Germany will go to the polls on Sunday, February 23 after a snap election was called in December following the collapse of the coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Key issues for voters in this parliamentary election will be the state of the economy, migration and Ukraine’s war with Russia.

A survey on February 12 by news outlet Politico showed that the main opposition – the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) – are currently leading the polls with the support of 29 per cent of voters, followed by the right-wing Alternative Fur Deutschland (AfD) which has 21 per cent.

In the same poll, Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) was third with 16 per cent, followed by Alliance 90/The Greens, commonly referred to as the Greens, with 12 per cent.

Junior Professor Endre Borbath from the Institute of Political Science at Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat Heidelberg, told Al Jazeera that the resurgence of support for the CDU, which ruled Germany for 16 years until 2021 under former chancellor Angela Merkel before losing the last election, was “not that surprising”.

“Due to the war in Ukraine, and the resources that were required to support the Ukrainian side in this conflict, much of the government priorities had to be scaled down,” he said.

In November 2024, Germany’s ruling coalition, a three-way alliance between the SPD, the Greens and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), collapsed following disagreements over the country’s weak economy, which led Scholz to sack his finance minister, Christian Lindner of the FDP party.

After months of wrangling, Scholz said he fired Lindner for his obstructive behaviour over the country’s budget and accused him of putting party before country and blocking legislation on spurious grounds, leading the FDP to quit the government.

“Too often he has engaged in small-minded party political tactics. He broke my confidence too many times,” the chancellor said of Lindner.
For his part, Lindner said the chancellor had tried to strong-arm him into breaking a constitutionally enshrined spending limit, known as the debt brake, a move that the fiscal hawk refused to support.

In December, a confidence vote was held in parliament, which Scholz lost, paving the way for the February 23 parliamentary election.

The country has two centrist party groups; Scholz’s SPD and the conservative alliance, which includes the CDU and CSU.

In recent years, these parties have been losing support, while smaller parties from both sides of the political spectrum, including the Greens and the far-right AfD, have gained support.

Besides these players, the FDP, a pro-market, neoliberal centre-right political party, the far-left Linke, and the left-leaning populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) are also running in the election.

On Sunday, German citizens will vote twice: once for a local member of parliament and, secondly, for a party.

This system means that alongside the winning local MP, each party also sends a number of MPs to the federal parliament (Bundestag) based on the vote share they secured in the second vote.

The second vote is considered the most important and is most widely reported on election night, as it determines the number of seats a party will receive overall in the Bundestag and the party’s strength within government.

There are 630 parliamentary seats up for grabs, which will be distributed proportionally on the second votes.

A coalition government will likely be formed as it is rare for one party to win an absolute majority.

The only time a single party secured a majority was for the parliamentary term of 1957 to 1961 when the CDU/CSU won the election in West Germany.