The main​ outcome of the German federal election became clear shortly after the results were in: the Christian Democrats (CDU) would be slinking into power with the Social Democrats (SPD) in a grand coalition. Spurred on by the shocks of the Trump administration, and with opposition parties on the rise, the CDU and SPD seem determined to bypass or manipulate the constitutionally mandated debt brake that regulates the government’s ability to run deficits, whether on behalf of military spending or climate-related infrastructure or public investment more generally. There have been feints in this direction before, from Angela Merkel’s promise to raise defence spending to 2 per cent to Olaf Scholz’s over-touted Zeitenwende, all while the German export-driven wage suppression model remained otherwise intact. But Trump has provided the CDU with perfect cover to break with the creed of the schwarze Null. Whether the fiscal unleashing comes in the waning days of Scholz’s coalition or has to wait until Friedrich Merz is chancellor, the German establishment is no longer in a state of total complacency.

A small surprise last month was Die Linke’s performance. Despite polling at around 3 per cent just a month before the election – in the wake of internal controversies and the departure of its former leader Sahra Wagenknecht – the party ended up with 8.8 per cent of the vote. This could make it a force in future negotiations over spending, and its votes will be required for any changes to the German Basic Law, which requires a two-thirds majority. If Merz wants to run deficits to fund defence – and even if he can find a way to do so while keeping the debt brake intact – the SPD and Die Linke may still be in a position to extract concessions on social spending, although the CDU could just as easily use increased military spending as an excuse for belt-tightening elsewhere.

A kind of dual shadowing of the two former Volksparteien (‘people’s parties’) has come into sharper focus. The CDU and the SPD both face upstarts, in the form of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland and Die Linke, which – it is no longer inconceivable – could outpace their elders in a future election (and if not Die Linke, the Greens). The AfD, the second most popular party, with 20.8 per cent of the vote, has become the undisputed home of blue-collar workers and the economically destitute, while Die Linke, which swept the vote in Berlin, has some claim to being the party of progressive German youth.

A turning point in Die Linke’s fortunes came in late January, when Merz went back on his word and attempted to pass anti-migration legislation – Zustrombegrenzungsgesetz (‘Influx Limitation Act’) was the euphemistic compound – by relying on votes from the AfD. It was like watching a man touch an electric fence to test the voltage. The gambit may not have cost him much, but it galvanised previously scattered anti-fascist opposition. Die Linke’s co-Spitzenkandidat, 36-year-old Heidi Reichinnek, seized the moment. She upbraided Merz in the Bundestag for attempting a rerun of the 1930s. ‘You are a Christian Democratic party. A Christian Democratic Party,’ she repeated, as if Merz were not merely selling out the norms of postwar German politics but also Western civilisation itself. As opposition leader in the early 2000s, Merz was known for his intense rhetorical combat with the left-wing politician Oskar Lafontaine, and he seemed to relish the opportunity for similar battles against Reichinnek. It was, as Trump likes to say, good television in a country with precious little of it. ‘We are the firewall!’ Reichinnek thundered. ‘To the barricades!’

Die Linke ran a strong ground game during the election campaign, especially in Lichtenberg in Berlin, one of its strongholds, where Ines Schwerdtner, the former editor of Jacobin’s German edition, defeated the AfD’s Beatrix von Storch, the granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister. Hipsters and pensioners who had never before been contacted by canvassers found themselves opening the door to upbeat American-style get-out-the-vote campaigners. There were dollops of pragmatism as well. Die Linke’s campaign ads featured pensioners looking at the price of supermarket products in disgust, and it adjusted its language from ‘open borders’ to something closer to ‘don’t let them deport our friends.’

Whether Merz’s attempted collusion with the far right really represented an epochal shift in German politics is another question. Co-ordination with the far right has long been a staple of German politics. In the 1950s, Konrad Adenauer’s CDU – whose ranks included numerous former Nazis – rarely hesitated to rely on support from short-lived far-right parties, even if those parties never enjoyed anything close to the AfD’s share of the vote. The early CDU was so unredeemable in the eyes of the SPD leader Kurt Schumacher that he effectively barred any coalition with it during his lifetime. But the search for allies is an inevitable component of electoralism, especially in Germany with its system of mixed proportional representation. It may be off-limits for now, but it is unlikely that Merz will be able to resist working with a party which shares such a close resemblance to his own. The week of the election, the CDU performed one of its most convincing imitations of the AfD when it submitted a ‘Kleine Anfrage’, a ‘small’ questionnaire, to the German government, in which it demanded answers to 551 questions about the funding and politicisation of state-funded NGOs. The Berlin branch of the AfD was so impressed that it in turn copied the CDU’s wording for its own Anfrage.

