Death Of The Status Quo: The Share Of Votes For German Establishment Parties Was The Lowest On Record

We previously discussed the highlights from Sunday’s German election, but perhaps the most important big picture story was the continued decline in support for mainstream parties, something that’s occurred across many parts of the globe in recent years, especially in Europe. 

As DB’s Jim Reid writes, in yesterday’s election the combined share of the “establishment” CDU/CSU and SPD parties was only 45.0%, the lowest on record. And as his Chart of the Day below shows, this share has been progressively declining since the peak of 91.2% in 1976. Even though the CDU/CSU were the largest party yesterday, their vote share (28.6%) was the second lowest ever behind the 24.1% in 2021. The SPD (16.4%) took their lowest share since 1887.

The far-right (AfD 20.8%) and far-left (Die Linke 8.8% and BSW 4.9%) achieved 34.5% of the vote. While this polarization is not as extreme as in France where support for the far right, far left and centrists seems to be broadly equal at the moment, there has been a discernible shift away from the centre. 

This is also similar to the UK, where the combined vote for Labour and the Conservatives was the lowest in over a century at the election last summer.

Why? The main reason is ever lower economic growth, which along with wider inequality means that an increasing share of the electorate must be, by definition, exposed to negative growth in their world. And in turn, that’s interacting with other issues like globalization and immigration where critics have argued the mainstream parties aren’t listening to voter concerns. If economic growth was as high as it had been a few decades back, concerns over these two hot topics would likely be a lot lower though.

And then there is forced immigration, a topic which even progressives on the left admit has been a disastrous push in recent years.

Immigration is now roiling politics in the U.S., Canada, Australia, South Africa and Europe. The left’s recent strategy — lecturing working-class voters and ignoring the burdens on their communities — hasn’t worked. Denmark points to an alternative. https://t.co/wsGeOyhueh

— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) February 24, 2025

In any case, without decent economic growth (which in modern economic parlance really means “debt”), and with continued forced immigration, pardon “diversity”, it’s likely that the center will continue to struggle versus past glories in elections. So it must be in the center’s interest to do everything they can to help improve it for their own preservation.

Translation: with all due respect to DOGE, much more debt is coming not only in the US but across the world.