German Politics and Society

For many decades, stability and predictability were the defining features of German party competition. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, West German politics was dominated by the well-known two-and-a-half party system, which later expanded with the rise of the Greens in the 1980s and the addition of the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) after German reunification.¹ Despite the expanding party system, party competition continued to be anchored by the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union) on the center-right and the SPD (Social Democratic Party) on the center-left, such that government coalitions at the federal and state level could typically be formed by two coalition partners, while ideologically coherent coalitions among parties on the left or the right were the norm.

Leaving office after 16 years as German chancellor, Angela Merkel has multifold and complex legacies. While Merkel's leadership style has frequently been described as cautious in domestic politics, her role in international relations is often characterized as that of an active defender of liberal international norms and values. Yet she was also responsible for some of the most controversial decisions regarding Europe, often raising questions about Germany's commitments and goals. This article explores her foreign policy and her role in the European Union through a gender-sensitive lens. It examines the scope and significance of her leadership based on three case studies to allow for a differentiated analysis: the Eurozone crisis, the migrant crisis, and the COVID-19 crisis.

This article assesses the distinctiveness of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on German party politics. To do so, it compares and contrasts the politics of the pandemic with those of four other historic crises—the catastrophic flooding of August 2002; the 2008–2009 global financial crisis; the European Union's sovereign debt crisis; and the refugee influx of 2015–2016. It examines the extent of a “rally-round-the flag” effect; how political parties framed the crisis in terms of solidarity; and the impact of retrospective assessment and voting on crisis management. The article finds that the political consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on the whole resembled past patterns, notwithstanding the unprecedent nature of the 2020–2021 crisis.

This article traces the transformation of West Germany's political system during the 1970s and 1980s, when an extra-parliamentary ecological opposition emerged to challenge the governing Social Democratic Party (SPD). Demographic, economic, and structural features in West Germany's political system created the space for this opposition, eventually leading to the formation of the Green Party. This article argues that ideas about energy were crucial to the movement's success, providing a focal point for reform that aimed to spur an energy transition. This movement of experts and activists pulled West Germany's political system in an ecological direction, forcing the SPD to become green itself. The transformation of West Germany's political system, in turn, set the Federal Republic on a different energy trajectory than the United States, Great Britain, and France.

In this article, we develop and apply a typology of formal and substantive party responses to the radical right in three arenas: parliament, party competition, and the media. We argue that these provide distinct environments for parties’ scope of action, which is why responses must always be understood in the light of their respective context. Empirically, we focus on the case of the Federal Republic of Germany and illustrate the usefulness of our model by analyzing the responses of the largest conservative and social democratic mainstream parties in the Bundestag (CDU/CSU and SPD) to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) between 2017 and 2022. Although both coalition partners have primarily excluded the AfD at the formal and substantive level, we find crucial differences in their response patterns between the arenas and highlight future research perspectives.

This article situates Germany within postcommunist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to explain current political outcomes, particularly, the disproportionate success of the AfD in eastern Germany. Similar to CEE, politics in eastern Germany is fragmented and volatile compared to western Germany; the political system in the east reflects conservative social values; and east German patterns of discontent are similar to CEE. However, in CEE, party systems were new and thus volatile and susceptible to populist mobilization from both mainstream and radical parties. Conversely, East Germany integrated into the developed West German party system and adopted its traditional parties, lowering the east's potential for volatility and polarization. Moreover, since the east is a minority within Germany, its relative volatility has limited impact on the German system.

Is cultural political polarization caused by a convergence of policy positions on an economic dimension that is in turn effected by globalization? Or is globalization influencing economic and cultural polarization separately, if not independently? This article argues that an influence of globalization on both economic and cultural polarization are supported by empirical evidence. I show that (a) economic globalization exerts a depolarizing influence on an economic dimension and a polarizing influence on a cultural dimension; (b) neither economic nor cultural polarization influence polarization on the other dimension; (c) voters in Germany who express more fear of globalization are more likely to vote for the far-right AfD; and (d) fear of globalization is not related to voting for parties that compete on an economic left–right scale.

Since the federal election in 2021 Alliance 90/the Greens have governed in a novel “traffic-light” coalition with the Social Democrats and the Liberals. The Greens’ willingness to experiment with new coalition models has precursors on the state level, where they have exhibited a surprising coalition flexibility. This article combines models from coalition theory with insights from issue ownership and niche parties to explain this flexibility. The empirical analysis based on Wahl-O-Mat data shows that one contributing factor is the emergence of a radical challenger that reduces the perceived distances between the established parties. This is reinforced by an increasing relevance of ecological and environmental issues, which the Greens have issue ownership of and which function as a bridge over the camp divide. The article illuminates how a general shift in a multilevel party organization shapes and enables coalition strategies on the federal level.

The small federal state Thuringia has been politically unique over the last two legislative terms in two respects: It is the only German state in which a minister president belonging to the Left Party is leading a left of center coalition government; in other states where the Left Party is participating in governmental coalitions it is always the SPD that is leading the government. And, at least since 2019, Thuringia is unique because it is ruled by a minority government of the Left Party, SPD, and Greens. This article argues that the first uniqueness is a historically contingent deviance from national patterns that can be explained by the electoral development of the Thuringian SPD. The unique type of minority government has been caused primarily by the electoral success of the AfD in Thuringia, and it might serve as a model for other federal states if coalition building becomes equally difficult.