Berlin:

Germany is set to hold the crucial federal election on Sunday (February 23) to elect its next chancellor. The snap polls were called by chancellor Olaf Scholz when his coalition government fell apart at the end of last year, the results of which will shape the future of Europe’s most influential nation and the European Union.

In the race for top leader is an incumbent chancellor seeking a second term, the opposition leader, the current vice chancellor and — for the first time — a popular leader of a far-right party. The elections are receiving an unusual level of interest from onlookers outside the country, including the world’s richest man Elon Musk, who caused an outcry in Germany by throwing his weight behind the far-right Alternative Alice Weidel.

A Look At Top Contenders 

Olaf Scholz: The 66-year-old centre-left Social Democrat has been Germany’s chancellor since December 2021. Seeking a second term, Scholz has a wealth of government experience, having previously served as Hamburg’s mayor and as German labour and finance minister. 

As chancellor, Scholz launched an effort to modernize Germany’s military after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and made Germany Ukraine’s second-biggest weapons supplier. His government prevented an energy crunch and tried to counter high inflation. But his three-party coalition became notorious for infighting and collapsed in November as it argued over how to revitalize the economy — Europe’s biggest, which has shrunk for the past two years.

Friedrich Merz: Germany’s 69-year-old opposition leader has emerged as the front-runner in the election campaign, with his centre-right Union bloc leading polls. Merz became the leader of his Christian Democratic Union party after longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel — a former rival — stepped down in 2021. Since then, he has taken the party in a more conservative direction. 

During the election campaign, Merz has made curbing irregular migration a central issue. However, he lacks experience in government. He joined the European Parliament in 1989 before becoming a lawmaker in Germany five years later. He took a break from active politics for several years after 2009, practising as a lawyer and heading the supervisory board of investment manager BlackRock’s German branch.

Robert Habeck: The 55-year-old Habeck is the candidate of the environmentalist Greens. He’s also Germany’s current vice chancellor and the economy and climate minister, with responsibility for energy issues. As co-leader of the Greens from 2018 to 2022, he presided over a rise in the party’s popularity, but in 2021 he stepped aside to let Annalena Baerbock — now Germany’s foreign minister — make the party’s first run for the chancellor’s job. 

Habeck’s record as a minister has drawn mixed reviews, particularly a plan his ministry drew up to replace fossil-fuel heating systems with greener alternatives that deepened divisions in the government.

Alice Weidel: The 46-year-old Weidel is making the first bid of the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, for the country’s top job. An economist by training, Weidel joined the party shortly after it was founded in 2013. She has been co-leader of her party’s parliamentary group since the party first won seats in the national legislature in 2017. 

Weidel has been a co-leader of the party itself since 2022, along with Tino Chrupalla. In December, she was nominated as the candidate for chancellor — though other parties say they won’t work with the AfD, so she has no realistic path to the top job at present.

When Will The Results Come?

It is likely to take several days after February 23 to confirm the final results of the election. However, based on the exit polls, fairly reliable results are likely to be out by Sunday evening, but there may still be some uncertainty as the counting of votes by post (a trend which is on the rise) takes time. The performance of smaller parties will also factor in result timing as Germany has a norm of electing a coalition government. 

Even after the full results are out, forming a new government will, most likely, take some time as talks between parties on coalition will start only after the results. The coalition might take several months to put a government together. It depends on the numbers at play and the political arithmetic – essentially the extent to which different combinations of parties agree or disagree on various policy positions.

Why Germany Forms Coalition Governments?

The proportional voting system and increased political fracturing in Germany make it extremely difficult for any one party to form a government alone and a coalition needs to be formed comprising parties that together hold more than 50 per cent of the seats in the Bundestag — the national parliament.

It is also partly political culture in Germany to prefer stable majorities as minority governments are considered to be too weak and unstable. 

Until the early 1980s, there were usually three parties (conservative, social democrats and liberals) in Parliament. However, currently, the country has seven parties in the Bundestag.

Parties In Fray 

Germany has two centrist, “big-tent” parties: Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the opposition conservatives, an alliance of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU).

Both have lost support in recent years, with smaller parties such as the Greens and far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) gaining ground.

The SPD, conservatives, Greens and AfD are all fielding candidates for chancellor.

Also running are the pro-market Free Democrats (FDP), the far-left Linke and the leftist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), who are all at risk of missing the 5 per cent threshold to make it into parliament, according to opinion polls.

Polls

The conservatives have been leading nationwide polls for more than two years and are at 30 per cent, according to the latest survey published by Forsa Institute on February 16, followed by the AfD at 20 per cent.

Scholz’s SPD, with 16 per cent, has dropped to third from the first place it achieved in the 2021 election. It is followed by the Greens on 13 per cent and Linke on 7 per cent. The FDP is polling at 5 per cent, with the BSW at 4 per cent, according to the latest poll.

Analysts say polls can shift quickly as voters are less loyal to parties than they once were. In the 2021 election campaign, the conservatives went from frontrunner to runner-up within a few months.