J.D. Vance and Elon Musk’s overtures to the AfD enraged German free-speech wardens, but the only effects seem to have been to reduce the attractiveness of Tesla cars and to embolden AfDers. By throwing the German political establishment into a tailspin, the Trump administration has had the salutary effect of making calls for autonomy from Washington no longer the exclusive domain of the far right and far left, but a position increasingly appealing to broad swathes of the political centre, which can finally dispense with pieties about travelling down ‘the long road west’.

The members of the fractious Ampel (‘traffic light’) coalition – the SPD, the Greens and the Free Democratic Party – were all big losers in the election. The SPD dropped to 16 per cent of the vote, a 138-year low. Tainted by its leader Robert Habeck’s determination to co-operate with Merz’s next government, the Greens – until recently the vanguard party of what Nancy Fraser calls ‘progressive neoliberalism’ – were punished severely, and reduced to such embarrassing moves as having the hawkish foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, implore voters not to vote for Die Linke. But the most satisfying political self-detonation was that of Christian Lindner’s FDP, the party of slick entrepreneurs trapped in the amber of mid-century Ordoliberalism. Lindner, an amateur racing-car driver, came up with an elaborate plan titled ‘D-Day’ (discovered by Die Zeit’s Robert Pausch) to sink the despised coalition on his own terms, but ended up being beaten to the punch by Scholz, who ejected him before he could act.

A vexing problem for Die Linke was solved by Wagenknecht’s departure in 2023. She has since formed a new party, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, which, if not entirely driven by her persona, depends on her name and her media savvy. BSW claims to have an explicitly working-class agenda, from tighter migration restrictions and anti-woke measures to a fuzzy plan for peace in Ukraine and a call to end weapons shipments to Israel. More accurately, the party addresses the concerns of the petite bourgeoisie. When I met Wagenknecht in her office last year, she told me she was as surprised as anyone that she – a former member of the ruling Communist Party in East Germany who once had a poster of Walter Ulbricht on her wall – now saw one of her main tasks as protecting German industry from the shocks of American capitalism. At its peak BSW climbed above 8 per cent in the polls, but on election day fell just short of the 5 per cent threshold required to enter the Bundestag. That’s not a poor result for an organisation only a year old – and certainly better than the AfD when it started – but a number of factors have hobbled Wagenknecht’s rise. The BSW restricted membership out of fears of a lunatic fringe capturing the limelight, which meant holding back even those who wanted to work on the campaign. It won an impressive 6.1 per cent of votes in the European elections last June. But entering the government in Thuringia and Brandenburg three months later dampened its outsider appeal and, perhaps most important, Washington’s volte-face on Ukraine did away with Wagenknecht’s novelty. In the days leading up to the election, the BSW’s calls for its supporters to like its Facebook posts didn’t inspire confidence.

This is hardly the first time we’ve seen the German political establishment pining to remain under Washington’s blanket. In the 1960s, the Kennedy administration contributed to the downfall of Adenauer after he resisted onerous demands to offset Germany’s balance of payments deficit. Like Germany’s leaders today, his successor, Ludwig Erhard, rushed to reassure Washington of Bonn’s readiness to make economic concessions in order to keep the US security guarantee intact. Though almost no German politician is willing to say it out loud, one senses a degree of relief that an end to the Ukraine war (which could mean the return of Ukrainian refugees and, in the long run, renewed access to cheap Russian gas) can at last be discussed, and Germany no longer needs to keep on pretending it can be won.

If there is one thing that unites the German centre and Die Linke at present, it is the necessity of European autonomy from the US. This may cause Die Linke to reconsider its longstanding opposition to armaments, and the centre to recognise Nato for the protection racket it has always been, however much it has benefited Atlanticist elites. ‘Our absolute priority,’ Merz announced, ‘will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the US.’ But the trap was set long ago. Unless Germany and France accelerate a kind of European Tank and Fighter Jet Community, higher domestic defence spending will still mean an even larger portion of taxpayer money flowing to US defence contractors. Will the transatlantic ruling class get the profit-sharing sorted out? Can the ‘Common European Home’ be scavenged from the rubbish heap? It seems doubtful. At the very least, those who wish to avoid more trips to the Canossa of the Oval Office ought instead to pay their respects at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises.