Berlin7:44 p.m. Feb. 23
Live Updates: Merz Appears Poised to Be Next Chancellor
Early exit polls suggest that Friedrich Merz, the candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats who has vowed to bring stronger leadership in Europe, will be Germany’s next leader. The hard-right AfD party was in second place.
The conservative Christian Democrats appear poised to win Germany’s parliamentary elections on Sunday, with the hard-right Alternative for Germany in second place.
The first wave of exit polls, which are historically highly accurate predictors of Germany’s final vote, showed German voters delivering a rebuke to the nation’s left-leaning government over its handling of the economy and immigration.
The Christian Democrats and their sister party, the Christian Social Union, were leading with a combined 29 percent of the vote. The AfD had 19.5 percent, lower than what was predicted, while the governing Social Democrats had 16 percent, the early exit polls indicated.
That almost certainly means the country’s next chancellor will be Friedrich Merz, a businessman who has promised to crack down on migrants and slash taxes and business regulations in a bid to kick-start economic growth.
“We have won it,” Mr. Merz told supporters in Berlin after the exit polls were released.
But if those exit polls are correct, Mr. Merz will likely not have the option of forming a simple coalition with the second-place finisher. Like other German party leaders he has promised never to partner with the AfD, parts of which are classified as extremist by German intelligence.
The snap election was held earlier than expected, after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling coalition splintered last fall. The relatively brief campaign was dominated by two issues: the economy and immigration.
Mr. Scholz conceded defeat shortly after the exit polls were released on Sunday.
“It is bitter,” he told a crowd of hundreds gathered at his party’s headquarters, congratulating Mr. Merz as he vowed that his party would stick together in the days ahead.
The Trump administration became a late-arriving issue in the campaign, with candidates warning that the United States is no longer a reliable ally. How Germans voted will now be a critical component of Europe’s response to President Trump’s new world order, and resonate far beyond their borders.
On Sunday, Mr. Merz promised swift talks to form a coalition and restore strong German leadership in Europe. “The outside world is not waiting for us,” he told supporters. “And it is also not waiting for lengthy coalition talks and negotiations.”
Here’s what we are following:
Immigration policy: A series of deadly attacks over the past year committed by immigrants, including asylum seekers from the Middle East and Afghanistan, have rattled Germans. The AfD has gained support by promising to deport some immigrants and seal borders, which won the endorsement of Trump adviser Elon Musk and a form of encouragement from Vice President JD Vance. The U.S. meddling in the campaign put off some left-leaning voters on Sunday but was welcomed by others supporting the AfD, according to interviews at polling stations.
Economic crisis: Germany’s economy has not grown in five years and is suffering from an industrial competitiveness crisis. Forecasts show an economy rapidly sliding backward, stunning declines that have emerged as one of the biggest issues in the parliamentary election.
Elevating the AfD: The AfD, with its anti-immigrant and nationalist platform, has long been a pariah of German politics. A new band of influencers unafraid of confrontation had helped push the Alternative for Germany party to second place in pre-election polls.
Voters from across Germany’s political spectrum in Aschaffenburg seemed to agree about one thing on Sunday, saying they were unhappy with how their quaint city featured in election debates.
A series of seemingly unrelated high-profile killings carried out last year by immigrants has changed the debate in the snap parliamentary election, refocusing what had been an economy-themed campaign toward the contentious issue of migration. One of those attacks took place in Aschaffenburg.
On January 22, a mentally-ill former asylum seeker from Afghanistan killed two people in a park in the city, including a 2-year-old. A week later, opposition leader and Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, the favorite to become the next chancellor, cited the killings when he broke a longstanding taboo to vote with the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in favor of tightening immigration controls.
That decision drew protests from liberal Germans — including by voters in Aschaffenburg on Sunday.
“It was instantly exploited and twisted, and in a way that is against my personal opinion about immigration,” said Vera Henzel, 32, who voted for the Green Party on Sunday. “The parties, and politicians, essentially used the crime for their own purposes.”
Voters from more conservative parties also said they were unhappy with how their town has been used in political discourse — but for different reasons.
Mario Saubert, a 44-year-old machine operator, lamented how people used the attack to repeat “the usual” warnings about the rise of the far right in Germany.
“You don’t want to imagine it, I mean, a small child was killed. People were horrified,” Mr. Saubert said after voting for the Bavarian Christian Social Union, which works together with Merz’s Christian Democrats. “But at the same time, it became all about ‘don’t exploit, we have to stop the shift to the right,’ which was totally inappropriate in the moment, I think.”
Latest exit poll projections
| Party | Political alignment | Pct. | 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|
| CDU/CSU | Center right | 28.9 | 24.1 |
| AfD | Far right | 19.9 | 10.3 |
| SPD | Center left | 16.2 | 25.7 |
| Greens | Center left | 13.0 | 14.8 |
| Die Linke | Far left | 8.5 | 4.9 |
| FDP | Liberal | 4.9 | 11.5 |
Source: Infratest dimap/ARD
Last updated at 1 p.m. E.T.
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“It’s best if the CDU/CSU gets a lot of votes and we can somehow form a coalition with as few people as possible, even if it’s not my party.”
Felix Saalfeld, 32, referring to the Christian Democrats and their sister party, the Christian Social Union.
Friedrich Merz, the man favored by early exit polls to be Germany’s next chancellor after elections on Sunday, is a conservative businessman who has never been a minister and was forced out of government years ago in a power struggle with Angela Merkel.
The leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, Mr. Merz earned his fortune working in the private sector before returning to politics at 63.
That business background appealed to many Germans amid the political turbulence caused in part by stagnation in one of Europe’s largest economies.
Mr. Merz, now 69, was born and still lives in the Sauerland, a district of western Germany known for hills, heavy food and picturesque nature. It was from there that he was first elected into the European Parliament in 1989 and then the German Parliament in 1994.
While he comes from the same party as Ms. Merkel, the former chancellor, Mr. Merz — a pugnacious old-school politician — is in many ways her opposite.
He rose through the ranks to lead the Christian Democrats’ parliamentary group, but was ousted by a rising star in the party — Ms. Merkel. It was then that Mr. Merz pivoted from politics and started a lucrative law career.
He got rich working as a lawyer and a lobbyist. When Ms. Merkel was getting ready to retire, Mr. Merz got back into politics. In 2018, when he returned to the political stage, Mr. Merz promised he could stem the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, by moving his party further right on key issues like migration and crime.
Mr. Merz re-entered Parliament in 2021 and — after two failed attempts — won the party leadership in 2022.
As party leader, however, he made a number of gaffes — like claiming in September 2023 that refugees were having their teeth redone at taxpayers’ expense while regular German patients were unable to get appointments. (The head of the German Dental Association denied this.) And his insistence that he is just a regular member of the middle class — despite significant personal means — has been mocked by some Germans who see him as being divorced from the economic reality many members of the middle class face.
Still, Mr. Merz managed to coalesce his party around him and shift it to a more traditional conservative posture after Ms. Merkel’s long tenure took the party further to the left. His business experience is considered a strength, as he promises to restore growth to the German economy.
As chancellor, as a conservative and committed trans-Atlanticist, Mr. Merz would be considered a better match for President Trump than the current Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz. Mr. Merz is also expected to lead a foreign policy more aligned with Mr. Trump’s ideas about Europe’s taking responsibility for its own defense.
Still, Mr. Merz — who is known to be assertive and direct, if a bit awkward — pushed back strongly against Mr. Trump’s latest comments siding with Russia about Ukraine, as well as what was seen as interference in Germany’s election by Vice President JD Vance when he criticized Europe for sidelining far-right voters and their parties.
Boldness is characteristic of Mr. Merz, analysts say, and reflects a conviction that Germany must be more forcefully engaged in European and global affairs. Mr. Scholz has often been criticized for his tentativeness and caution, even from within his own coalition.
Just last month, Mr. Merz showed his willingness to act brashly when he presented a migration measure and then a bill in Parliament that he knew he could pass only with the hard-right AfD, despite earlier promises never to work with them. The political maneuver did not go well: It prompted hundreds of thousands of Germans to take to the streets in protest, dissent within his party and a rare public rebuke from Ms. Merkel.
Mr. Merz has vowed to carve out a more prominent German role inside the European Union and NATO, to pursue better relations with France and Poland, and to take a tougher stance against China, which he has described as a full member of the “axis of autocracies.”
He has also promised more forthright support for Ukraine’s battle against Russia — saying, for instance, that he would provide Ukraine with Germany’s long-range cruise missile, the Taurus. And Mr. Merz has pledged that Germany will meet and surpass the current NATO target of 2 percent of gross domestic product being spent on the military for the long term.
In a recent foreign-policy speech at the Körber Foundation, Mr. Merz, a former member of the European Parliament, promised to provide German leadership in Europe, which has not been a priority for Mr. Scholz, and to establish a national security council in the chancellery.
Merz would likely face a difficult road if tasked with forging a governing coalition. But he promised swift talks to restore strong German leadership in Europe. “The outside world is not waiting for us,” he told supporters. “And it is also not waiting for lengthy coalition talks and negotiations. We must now be able to act quickly again so that we can do the right thing.”
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Chancellor Olaf Scholz told a watch party that his party, the Social Democrats, had suffered a loss. “It is bitter,” he told a crowd of hundreds gathered at his party’s headquarters after the early exit polls came out.
Friedrich Merz of the conservative Christian Democrats, who the early exit polls predict will be the next chancellor, has thanked his supporters in Berlin. “We have won it,” he said.
Sighs and groans were audible at the Social Democrats’ watch party when Merz appeared on TV to proclaim victory. The results are not yet final, and the Social Democrats could still make it into government as a junior partner.
Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor, has thanked her supporters at an election watch event. “I must say one thing: our hand will always be extended for participation in a government” she said. Germany’s other parties have vowed never to partner with the AfD.
In order for a party to make it into the German parliament, it must receive 5 percent of the national vote. Right now, two parties are hovering right around that line in the exit polls: the pro-business Free Democrats and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, a new party rooted in the extreme left.
Early exit polls are pointing to the highest voter turnout in decades, with Germans responding to the sense of urgency that surrounded the elections at a time when democracy is under pressure.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIf exit polls are correct, the results could be a disappointment for the hard-right AfD, which was endorsed by Elon Musk, President Trump’s key advisor. Recent pre-election polls had suggested that they would win more than 20 percent.
The mood at the Social Democrats’ election watch party is subdued, as early exit polls suggest that Olaf Scholz would likely be ousted, after having served only three years as chancellor.
According to the early exit polls, the Christian Democrats are leading with 29 percent of the vote. The Social Democrats have 16 percent and the AfD 19.5 percent, lower than what was predicted, the exit polls show.
Polls have closed in Germany.
We already have early exit polls, which are historically quite accurate in Germany. They suggest that Friedrich Merz, the candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats, is in line to be Germany’s next chancellor.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Aschaffenburg, Germany
“For me it was also very important that the Greens took a clear stance on Ukraine, which many of the smaller parties have not done.”
Andreas Sickenberger, 64, a retiree who voted for the Greens.
At an election watch party for the AfD, guests were welcomed with champagne and a buffet of sandwiches, grilled meat, potato salad and beer. The AfD has been in second place in pre-election polls, but no other German party will invite it into government.
Reporting from Dresden, Germany
“He’s like the AfD 10 years ago, just saying a lot of populism.”
Niklas Adams, right, said of Friedrich Merz from the conservative Christian Democrats, who is expected to be Germany’s next chancellor.
Catherine Odom and Sam Gurwitt
Catherine Odom reported from Dresden, Germany, and Sam Guritt from Aschaffenburg, Germany.
Interference by Trump administration officials in the German campaign put off some left-leaning voters but was welcomed by others supporting the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, according to a smattering of interviews at polling stations.
Several voters in the eastern city of Dresden took note of a speech by Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference this month, when he told European leaders to stop shunning parties deemed “extreme.”
Chris Buschmann, who said he is left-leaning but declined to say how he voted, said hearing Mr. Vance made him “anxious.” Mr. Buschmann, 27, said he is worried about the rise of right-wing populism both in Germany and around the world. He worries, he said, about “history repeating itself,” referring to Germany’s Nazi past.
Tim Adams, an engineer who split his ticket between the Green Party and Die Linke, the German left party, criticized attempts by the billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk to influence the German election. Mr. Musk has endorsed the AfD and praised the party’s co-chair, Alice Weidel. Last month, he spoke at an AfD rally, telling the audience that Germany has “too much of a focus on past guilt.”
Those interventions have been “very bad for our politics,” Mr. Adams said.
Others voiced support for President Trump and his administration. Andreas Mühlbach and Anja Zeumer, both of whom voted for the AfD, said they welcomed the new American president.
In Aschaffenburg, Peter Kraus, a retired painter, said he voted for the AfD “with great joy” — and on the recommendation of Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk.
“When the American vice president says it, and Elon Musk, yeah, they have exactly my opinion,” Mr. Kraus said. “And I’m not as well-educated as those two.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT“They have the best election program and have the best perspective for the future. For a young person this is the best vote. ”
Sarah Henser, 24, a student, after voting for the Greens party.
Reporting from Dresden, Germany
“I voted for the AfD. It is the only alternative that is able to change things here.”
Andreas Mühlbach, 70, referring to the far-right Alternative for Germany.
Good afternoon from Berlin, where we have just an hour to go before polls close in what has been a contentious German election. I’m the bureau chief here, and we have a wunderbar team of reporters fanned out across the country to bring you the story of the election from voters, political leaders and, of course, official returns.
Have you ever seen a clown vote?
Sunday’s snap election is unusual for several reasons, but the one Germans talk about the most is its timing.
Because Chancellor Olaf Scholz was forced to call it seven months early, the vote is not taking place in the late summer, or early fall, as in previous federal elections.
That means campaigners, politicians, and volunteers have been facing the dark and cold European winter. On the upside, it also means that voting falls during the annual carnival season — when many Germans, especially in the Western part of the country, dress up, imbibe and revel.
Faced with the question of how to vote when one wants to be partying, the typically fun-resistant Federal Returning Officer, who is in charge of running free elections in Germany, released guidelines around voting in costume and other voting-day festivities.
The rules state that people can wear costumes to cast their ballots, but cannot bother other voters and must be recognizable. Poll workers, too, can dress up, as long as they do not wear costumes that advertise or discourage voting for any party.
Local election workers are allowed to decorate voting locations but cannot play music, the guidelines say, since that could bother the voters and impede the job of the poll workers.
Perhaps surprisingly, there are no rules against showing up inebriated. But “heavily intoxicated and/or rowdy voters who disrupt order in the polling station may be expelled from the polling station,” the guidelines say — adding that unruly voters can be allowed back into the polling station to cast their ballots once they’ve calmed down.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTGermans are voting on Sunday in a rare snap election that has taken on outsize importance as the new Trump administration threatens European countries with tariffs, cuts them out of negotiations over Ukraine and embraces an authoritarian Russia.
The election for Parliament was called after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unpopular and long-troubled three-party government collapsed in November. Seven months earlier than scheduled, the voting now falls in the midst of Europe’s struggle for strong leadership and as it recalibrates its relationship with the United States.
Despite the effort by politicians and countless volunteers to bring excitement to the race during the short, dark winter campaign, polls never much shifted. Friedrich Merz and his conservative Christian Democratic Union have a comfortable lead.
The hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is expected to place second, riding on voter dissatisfaction with mainstream parties and fears of migration. Polls show it is likely to have its best showing ever.
Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats, which eked out a victory in 2021, are expected to come in third, just ahead of the Greens. The Social Democratic party, the oldest party in Germany, may be poised for its worst showing since it was banned by the Nazis.
But uncertainties abound. Here are some things to watch for:
Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd
No party is expected to get enough votes to govern alone and outright. The most important question will then be how many parties are needed to form a government.
Together, Mr. Merz’s center-right Christian Democrats and the far-right AfD are likely to have the broadest majority. But because the AfD is tainted by neo-Nazi associations, Mr. Merz and all mainstream party leaders say they will not form a government with it. Instead they will join together in what’s called the “firewall,” aimed at keeping extremists out of power.
That leaves the Social Democrats, though they are on the center-left, as Mr. Merz’s most likely partner. If the two of them don’t have enough support to form a majority, a third party will be needed.
The experience of the incumbent government showed just how difficult and unstable a three-party group can be. It’s an outcome that many analyst say would leave Germany almost back to when the last three-party government collapsed.
Little Kingmakers
It will be critically important, then, how well smaller parties will do and whether they get at least the 5 percent support needed to enter Parliament.
If polling is correct, the tiny Die Linke party, on the far left, seems likely to make it. Polls show it poised for a turnaround from last year when it appeared to be on its way to extinction after one of its most popular members, Sahra Wagenknecht, broke from it to form her own party.
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, as the new party is called, is running for the first time at a national level. Its prospects are uncertain.
Another party hovering near the threshold is the pro-business Free Democratic Party. Its leader, Christian Lindner, is the man who goaded Chancellor Scholz into kicking him out of the government, precipitating Sunday’s election. For him, the vote will be a test of whether that gambit to save his party pays off.
For all these parties, clearing the barrier to entering Parliament is an existential question; without seats in Parliament, they are much less visible and have access to much less funding.
But if they all make it into the Parliament, that is likely to complicate life for the bigger parties, reducing their number of seats and denying them the chance for a two-party coalition.
Will the ‘Firewall’ Hold?
If the AfD has an even stronger than expected showing — somewhere above 20 percent — and provokes an unwieldy effort to work around it, questions of how long the “firewall” by the mainstream can hold are likely to intensify.
Even among nationalist, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, the AfD is considered one of the more extreme. Parts of the AfD are closely monitored by German domestic intelligence agencies, which have labeled them extremist and potential threats to the Constitution. Party members have toyed with reviving Nazi slogans, downplayed the horror wrought by the Holocaust and have been linked to plots to overthrow the government.
Yet the party has been embraced by Trump administration officials. During the Munich Security Conference this month, Vice President JD Vance called on Germans to stop marginalizing far-right parties, saying, “there is no room for firewalls,” and he met with Alice Weidel, the AfD candidate for chancellor.
Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump adviser, interviewed Ms. Weidel on his social media platform X and endorsed her by video link before AfD supporters assembled at a rally, telling them that Germans had “too much of a focus on past guilt.”
The strength of the AfD’s showing, then, could prove a bellwether not only for German politics but also for political trends across Europe since Mr. Trump’s election to a second term.
And it may be judged as a gauge of whether those endorsements from Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk helped legitimize the party and gave it broader appeal, or potentially backfired, given the Trump administration’s newly antagonistic relationship with Germany and Europe.
When Will We Know?
First projections will come in once the polls close at 6 p.m. Sunday in Germany (noon E.S.T. in the United States). Because they are based on extensive exit polling, those numbers tend to be very accurate. During the last election, the exit polls were within 1 percent of the final vote that was posted hours later, once all ballots were counted.
But this year, exit polling could be less predictive. An unusual number of voters have told pollsters they had not yet made up their minds and an increasing number of voters use mail-in ballots and so they do not figure in exit polls.
Most Germans will be glued to their televisions at the close of polling. Expect pictures from various party headquarters, with everyone huddled around lead candidates — champagne flutes or beer steins in hand, depending on the party — waiting for those first results.
Reporting from Dortmund, Germany
A month ago, no one would have ever mistaken Germany’s often taciturn chancellor for an aggressive political campaigner. But prowling the stage in a dark suit and open shirt with a microphone in hand, Olaf Scholz certainly looked like one on Friday night.
At a nearly euphoric rally for someone trailing in the polls, Mr. Scholz spoke for 50 minutes before supporters in Dortmund, one of only two German cities where his center-left Social Democrats are projected to win the majority.
He trumpeted his government’s achievements, like raising the minimum wage and bridging the loss of Russian gas after the invasion in Ukraine. He told the crowd he could still win. And he took a swipe at President Trump.
“If you translate what ‘transactional’ means specifically,” Mr. Scholz said, alighting on a word often used to describe the American president’s approach to politics, “it means I only think of myself and I only do what benefits me.”