The coming 12 months can’t promise the bumper crop of elections we saw during 2024, when countries home to about half the world’s population headed to the polls. Still, voters will cast ballots in several important elections throughout the year – and many of the themes persist: the impact of inflation, the rise of the populist right and the fallout of war in Europe and the Middle East.

Only a fool or charlatan will pretend to predict the future, so it’s usually best to avoid election forecasting. So instead, The Conversation asked experts on five countries – Canada, Germany, Chile, Belarus and the Philippines – to explain what is at stake as those nations go to the ballot.

BELARUS (JANUARY 26)

– Tatsiana Kulakevich, associate professor of instruction, School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies, the University of South Florida

Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s longest-serving authoritarian ruler, will run for his seventh term on Jan. 26, 2025 – and he is not expected to lose.

No real opposition will participate in the upcoming elections against Lukashenko, who has run the country since 1994.

Four other persons seeking nomination include the head of the Liberal Democratic Party, Aleh Haidukevich, who ran in the 2020 elections, but withdrew his candidacy then in favor of Lukashenko; Hanna Kanapatskaya, a former member of parliament, entrepreneur and candidate in the 2020 Belarusian presidential election; Aliaksandr Khizhnyak, the chairman of the Republican Party of Labor and Justice; and Siarhei Syrankou, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus. But all have expressed their support for Lukashenko and his key policies.

Current conditions in Belarus do not allow for free and fair elections. Belarusians living abroad will not be able to vote. After the mass protests in 2020’s election, the Belarusian authorities stopped setting up polling stations at diplomatic missions.

That year, protesters claimed widespread election fraud in favor of Lukashenko and argued that most people actually supported Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, his main opposition rival, who now leads the opposition in exile from Lithuania.

Repression continues in the wake of the 2020 protests, with over 1,200 political prisoners currently detained. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians have fled the country.

If Lukashenko wins the 2025 presidential election, Belarus will likely continue to serve as a key ally of Russia, hosting Russian nuclear weapons and providing a launchpad for military operations, as seen in the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

GERMANY (FEBRUARY 23)

– Garret Martin, Hurst senior professorial lecturer of foreign policy and global security, American University

The German public knew that it would be called upon to vote in a federal election in 2025. But the recent collapse of the German coalition government means that the vote will happen on Feb. 23 – seven months ahead of the anticipated schedule.

Indeed, after weeks of fighting over the budget, Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired Finance Minister Christian Lindner in early November. As a result, Lindner’s Free Democratics party left the coalition, meaning that the two remaining parties – Scholz’s Social Democrats, or SPD, and the Greens – no longer command a majority in the German parliament. This left the chancellor with little choice but to look for snap elections. And after losing the confidence vote on Dec. 16, Scholz got that outcome.

The February election will take place in a particularly challenging global context for Germany. Besides the ongoing war in Ukraine straining Berlin’s diplomatic and economic position in Europe, Germany is also sandwiched between the continued industrial competition from China and the prospect of Donald Trump launching a trade war. All of this is adding to Germany’s ingrained woes.

Its economy has been stuck since COVID-19 hit, and the country is facing a second year of recession.

Domestically, the various parties will joust over the hot-button topics of migration and funding greater investment at home. But spending more will be politically fraught – Germany’s constitutional “debt brake” currently forces the government to keep a balanced budget.

Polls suggest that Scholz faces a major challenge to stay on as chancellor. His approval rating has been dismal, and his party is polling well behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union and its Christian Social Union sister party. The SPD is in a tight race for second place with the far-right Alternative for Germany, which is hoping to capitalize on its recent successes in state elections.

Barring a major surprise, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union, will become the next chancellor. But forming a stable coalition that can command a majority could prove challenging.

PHILIPPINES (MAY 12)

– Lisandro E. Claudio, associate professor of Southeast Asian studies, University of California, Berkeley

Since the end of the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, Philippine presidents have been restricted to single six-year terms but face midterm elections in which Filipinos elect local officials, district representatives to the lower house and 12 nationally elected senators – 2025 is one such year.

On paper, these senatorial races amount to a referendum on the sitting president. But it’s more accurate to think of them as displays of the incumbent’s awesome control over political machines. Most senatorial candidates who win have the president’s backing.

And there’s no reason to think this dynamic won’t prevail in the May 2025 election. Surveys, which have tended to be more accurate in the Philippines than in the U.S. in recent years, show President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s senatorial bets could win as many as nine or 10 of the 12 open positions.

This will be important for Marcos Jr., who needs to consolidate his power amid a feud with Vice President Sara Duterte, the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, the previous occupant of the presidential palace who presided over a ruthless and bloody drugs crackdown. Though she ran as Marcos’ ally – vice presidents are elected separately – in 2022, the marriage of convenience quickly fell apart once it became clear that Marcos didn’t have Duterte in mind as his successor.

A Marcos-dominated senate would increase the likelihood of a conviction should Duterte undergo an impeachment trial for alleged mismanagement of confidential funds.

