Why did the elections happen anyway?
It was a regularly scheduled election, no sneeki breeki backstabbing going on. Irregular elections are extremely rare – only three happened so far, and at least one of them only because of Soviet interference.
What, exactly, was voted for?
The parliament's lower chamber. If that sounds underwhelming, well, that's German politics for you!
But
Okay then, a short primer on how the German parliamentary system works. Like most democracies and countries that pretend to be democracies, Germany has a threefold separation of powers:
- The legislative consists of the two parliamentary chambers that are elected by the population
- The judicative is appointed by the legislative and totally at its mercy
- The executive (chancellor, president, and ministers) are appointed by the legislative and totally at its mercy
See? Complete separation of powers!
The parliament's upper chamber (Bundesrat) is appointed by the individual state parliaments, which are re-elected every 4-5 years at irregular intervals, and can veto the lower chamber's laws. Due to the fact that there's always a state election campaign going on somewhere, it's a mighty clusterfuck, and I have no fucking idea who even has the majority now. Wikipedia doesn't know either.
As such, the Rat rarely matters in day-to-day politics – due to how often its composition changes, it rarely is more than a road bump for the government. Only once did it matter enough that the government had to resign – it led to the 2005 irregular parliamentary elections.
The lower chamber (Bundestag), on the other hand, does matter: It appoints the chancellor, the president, the rest of the government, makes laws for the upper chamber and president to rubber stamp, and pretends to run the country while the civil service grins smugly.
This is also why "chancellor apparents" are thrown around during parliamentary election campaigns: While, in theory, every member of parliament is "only accountable to their own conscience", in practice, the parties run the show to the point of enforcing strong party discipline, making bi-partisan decisions virtually impossible. (The last time that happened was, as mentioned above, due to Moscow buying MPs. The irony was lost on the German populace.) As such, each party has a preferred chancellor they will appoint if given a chance.
Similarly, presidents are elected by the lower chamber, and are completely at their mercy. The president's powers have been successively restricted after the experiences of the Kaiserreich, Weimar Banana Republic, and That Other Reich, and largely boil down to calling for irregular elections and to delay (not veto) laws he deems unconstitutional, in the hope parliament will act like a herd of five year olds and find some other shiny to run after. It works better than you'd think, but presidents still don't matter much.
So, in short, Germany voted for everything relevant on the federal level in one massive clusterfuck of an election that doen't even give people a proper way to express their preferences for most of it.
How was voted anyway?
This question matters more than you'd think. Germany's parliamentary elections are… special. Not Krupp Stahl special, "sits in the corner eating glue" special.
After WW2, Germany looked at the systems in other European countries (i.e., all countries that matter), and found both the majority system (everyone votes a party, party distributes seats) and the first past the post (FPTP) system (districts vote for people, people organize in parties) to be lacking. The obvious choice was to just use both and let people vote twice. If the results differ, parliamentary seats are added in favour of FPTP votes, and parties with less than 5% majority votes are ignored (unless they grabb FPTP votes, which never happens).
Yes. That was, somehow, what a committee ended up declaring to be a working solution. This leads to the strange situation where Germany has a parliament with a lot of parties represented… but only two big ones that matter, because they're the only ones with enough clout to grab FPTP votes.
So how is the government formed?
Like making sausages, it's a messy process that ruins your appetite. Two or more parties disappear behind closed doors and agree on what laws they want to pass, and who gets what ministries – the chancellor post (which runs the government, and the armed forces in a state of war) usually goes to the biggest party.
Notably, the voters don't get asked what kind of coalition they want, nor what they want to see in a coalition. It's not uncommon for a junior partner to completely roll over and rubberstamp laws they considered the end of western civiliation a week earlier, when the election campaign was still running.
If this sounds dysfunctional, it's because it is.
Who was running?
A grand total of 34 parties, of which about 25 didn't matter: Those stood no chance of grabbing a FPTP seat, nor 5% in total. I'm not even going to bother explaining most of them, because they're about as relevant as Jill Stein is for US politics. Those that do (or did) matter are:
Union (CDU / CSU)
Both are centre-right conservative parties; the former runs everywhere except in Bavaria, the latter only runs in Bavaria. Why? Because fuck you, that's why.
Bavaria is… special (see definition above): It wasn't proper part of the Kaiserreich (the Kaiser had to declare war on France twice, once as Kaiser of Germany, once as King of Bavaria), and nobody afterwards had the necessary clout to fix this cow-fucking mess.
This reflects down to the party landscape: The CSU is the Bavarian Party (after they killed off the former party of that name by falsifying evidence in courts presided over by CSU-appointed judges), and teamed up with the CDU to reduce competition on the right half of the party landscape.
Most Americans are probably scratching their head at this point, because "Merkel" and "right-wing" politics are not a combination that makes much sense by American sensitibilities. That's due to several factors:
- Ever since Bismarck, the German right wing made a point of adopting any and all sensible left wing policies – starting from Europe's first comprehensive pension and health care insurance to the modern welfare state, German conservatives were eager to grab up all left wing positions they coul stomach, arguing that it leaves the left wing only with the pants-on-head retarded extremist positions. It works well, to the point that the left often forgets to actually re-adopt said sensible positions after a right wing government dropped them.
- German conservatives are staunchly pro-USA. During the Cold War, this was a mere necessity¹, but even then, the Atlantik-Brücke made sure that right leaders would go above and beyond in supporting the US… Or, to be more precise, the US establishment, which makes things a little bit more complicated ever since the US population was crazy enough to vote for someone Hollywood dislikes.
- Merkel has less of a spine than a sponge, and soaks up mob demands like she's addicted to them. Her party isn't happy about it, but they can't get rid of her.
Speaking of Merkel: There's absolutely no way of the Union to get rid of her. Zero. Nil. Nada. Null. She merely floats above day-to-day politics, delegating everything (including having an opinion) to other people, merely firing them whenever a scandal happens. And more often than not, she carefully orchestrates those scandals to begin with, using them to get rid of anyone who could possibly challenge her. Combined with the lack of term limits, I don't see Merkel ever leaving politics unless she dies or gets alzheimer's. And even then it'll be a close call.
Traitor Party (SPD)
The Social Democrats are sure an interesting bunch. They're the oldest German party that's still actually noteworthy, having given Bismarck the excuse to implement the welfare state, given Ludendorff the excuse he needed to blame Germany's loss in WW1 on the home front, given Hindenburg the exuse he needed to appoint Hitler as chancellor, given Hitler the exuse he needed to shut down parliament, voluntarily joined up with Stalin after the war in the Soviet zone and voluntarily joined up with the Allies in the west in their occupation zones.
In the east, they effectively ceased to exist at that point, being absorbed in the SED (United Socialists); in the west they managed to snag parliamentary majority from the CDU briefly after one too many scandals involving German police helping the Persian Shah's body guards to murder German citizens. They (unsurprisingly) managed to bring a detente with the Soviet Bloc by actually apologizing for WW2 (gasp), before they found out that a coalition government between Socialists and Libertarians somehow didn't work out (gee, who'd have guessed), leading to another round of irregular parliamentary elections.
After reunification, they (bolstered by parts of the SED) managed to snag government control again, after Schäuble (yes, that Schäuble) got involved into one bribery scandal too many. (The irony of putting Schäuble in charge of unfucking Greece was, again, lost on the German populace. Maybe we really do have no sense of humour.)
The resulting coalition government between the Internationalist SocDems and the pacificst Green Party under Schröder did what it obviously had to do, and voted in favour of waging an illegal war of aggression against Serbia, in direct violation of international law. Dissatisfied with being the cause for the first German war crimes since Hitler, they then completely dismantled the welfare state, because globalisation was "inevitable" and the only way to compete with China was to lower Germany's quality of life below that of China.
If you go "wat", you're about summing up the reaction of your average German, ca. 2005. This led to the Bundesrat having, for the first time, such a clear anti-government majority that re-elections were forced by it. The incumberent president didn't even bother to sober up for the TV duels against Merkel, and then went to become a board member at Russia's Gazprom, campaigning to make Germany more dependent on Russian gas.
If you're still going "wat", rest assured that… the SPD is still backing him, and invited him as speaker for the current election campaign. After being Merkel's whipping boys for a good decade, they figured it wouldn't matter anyway.
To the surprise of nobody outside the SPD, they got their worst election result in history, at only… 20%, making them still the second strongest party.