Nearly 2,000 Social Democrats jumped to their feet and cheered. “I thought he was in good fighting form,” said Elisabeth Schnieder, 69, who joined Mr. Scholz Social Democrats, or S.P.D., after she retired from her job as a senior care aide.
“I just wish he had shown that side earlier.”
The Friday rally was Mr. Scholz’s last of the campaign ahead of Sunday’s vote. It was also possibly the last of his career.
Mr. Scholz, 66, has been relentlessly optimistic (some might call it unrealistic) in a race that would have seemed hopeless to anyone else. That is because he was the only one who believed he could win in 2021, when his party was stuck at 14 percent before catching up in a few short months to win. That success seems to have inured him against the realities of the polls.
At the same time, Mr. Scholz has clearly relaxed in the final weeks of the campaign. Instead of standing rigidly behind his lecterns at recent televised debates, he leaned against them from the side, in a pose more befitting a 1950s-era Hollywood Cowboy movie than German politics.
It does not seem to have done the job. According to opinion polls, Mr. Scholz’s party is expected to come in with half the support of the conservative Christian Democrats of Friedrich Merz, and also behind the far-right Alternative for Germany.
Sunday’s election was scheduled seven months early because the government Mr. Scholz led collapsed in November. His tenure will likely be cut short by a sluggish economy, a shrinking export market and inane political infighting between the three parties that made up Mr. Scholz’s “future coalition.”
Even some of Mr. Scholz’s biggest supporters were not acting this week like he had a chance to win. The Social Democrats are Germany’s oldest party and have long partnered with organized labor. But this week, one of Germany’s biggest unions called a two-day nationwide public transit strike, ending just over a day before polls open.
Behind all of his bluster, Mr. Scholz and the people around him know that he has in all likelihood lost the chancellorship. His party’s best — and most likely — scenario is a grand coalition, in which the Social Democrats would play a junior partner to the conservative Christian Democrats.
It may spell the end of Mr. Scholz’s political career, but it would put the party in the familiar role of ensuring Germany’s generous social benefits stay intact, even under a conservative-led government.
“It’s the only way we can stop the C.D.U. from rolling back some of the progress,” said Christian Ratschinski, 43, who has been both a machinist and a union member for more than two decades.
Mr. Scholz seemed to hint that such political coexistence was possible, in an unusually friendly debate exchange on Wednesday with Mr. Merz, the man likely to replace him as chancellor.
Asked if he would consider getting on an aircraft flown by Mr. Merz, who is a private pilot and owns a twin-engine plane, Mr. Scholz grinned and nodded. “I’m assuming he has his pilot’s license for a reason,” he said
Mr. Merz’s response came quickly.
“Now you’ll ask me,” Mr. Merz said, “whether I would take him along for a ride.”
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It has been a rocky few months for Christian Lindner, and for the German political system that he has thrown into chaos.
In November, Mr. Lindner, who was the federal finance minister, effectively toppled Germany’s fragile government in a bid for his political life. He goaded Chancellor Olaf Scholz into expelling him from the ruling coalition.
That set off a snap election. It means that Mr. Lindner is the primary reason the country will select a new parliament on Sunday, at a time of European and global upheaval in the early weeks of the new Trump administration, and not next fall as originally scheduled.
Mr. Lindner’s move was a bid to save his party, which had slumped in the polls, from its association with an unpopular government. He was trying to avoid a temporary death sentence in federal politics. The question is whether it will work.
In the final week of the campaign, Mr. Lindner and his pro-business Free Democrats remain just under 5 percent of nationwide support in most polls. That is a crucial threshold in German politics. Score above 5 percent, and your party gets into parliament. Fall below it, and you are almost certainly out.
And yet — because of how Germany’s political system is structured — Mr. Lindner retains a chance to play a kingmaker role in the formation of the next government. He just needs to scrape together a little more support, somehow.
“He doesn’t have good cards,” said Stefan Merz, a director at Infratest dimap, a polling firm in Berlin. “But it can’t be ruled out.”
Mr. Lindner is an outlier in German politics, where unflashy, stoic characters abound. He is fond of hunting and sports cars, with an aversion to autobahn speed limits.
Mr. Lindner’s campaign declined interview requests from The New York Times. In an interview last fall with the podcast Hotel Matze, shortly before he initiated the end of the governing coalition, he mused about his fans and detractors alike.
“Those who like you say, ‘The last hope of bourgeois politics in Germany, the last free-market economist in politics,’” Mr. Lindner said. Critics, he added, call him a government debt fetishist, a “neoliberal exploiter and misanthropist.”
“I deal with it in a relaxed manner,” he added.
Mr. Lindner’s grandparents were bakers. His parents divorced when he was a young boy. His mother taught him to prioritize financial independence. From a young age, he yearned to move fast.
A video on YouTube captures a television show for young people recorded in 1997 in which an 18-year-old Mr. Lindner, wearing a suit with a monstrous cow-patterned tie, talks about the advertising business he had started with a friend. It earned him enough to buy his first Porsche by the age of 20.
He was also a political prodigy. Mr. Lindner joined the Free Democrats, or F.D.P., a neoliberal party that favors low taxes on business and high earners — and no speed limits on the highway — at age 16. At age 34, he became the youngest chairman in party history, and he brought it back from the political wilderness.
