How Germany voted: Election results map shows far-right AfD surge in East as CDU win most seats
The preliminary results of Germany’s national election on Sunday are in, with conservative parties winning the most votes and the far-right nearly doubling its seats in the national legislature.
Germany’s far-right Alternative fur Deutschland party (AfD) party saw particular support in the former East Germany, as high as 46.7 per cent in some areas.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a centrist conservative party in coalition with the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), won the most votes overall, at approximately 29 per cent of the national vote combined.
Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU party which has been the party of opposition up until now, is set to become the next chancellor of Germany according to provisional results on Monday, with 208 seats for the CDU/CSU.
The incumbent chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose Social Democrats party (SPD) previously held the most seats in the Bundestag, saw his party’s seats drop significantly to just 120, now only the third largest in the legislature.
The German parliament has slashed its seats since 2021, from 736 to 630 under the new system.
Much of this reshaping of the Bundestag is owed to unprecedented success for the AfD, which is now the second largest with 152 seats and some 21 per cent of the national vote.
Co-leader Alice Weidel’s AfD has nearly doubled its representation in the Bundestag, winning just 85 seats in the 2021 elections – and crucially, taking its national support from 10.4 per cent to 20.8 per cent.
The incumbent SPD lost around 2 million votes to the conservatives, and 720,000 to the AfD. The far-right Alternative fur Deutschland also took a further 890,000 votes from the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and 1 million votes from the CDC/CSU conservatives, according to preliminary results.
Provisional results show that over 10.3 million Germans voted for the AfD, nearly as high as the incumbent SPD party in 2021 (11.9 million).
The results suggest that the AfD mobilised an estimated 2 million non-voters, more than any other political party in Germany.
Some 83.5 per cent of the eligible population voted in Sunday’s elections, the highest recorded figure since 1990.
Across the board, the AfD swept up support in every region, receiving at least 15 per cent of the vote in the majority of constituencies.
The AfD’s greatest bastion of support came in eastern Germany, where most constituencies (outside of Berlin) saw the far-right party usher in over 30 per cent of the vote.
