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Friedrich Merz and his party won, Elon Musk didn’t seem to move voters, and more lessons from an early German vote with big implications for Europe.
Voting on Sunday at a polling station in Berlin. Turnout for the parliamentary election was the highest in years. Credit… Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times Feb. 24, 2025
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.
By early Monday morning, the results seemed clear enough to indicate that the center-right Christian Democrats would be able to lead Germany with only one coalition partner, returning the country to the more durable two-party form of government that has led it 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 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.
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Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union at party headquarters in Berlin on Sunday. Credit… Angelika Warmuth/Reuters Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
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