When Germany went to the polls on Feb. 23, the timing of the election was unusual. According to the electoral calendar, the election should have taken place in September. But the coalition government of outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz had broken apart over a variety of issues, most immediately a disagreement over how to finance future government spending. As a result, the vote was held a mere month after U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to the White House and just a week after Vice President JD Vance’s bombshell speech at the Munich Security Conference, which attacked some of the most fundamental foreign policy beliefs that Germans hold.
Despite the prominence of these and other foreign and defense policy developments these days, as well as the obvious challenges they pose to Germany, those issues didn’t played a particularly important role in the campaign, which focused primarily on migration and the economy. The election resulted in a win for Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, which—combined with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, or CSU—took 28.6 percent of the votes, followed by the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party with 20.8 percent. Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, or SPD, dropped substantially from its previous showing, winning only 16.4 percent. In total, five parties, including the far-left Die Linke party, made it over the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament.
Nevertheless, despite the relative disinterest in defense topics in the runup to the election, when Merz—now the likely next German chancellor—announced his three priorities for any potential coalition government the day after the election, Germany’s defense policy was first on his list. Since then, Trump ambushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in one of the most shocking Oval Office meetings in living memory; stopped U.S. arms deliveries to and intelligence-sharing with Ukraine; and demonstrated in various ways that Washington’s European allies, most of which rely extensively on U.S. security guarantees, are less than an afterthought for his administration.
