Voting for Germany’s federal election started on Sunday, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz competing with opposition leader Friedrich Merz, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck of the Greens, and far-right AfD co-leader Alice Weidel. Around 60 million voters are eligible, and polling stations opened at 8 a.m. local time, closing at 6 p.m. Vote-counting will start once the voting ends, and exit polls will be published.
The election was announced early following Chancellor Scholz’s three-party coalition breakdown in November. The Bundestag dissolution is only the fourth time since the World War that this has occurred. The outcome of the election is predicted to be soon after voters cast their ballots, and with a final official tally by Monday morning.
Germany’s voting system is unlikely to yield a single party majority, hence the frequent formation of coalition governments.Based on polls, no party will win the majority in this election either. Friedrich Merz’s conservative group, made up of the CDU and CSU, has been forecasted by analysts to form an alliance with the third-placed SPD, forming a “grand coalition.”
Merz, if he replaces Scholz, is likely to provide a “strong voice” for Germany in Europe, especially in the wake of the upset in US-Europe relations after President Trump’s overtures to Russian President Putin over the Ukraine conflict. At the same time, during an AfD rally in Berlin, a 49-year-old engineer was cheering party leader Alice Weidel as a “tough woman,” saying that she had forced other parties to adopt the AfD’s programs as their own, adding, “So she is doing something right.”
