IT HAS been a dramatic few months in Germany. November saw the collapse of the three-party coalition led by Olaf Scholz, triggering an early election that will take place on February 23rd. Then, last month, the campaign was given a jolt by the decision of Friedrich Merz, head of the opposition conservative Christian Democrats (cdu), to push anti-immigration motions through the Bundestag with support from the hard-right Alternative for Germany (afd). For many, including hundreds of thousands that took to the streets in protest, Mr Merz had violated a long-standing taboo against working with extremists.

Yet you would not notice it from the polls. Apart from Die Linke (“The Left”), a small left-wing outfit enjoying a last-minute surge—perhaps in part because of Mr Merz’s stunt—every party sits within two percentage points of its score a year ago (see chart 1). Barring an unprecedented polling miss, the cdu and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (csu), will win a clear victory. That means Mr Merz should take over as chancellor once he builds a coalition, probably in April or May. As for the afd, its forecast share of 20% puts it on track to double its seat tally. Yet it is blocked from government by the “firewall” other parties maintain around it.

But Mr Merz cannot sleep easy. An interaction between Germany’s electoral rules, the anti-afd firewall and the fragmentation of the vote has led to a curious situation in which tiny changes could have huge consequences for government formation. In most cases parties must win 5% of the national vote to enter the Bundestag. Three sit close to that threshold: the Free Democrats (fdp), a pro-business outfit ejected from government by Mr Scholz in November; the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (bsw), a left-conservative, pro-Russia outfit that broke away from Die Linke a year ago; and Die Linke itself.

So the Bundestag that emerges could have anything between four and seven parties (taking the cdu and csu as one, see chart 2). The higher that number, the fewer seats for the larger parties and the trickier the coalition options for the cdu/csu. Mr Merz will be watching the results for the small parties as closely as his own.

If none of them qualifies—unlikely, given Die Linke’s uptick—Mr Merz will almost certainly have a choice between Mr Scholz’s Social Democrats (spd) or the Greens as coalition partner, as he also may if just one minnow makes it. Our election-forecast model shows a 22% chance he will find himself in this happy situation. With five parties in parliament, Mr Merz’s only viable two-way coalition may be with the spd. A six-party Bundestag sharply increases the chance that three parties will be needed. And if all three tiddlers make it, a two-party coalition will be near-impossible. So complex is the situation that tactical voting to boost the chances of a particular outcome, often favoured by sophisticated voters, is like “playing 3d chess”, says Frieder Schmid at YouGov, a pollster.

Worryingly for Mr Merz, the Die Linke surge, and a smaller bump for the fdp, are squeezing his options. Our model finds a 37% (and growing) chance that neither a pairing of the cdu/csu with the spd (a “grand coalition”) nor the Greens will win a majority. With the afd out of bounds, that means Mr Merz would need two partners: either the spd and the Greens in a so-called Kenya coalition, or a variation with the fdp, should it qualify. (The cdu/csu also shuns Die Linke and the bsw.) This might also apply if a two-party coalition would have only a tiny majority.

“If that happens,” sighs a cdu official, “we’re dead.” An ideologically messy three-party coalition could be a nightmare for Mr Merz’s hopes of restoring stability to German governance and predictability for Germany’s eu partners. Voters shudder at the prospect of another governing throuple, having despaired at the endless bickering of the spd-Green-fdp “traffic-light” coalition. A second worry is that a three-way government could leave the afd as the only meaningful opposition. A third is of a one-third “blocking minority” in the Bundestag that could thwart plans to relax Germany’s constitutional debt brake.

Germans will greet the next government with the stoniest of scepticism. Thorsten Faas, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin, notes that this is the first election since records began in which every leading candidate has a negative approval rating (see chart 3). Just 25% of Germans say they are satisfied with Mr Merz.

Having briefly harboured hopes of an absolute majority, his party is now on track for the second-worst result in its history. The spd, his likeliest (and Germans’ preferred) partner, will certainly chalk up its worst-ever score. A stagnant economy, a wave of deadly attacks by asylum-seekers and the chaos unleashed by the Trump administration have stoked the unease. There is a fog of uncertainty surrounding the post-election outcome. But that Mr Merz will enjoy no honeymoon is a dead cert. ■

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