After failing to win 5 percent of the vote in Germany’s 2013 elections, the Free Democrats spent four years out of parliament. Mr. Lindner brought the party back in 2017, though he pulled out of negotiations to join a ruling coalition with Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and the liberal Green Party. “It is better not to govern than to govern wrongly,” Mr. Lindner said at the time.
In 2021, Mr. Lindner helped the Free Democrats score 11 percent of the vote, in part by leading a charge against government restrictions on daily life and economic activity. He joined Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens in a so-called “traffic light” coalition. It was always a troubled partnership, but it worsened as Germany’s economy stagnated and the government’s approval ratings sank.
A fissure opened: Mr. Scholz and the Greens wanted to relax a limit on government borrowing — known as the debt brake — in order to juice economic growth. Mr. Lindner refused.
He also saw ominous signs in the polling. All the ruling parties had lost support, but of the three, only the Free Democrats had slipped below 5 percent. His core of support remains “wealthy entrepreneurs in West Germany,” said Marcel Fratzscher, the president of the German Institute for Economic Research.
Mr. Lindner hatched a plan to collapse the government, in hopes of saving his party. Publicly, it began with a leaked document in which he demanded swift changes from the Green Party’s economy minister, Robert Habeck, and Mr. Scholz.
His requests included tax cuts, regulatory relief and the relaxation of some climate goals that he said were pushing energy prices higher. He was daring Mr. Scholz to fire him. On the day after President Trump won another term in the United States, Mr. Scholz obliged, forcing early elections in the process.
Days later, Die Zeit newspaper revealed that Free Democratic leaders had spent weeks preparing to break with the coalition partners, including drafting a script for it. Mr. Lindner never denied the report. He explained that his party simply was seeking an economic turnaround in order “to make Germany successful again.”
In a blistering statement defending his firing, Mr. Scholz said Mr. Lindner cared only for his base electorate and for “the short-term survival of his own party.”
The ensuing political fallout has been shadowed by the opening weeks of Mr. Trump’s administration, including threats of tariffs on European exports and a pullback of America’s military security blanket that has protected Germany since the end of World War II.
Mr. Lindner has tried frantically to pull the Free Democrats above the 5 percent line. In an early bid to grab attention, he posted on the social media platform X that Germany needed more disruptive thinking like the billionaire Elon Musk has. Mr. Musk instead endorsed a different party — the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AfD — parts of which have been deemed extremist by German intelligence agencies.
Undaunted, Mr. Lindner continues to preach tax cuts and deregulation, to defend Germany’s constitutional curb on government debt, and to slam his former government partners for their management of the economy.
Mainstream parties have said they will not invite the AfD into a government. So Mr. Lindner’s party may still make a possible coalition partner for the poll-leading Christian Democrats and their chancellor candidate, Friedrich Merz. It could be a valuable one if the returns on Sunday are especially fractured.
But for now, Mr. Merz, who was a guest at Mr. Lindner’s wedding, is not tipping his hand.
As Mr. Lindner hovered a point below 5 percent this month, Mr. Merz was asked in an interview with German media about Mr. Lindner’s Free Democrats. “Four percent,” he said, “is four percent too much.”
Reporting from Berlin
When Vice President JD Vance criticized his German hosts last week for sidelining far-right parties, he did not mention by name the Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD.
But soon after his speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he stunned the room by comparing democracy in today’s Europe to Soviet-era totalitarianism, Mr. Vance met with Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD.
A former investment analyst who is raising two sons with her Sri Lankan-born wife in Switzerland, Ms. Weidel, 46, has become the unlikely face of the AfD. Her nationalist party campaigns on a platform that is anti-immigrant and defines family as a father and a mother raising children.
A favorite of the new American administration — receiving an endorsement from Elon Musk — she has been essential to AfD’s effort to break into the mainstream, helping to vault the party into a comfortable second place ahead of Sunday’s national election.
Ms. Weidel, whose turtleneck sweaters or open-collared shirts and pearl necklaces have become signatures, has lent a more cosmopolitan image to a party that has been linked to neo-Nazis and plots to overthrow the state.
But her AfD is no less extreme. “With Alice Weidel at the helm, the AfD has steadily become more radical,” said Ann-Katrin Müller, an expert on the AfD who reports for Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s most prominent news outlets.
The AfD is polling well ahead of the center-left Social Democrats of the incumbent chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and behind the conservative Christian Democrats of Friedrich Merz, the front-runner to be the next chancellor.
Those parties insist that they would never partner with Ms. Weidel’s party to form a government. But Ms. Weidel’s latest success in presenting the AfD as just another party came on Sunday, when she joined a televised debate with her mainstream rivals, who also included Robert Habeck, running for the Greens.
Ms. Weidel’s performance was widely judged to be uneven, but she left the event a winner nonetheless — it was the first time that AfD had been invited to such a debate, watched by millions of voters. At one point in the campaign, polls ranked her as the most popular chancellor candidate, across all parties.
But if Ms. Weidel’s professorial air and personal story suggest a softening of the party line, her language does not. She has promised to tear down wind turbines and to dismiss gender-studies professors. She has spoken about “remigration,” a term used by the far right that is widely interpreted as code for deportations.