This makes them strong enough for form a government together with the Union, but they're tired of being in power, and voluntarily want to go into opposition, hoping that more people will vote for them next time if they don't do shit for four years.
wat
Millionaires' Party (FDP)
The FDP officially supports personal and economic freedom, which in practice means it's a party by wealthy CEOs for wealthy CEOs. Their favourite activities in power are slashing taxes (while, regrettably, regrettably, they cannot slash funding to the welfare state because their evil coalition partners prevent that) and botching up privatizations by handing their golf buddies state-enforced monopolies.
Or so the theory.
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, they were the only small party that even managed to get into parliament, and basically didn't matter, serving only to legitimize whatever particular party they were sucking up to in coalitions at the moment (mostly Union).
When they last teamed up with Merkel in the wake of Merkel's first Union-SocDem coalition, they were eaten alive by her, somehow being officially responsible for everything that went wrong during that period, up to and including Fukushima. The populace gobbled it up without questioning the Federal Mommy, and FDP didn't even make it into the next parliament.
Thankfully, voters have about as good memories as gold fish, and they're back at some 10%.
Unsurprisingly, they're wary about becoming Merkel's whipping boys again.
The Left
After 1949, communism in Germany was in an awkward position: In the East, the Soviets waltzed in, told them to absorb the SPD and made them government, while in the West, they found themselves in the awkward position of being under a McCarthyist USA that technically had to allow them because muh freedom of speech, despite them being backed by Moscow.
Eventually, Western Germany managed to bend its constitution enough to banish the Communist Party By Stalin's Grace, and told the communists they were allowed to reform, as long as they stayed formally independent of Moscow.
The left did what it had to do: Instead of forming one successor party, they formed dozens, and spent the next 50 years screeching autistically at each other.
Only in the 2000s, long after unification, did a dozen of left parties (including the remnants of the Eastern Germany SED, now named PDS) manage to acknowledge that maybe they should settle their differences, and merged under the very original name "The Left".
Being left of both the welfare-state-supporting CDU and the SocDems, they convinced themselves that radicalization is the only way to make people vote for them, and so they're campaining with such delightful ideas as "let's just demilitarize Europe and disband NATO, what's the worst that could happen?"
Somehow, they managed to get 9%, but less surprisingly, nobody wants them in a coalition.
Can't Spell Green Without REE (Bündnis 90 / Die Grüne)
Founded to be an "anti-party" that's "social, grassroots democratic, anti-violence", they're neither. They stopped being an anti-party the moment they ran for parliament, stopped being grassroots democratic the moment they got their first seats, and the rest in their first SocDem coalition government (see above).
It's been so long since they last mattered on a federal level that I can't even say what their politics would be; on state level they're mostly a bunch of closeted conservatives who mourn the abolition of indulgence trade, and found a worthy replacement in CO² certificates: The rich, snobby elite who virtue signals by driving their kids to private schools in Tesla cars while angrily texting that Germany needs to shut down airports because they endanger some frog species or another.
How are these cunts getting 9%? I don't know. They are gullible enough to want to join up with Merkel either way, and their closeted conservativism makes them better suited at it than one would think if one remembered them from the days where they defended the Baader-Meinhof gang for gunning down innocents "because the newspapers were, like, really mean to them".
Cunts.
NSDAP NPD
Contrary to popular opinion, nazism didn't disappear after 1945, and found a niche in "patriotic" movements that supported anything from re-annexing French occupied Saarland (done in 1957) to restoring various pre-war borders (take your pick from any year between 1914 and 1939). For the most part, nazist and reactionary parties were at least as splintered as the far left, and until re-unification, didn't really matter.
Afterwards, however, Germany found itself with a freshly ruined former Communist half that was as broke as it was unemployed, ruined by Communist mismanagement, cut-throat CDU/CSU/FDP privatization, and SocDem/Green destruction of the welfare state. The migrant crisis – that is, the 90s migrant crisis that saw everyone shit their pants because everyone from not quite retarded Serbs to Bosniak muslims were flooding Europe's borders – did little to enamour Eastern Germany to their new overlords (never mind that they voluntarily joined up with them and were a major factor in getting the SocDems into power in the first place).
If you've been counting, that doesn't leave any other party. Except… the NPD, the least irrelevant of the right-wing parties. They've been oscillating between "ze joos are our misery" and "okay, maybe don't import all these Turks" depending on which wing of the party was in charge, assuming the party actually was in charge of itself.
Because, you see, the federal domestic security agency (Verfassungsschutz) was ~~envious~~ concerned about the NPD's successes and, having nothing better to do ever since they ran out of communists to give bombs to, started to infiltrate it. Heavily.