Not only would a conviction remove her from office, it would also bar her from running for president in 2028. And a restoration of vindictive Duterte power could mean trouble for the Marcoses – one of Asia’s most corrupt families, with many skeletons in its closet.

Marcos Jr. must bury the Duterte dynasty while he still can. In a place like the Philippines, where voters are often asked to choose between the lesser of two evils, such a resolution would be welcome to many.

CANADA (BEFORE OCTOBER 20)

– Patrick James, dean’s professor emeritus of political science and international relations, USC Dornsife

It is looking increasingly likely that a federal election in Canada will take place well ahead of the constitutionally mandated deadline of Oct. 20, 2025.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, well down in the polls even before a series of jarring events, now faces the possible – or even likely – fall of his fragile coalition government.

Trudeau, recently taunted by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump as the “governor” of Canada and threatened with a 25% tariff, experienced another shock on Dec. 16: Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned over irrevocable differences on key policy issues.

Trudeau may become the latest political casualty among global leaders committed to the priorities of the contemporary left rather than the populist right.

The Liberal leader is a long-standing champion of the cultural left and advocate of strong action over the threat of climate change. The result has been massive levels of government spending and soaring deficits.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, Trudeau’s likely chief rival in the 2025 election, has built a huge lead in the polls that appears based on public anger over high inflation and other material shortcomings.

Trudeau is embattled both from within and beyond Canada. Trump demands that Canada move away from what he has called exploitation of the U.S. in trade and calls on Canada to step up border security in particular and defense spending in general.

Poilievre calls for a shift back toward Canada’s abundant fossil fuels to improve the economy – a direct threat to Trudeau’s climate change agenda.

The coming election may even be about the identity of Canada itself. Will Trudeau somehow hold onto power and continue to implement a socialist agenda after the election? Or will Poilievre win and shift the country toward a more conservative populism? Or, again, will another coalition government come into place, with a set of policies that end up pleasing no one?

Pressure on Trudeau to resign, at this time of writing, seems to be approaching an overwhelming level. Time will tell – and maybe very soon.

CHILE (NOVEMBER 16)

– Jorge Heine, professor of global studies, Boston University

Chile’s presidential election is due to take place on Nov. 16, 2025. Given its ballotage system – meaning that candidates need 50% plus one of the votes to be elected, something which no presidential candidate has managed to do in the first round since 1993 – a runoff will likely take place on Dec. 14. That will be between the top two candidates.

The incumbent president, Gabriel Boric, is barred from running for a second consecutive term. Elected in 2021 at the age of 35 – making him Chile’s youngest-ever president – Boric has had great difficulty enacting the program of his Broad Front, a left-wing coalition with a platform of sweeping political, social and economic changes. This is in large part due to the coalition’s lack of a parliamentary majority.

In fact, Chile under Boric has the dubious distinction of being the only country to have rejected not one but two different constitutional texts submitted to the electorate – one for being too left-wing, the other for being too right-wing – placing Chile in a constitutional cul-de-sac.

Yet, after several years of upheaval that started with a 2019 social uprising – the most serious in Chile’s two centuries of independent history – and continued into the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit Chile badly, the country has now regained a modicum of political and economic normalcy. Foreign investment is up, but so is crime, which has become a major concern to voters.

In keeping with a Latin American – and worldwide – trend, most polls point to a likely 2025 win for the opposition, the right-wing coalition Chile Vamos, led by the former mayor of Providencia, Evelyn Matthei, who ran for the presidency and lost in 2013 against Michelle Bachelet.

The ruling coalition has found it difficult to come up with a strong candidate to face Matthei. Two of the likeliest ones – Bachelet herself and Tomás Vodanovic, the mayor of Maipú, a Santiago suburb – have indicated they are not interested, and a third one, Home Affairs Minister Carolina Tohá, is hampered by perceived difficulties in bringing the law-and-order situation under control.

That said, the ruling coalition did better than expected in the October 2024 local and regional elections, and an opposition win in 2025 is by no means a done deal.

(Authors: Lisandro Claudio, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Garret Martin, Senior Professorial Lecturer, Co-Director Transatlantic Policy Center, American University School of International Service; Jorge Heine, Interim Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston University; Patrick James, Dornsife Dean’s Professor of International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and Tatsiana Kulakevich, Associate Professor of Instruction in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies, Affiliate Professor at the Institute for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies, University of South Florida)

(Disclosure Statement: Lisandro Claudio is the administrator of a Title VI Grant from the United States Department of Education. He also administers a grant for the promotion of Phillippine studies, funded by the Philippine legislature. He was previously affiliated with the Akbayan Party in the Philippines. Garret Martin receives funding from the European Union for the Center he co-directs (Transatlantic Policy Center). Jorge Heine is a member of the Party for Democracy, a Chilean political party, and of the Foro Permanente de Politica Exterior, a Chilean think tank. Patrick James and Tatsiana Kulakevich do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
 

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