“Make it absolutely clear to the whole world: German borders are closed,” she told a cheering crowd when the AfD officially nominated her as its candidate last month.
Ms. Weidel declined to speak to The New York Times for this article. In interviews with the German news media, she has been alternately charming and biting.
She has consistently refused to distance herself from her party’s most extreme members, some of whom have minimized the Holocaust and Germany’s Nazi past.
“She and the people behind her now dominate the party — and they are ideologically very close to Björn Höcke,” Ms. Müller said, referring to an AfD state leader who has been fined by a court for using Nazi language.
On Sunday Ms. Weidel told Bild, Germany’s largest tabloid, that she would put Mr. Höcke into her cabinet if she were to become chancellor.
Ms. Weidel grew up in a middle-class Catholic family in Harsewinkel, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, in the country’s west, with two siblings and a dachshund. Her father was a salesman and her mother was a homemaker.
Her grandfather was a Nazi party member and was named a military judge in occupied Warsaw, Die Welt, a conservative daily, reported. Ms. Weidel responded that she did not know her grandfather, who died when she was 6, and that the Nazi past was never a topic of discussion in her family.
While finishing a Ph.D. in economics in Bavaria, she spent time in China. By her own account, she learned Mandarin. She later worked at Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs as an analyst. In interviews with the German news media, she has spoken about her love of feng shui, and of swimming and tennis when she was a girl.
Officially she divides her time between her home in a small town in central Switzerland and a house in her voting district on Lake Constance, in southern Germany. But Ms. Weidel admitted that she does not spend much time at the German address.
She says it is because of safety concerns. Despite her party’s gains, she remains a lightning rod of public outrage in a country where a majority of Germans believe the AfD should be shunned.
Her absence from Germany has become something of a sore subject for the leader of a nationalist party. She walked out of an interview aired this week with a public broadcaster when she was asked how many nights she had slept at her German address. In the same interview, she admitted she did not know how many people lived in the district she represents as a member of Parliament.
In November, Ms. Weidel told a group of business leaders in Zurich that her security situation had grown so difficult that it was hard even to spontaneously go out dancing or to dinner with her spouse, Sarah Bossard, a filmmaker.
“I am incredibly grateful to my wife for putting up with it,” she said.
Despite having been asked many times, Ms. Weidel refuses to explain how she reconciles the apparent contradiction between her personal life and the vision of society her party represents.
“I am not queer,” Ms. Weidel told an interviewer this summer, using the English word, “but I am married to a woman I have known for 20 years,” she said.
Experts say the fact that Ms. Weidel’s personal life defies party orthodoxy actually enhances her claim to carry the AfD banner and makes the party appear more mainstream.
“Ms. Weidel has become the face of the party because of her biography and her background, and also because of her ability to speak clearly — even if it is without much empathy,” said Werner Patzelt, a political scientist who has long studied the AfD.
Ms. Weidel joined the AfD in 2013, when it was virtually a single-issue party built on opposition to the common European currency, before working her way up to become its chancellor candidate — the party’s first.
Partially owing to the fact that no one will work with her party, she’s never held any government post before. She was elected to Parliament for the first time in 2017.
Even before her prominent new role, she was a fixture on political debate shows on German television. She argues that her party is libertarian, not right-wing nationalist, a position that puts her at odds with some of the AfD’s more fervent members.
Her fluent English has helped her build a relationship with Mr. Musk, President Donald J. Trump’s billionaire adviser, who interviewed Ms. Weidel on his social media platform X.
Mr. Musk surprised the party in December when he was beamed onto a big screen, at a campaign event in Halle, where he endorsed the AfD and told assembled members that Germans had “too much of a focus on past guilt.”
Mr. Musk himself stirred controversy by giving what was widely interpreted as a Nazi salute to a rally of supporters after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
Throughout the X interview, Mr. Musk portrayed Ms. Weidel as “a very reasonable person” and distanced her and the AfD from the Nazis.
Despite efforts to downplay associations with the Nazi past, some party faithful seem to have missed the message.
As Ms. Weidel took the stage in Halle, the crowd started a chant that was a not-too-subtle play on a Nazi slogan, “Everything for Germany,” a phrase once carved on the knives of Nazi storm troopers. It is banned in Germany.
The crowd tweaked it ever so slightly. “Alice for Germany!” they cried.
Jim Tankersley contributed reporting.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Munich
Follow live updates on the 2025 Germany election.
On Thursday morning, an Afghan refugee deliberately plowed a car into a crowd in Munich, motivated by what the police called an “Islamist orientation.” A 2-year-old girl and her mother were killed, and nearly 40 others were injured.
A day later — in a country where migration has been a major election issue — that attack was no longer the biggest news story in town.
German news media, and much of the country’s political leadership, immersed themselves to a larger degree in a blizzard of foreign-policy pronouncements from the Trump administration as Western leaders gathered at the Munich Security Conference.
The annual gathering, which ended on Sunday, left many Germans who attended fuming that the Trump team was trying to influence the vote in coming parliamentary elections by publicly lecturing German politicians about blocking a far-right party from government.