In 2003, they finally collected enough evidence to "prove" that the NPD was not a political party, but in fact just a criminal organization masquerading as one, about the only circumstances under which a party can be outlawed (if you go "but that didn't apply to the KPD" well you're a commie too and should be careful to not meet an unfortunate accident).
Under closer scrutiny, it turned out that all crimes were committed by agents provocateur sent by the Verfassungsschutz.
Somehow, despite funding the Baader-Meinhof group, funding the NSU terrorist cell and now undermining a democratic party with the express purpose of banning it with falsified evidence, there were no consequences for the Verfassungsschutz.
Either way, the NPD was vindicated, gained even more popularity… only to lose it to the AfD, and nowadays are completely irrelevant.
University Professors Know Better (AfD)
In 2013, people were Unhappy. Merkel was glued to her chair, going for yet another period of stagnation and petty populism, while the European debt crisis was threatening Germany's economic grip on the rest of Europ— I mean, threatening European democracy and wealth. Ahem. Obviously, this wouldn't do.
Alternative for Germany was founded by a wild mix of people, from former FDP members traumatized by getting assraped without lube by Merkel, to NPD members hoping for a fresh chance at getting themselves cucked by the Verfassungsschutz.
At first, the party was mostly anti-EU and anti-Euro, which weren't exactly unjustified or unreasonable positions, especially under the then-constant threat of Portual, Spain and Italy going the way of Greece.
Over the years, however, the party met the fate of many new parties, and accepted members faster than they could assimilate them into the party consensus (editor's note: insert immigration joke here); which led to massive and repeated shifts in positioning and degrees of extremism. At one point, AfD – together with Austria's official NSDAP successor FPÖ – accepted funding and support by Putin, making them one more shill to his attempts to create a disunited Europe; but this was about four party leaderships ago, and I haven't the slightest idea if that's still a valid criticism of them. Which, presumably, is half the reason for all that kerfuffle.
The only constants to their party program are rejecting the EU in its current form, and (after the 2015 migrant crisis) rejecting migration to various degrees of extremity (ranging from "could you just leave their boats alone" to "SHOOT THE CHILDREN FIRST", depending on who they let onto the microphones).
Due to a mixture of petty virtue signalling and legitimate concerns over the AfD being as stable as the average Balkans unions all parties vowed to not enter a coalition government with them. This made things a bit awkward when they became the third strongest party in the current elections, and is one of the main reasons why it's such a clusterfuck.
So… what?
Well, that's a damn good question: We have an unusually divided parliament, filled with parties that have sometimes good, sometimes bad reasons to hate each other, and nobody strong enough to challenge Merkel on their own. AfD is the only relevant party willing to challenge Merkel – it's basically the only reason they exist –, and most others are worn out after being used lightning rods for Merkel.
We might see another Grand Coalition between Merkel and SocDems, but this will need an internal revolt that seems unlikely at this point. Alternatively we could see a Union/FDP/Greens coalition, but the FDP are playing for time, eager to get into a much stronger position as last time, to avoid getting raped once more. Or we could see a minority government of Merkel riding populist opinion to rule where she can, and remain formally in charge without power where can't.
Either way, it's highly unlikely to see dramatic changes in policy.
¹ Even as early as 1945, it was painfully obvious that the USA would be calling the shots from now, and the British and French did their best to antagonize the German population during their brief occupation: The French – hated as occupying force since at least the days of Napoleon² – refused to cede the industrious area of the Saarland back to German until 1957; and the British did what they always did: Invent a tax that didn't bring in significant revenue while antagonizing the natives. The Indians has Ghandhi do his peaceful flower power salt march bullshit – The British Occupation Zone had Wehrmacht veterans who suddenly remembered where they had "forgotten" their equipment before surrendering, who were backed by a Catholic clergy that was still pissed over the whole Anglican Church thingie.
Facing armoured columns carrying tax-free Belgian coffee through the Ardennes, the British decided that fighting through the Ardennes three times in as many decades was enough and they'd rather not enforce the tax, thank you very much.
² It's one thing if your language has a word for everything. It's another thing if one of these words is "whoring yourself out to Napoleon's soldiers camping outside the city" ("Fisimatenden")… and a whole 'nother thing if that's taught in schools even today. The Rhineland does not like the French.