal conservatism, and generally maintain the post-1989 consensus.
Merz’s coalition breaks with that template. By going SPD-only, the CDU/CSU signaled that traditional coalition partners had become optional. By spending half a trillion euros through a fund mechanism, they showed that fiscal orthodoxy was negotiable when it served security and infrastructure priorities. By making migration the defining domestic debate, they moved the Overton window rightward on an issue that had previously been more contested.
This matters internationally because other European center-right parties are watching. France’s Republicans, Spain’s People’s Party, and even segments of Italy’s center-right are all asking whether the Merz model offers a template for recapturing political ground from the far-right without ceding policy control to the left. The answer seems to be: maybe, if you’re willing to spend money strategically, drop old coalition partners, and make certain cultural issues non-negotiable.
Check out the actual election results yourself if you want the full data. The Federal Returning Officer: 2025 German Election Results has all the precinct-level detail you could want. But the real story isn’t in the spreadsheets. It’s in the coalition agreement language. It’s in which journalists have access to which ministers. It’s in how often the SPD’s Vice Chancellor had to publicly clarify what the Chancellor just said.
What This Means for Democracy Watchers Right Now
Here’s what I find genuinely important about tracking Merz’s chancellorship: it’s not a story about whether center-right politics is good or bad. It’s a story about how political incentives reshape what’s possible. When parties calculate that working together is more valuable than maintaining coalition traditions, they reshape those traditions. When governments find mechanisms to spend money despite fiscal rules, they change what “fiscal discipline” actually means.
If you want to understand European politics in 2025 and beyond, don’t just watch what politicians say about migration or defense or infrastructure. Watch who gets the contracts. Watch which ministers attend which meetings. Watch when the coalition partners issue joint statements versus separate clarifications. That’s where the actual incentive structure reveals itself.
The Merz chancellorship is still young, and plenty can change in the next few years. But in those first hundred days, we saw a center-right party successfully navigate a fractured political landscape by making strategic choices about partnerships, spending, and which issues to prioritize. Whether that model holds, whether it spreads across Europe, whether it ultimately strengthens or weakens democratic institutions, those are the questions worth following closely. What’s your read on how sustainable this coalition actually is? I’d genuinely like to hear what you’re observing in your own local and regional politics about similar tensions.