German leaders left Munich profoundly worried about the country’s relationship with the United States as the Trump administration appeared to be icing Europe out of substantive discussions on a peace plan for Ukraine, at least for now.
The onslaught of news from the conference vaulted Mr. Trump and his policies squarely into the center of Germany’s final week of campaigning, diverting some of the attention from issues like the string of deadly attacks carried out by immigrants and refugees across the country over the last year.
The main article on the front page of Munich’s largest newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, on Saturday featured a picture of Vice President JD Vance delivering a speech criticizing Europeans that stunned attendees at the conference. “Undiplomatic Announcement,” read the headline.
In the speech, Mr. Vance urged German leaders to allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany to enter the federal government, without mentioning any of the reasons mainstream parties have shunned governing with it, including that some of its members have been convicted of using Nazi slogans.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung front page also included a picture from the attack site, but the accompanying article ran inside the paper. Other German news outlets were filled with stories on the fallout from Mr. Vance’s appearance and other Trump administration moves in Munich.
The coverage signaled a clear shift: Until this weekend, the American president was a preoccupation of many Germans. But he hadn’t really been an issue in the race for chancellor.
He is now.
It is unclear what party, if any, might benefit from the new focus on Mr. Trump. His administration’s actions gave platforms to several leading parties. Those include Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, which received what German media called a “campaign gift” from Mr. Vance in his Friday speech.
But they also include the incumbent Social Democrats and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who sit a distant third or fourth in the polls but suddenly had an opportunity to project diplomacy on a global and local stage. The same was true for the poll-leading Christian Democrats and their chancellor candidate, Friedrich Merz.
Both Mr. Merz and Mr. Scholz spent their time at the Munich conference publicly telling Mr. Trump and his team to stay out of German politics.
“There is an elephant in the room here, and the elephant is the trans-Atlantic relationship,” Mr. Merz said on Saturday in response to a Munich panel moderator’s question about plans for peace in Ukraine.
Germans respect America’s elections, he said, “and we expect the U.S. to do the same here.”
The reaction was so strong because of Germany’s “deep historical experiences with fascism,” said Steven E. Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany, who attended the conference. “Vance was a shock to the system,” he said.
But Mr. Sokol cautioned that “it remains to be seen if the speech has an impact on the results of the upcoming election.”
The German campaign has been relatively short, particularly by American standards. The early elections were called after the last governing coalition splintered in November. After a slow holiday start, the contest really roared to life only in January.
Until this weekend, candidates focused largely on migration and on Germany’s stagnant economy. The leading contenders for chancellor, including Mr. Merz and Mr. Scholz, have mostly sparred over government spending and borrowing, energy policy and how best to overhaul migration laws to manage the millions of asylum seekers who have entered Germany over the past decade.
The first big shake-up in the race came last month, when an Afghan immigrant who was scheduled to be deported — and who the police said suffered from mental illness — used a knife to kill a toddler in a Bavarian park and a bystander who tried to intervene. The killings came not long after a Saudi immigrant who was working as a doctor in Germany killed six people at a Christas market in Magdeburg by ramming his car into a crowd, and after other knife attacks last year.
Mr. Merz, breaking a decades-old taboo, quickly pushed a set of migration bills to a vote in Parliament, knowing they could pass only with votes from the AfD. Protests ensued across Germany against giving the AfD such an opening, but Mr. Merz emerged unscathed in polls.
Even before the shift in attention to Mr. Trump, the political race had stayed remarkably static. There is, however, potential for a dramatic swing in the final days. A third of Germans have told pollsters they could change their minds before Election Day — either switching parties or choosing not to vote at all.
The AfD sits in second place in polls with just over 20 percent support, well behind the Christian Democrats. It gained a few points of support in December, a trend that started before the Christmas market attack, but has largely flatlined in the new year. Recent polls showed it roughly back to the vote share it had a year ago, notwithstanding the high-profile endorsement it recently got from Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s billionaire adviser.
It will take a few days for polls to take the first measure of effects from the latest attack in Munich and the outcry at the Munich conference.
Still, it was clear that the Trump news at the conference had spilled immediately into German politics. Top German political figures rewrote their speeches or panel remarks to include pointed rebuttal to Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump. The AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, was alone in celebrating Mr. Vance’s remarks and the Trump administration.
Before diving into his plans for expanded government borrowing and military spending, Mr. Scholz rebuked Mr. Vance for telling Europeans “there is no room for firewalls” in their politics, a reference to mainstream parties shunning the AfD. “We will not accept outsiders intervening in our democracy,” the chancellor said.
He added, “That is not appropriate, especially not among friends and allies.”
The candidate currently leading the race, Mr. Merz, used his panel appearance on Saturday to defend German restrictions on hate speech in pushing back against Mr. Vance, who said it was time for Europeans to stop policing speech. He also went out of his way to ding Mr. Trump’s trade policies, including threats of new tariffs on Europe.
Mr. Merz tried to cast himself as a potential future counterweight to Mr. Trump in Europe, a message that seemed to be aimed as much at German voters as it was to the diplomats at the conference.
“I fully agree with all those who are demanding more leadership from Germany,” Mr. Merz said. “And I am willing to do that.”
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting.
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