German election results explained in graphics
Mainstream conservatives led by Friedrich Merz have won Germany's 2025 election. Here's a look in charts at the wins and losses, seats in parliament, possible coalition outcomes and voter demographics.
It's troubling that 20% of people, with exception of those who grew up under nazi rule, voted for nazis.
Edit: You can also see the split between east and west Germany extremely well
Süddeutsche had an east-west graphic, in the east AfD got 37% of the vote. It would probably could govern if east Germany was it's own country. If you take "west Berlin" out of it, probably much higher %.
The right loves the poorly educated, and vice versa.
I'm all for it, so let's give them their own country to fuck it up, we don't need them.
Final graphic shows why the far-right hates education. I’m probably jumping to conclusions, but I wonder if their relatively low popularity among higher-educated voters is due to:
It’s an undemocratic thought, but sometimes I wish there were some sort of aptitude test right before casting a vote. Or at the very least, a quick quiz to confirm you’re aware of the party’s key program points. Obviously, both options are ripe for abuse.
If democracy doesn't work for people, they're fine with getting rid of it altogether. The East was never really invested into after reunification, and in the whole country the poorest have been going backwards for decades. It's the consequence of the political debate being limited to very strict parameters of what is and is not acceptable to talk about in terms of solutions to problems. Even the 'socialist' party will go for neoliberal solutions and won't talk about the wealthy and corporations extracting wealth from the country.
And if you can't talk about that, it's easy to blame immigrants instead for the very real economic problems people are experiencing.
The East was never really invested into after reunification
Gee, I wonder why, after having been screwed by the sovjiet regime for decades (first by complete destruction of all industry, then in regards to fair voting process) and then getting screwed by west Germany by complete destruction of all industry & a lot of scams running wild, thus leading to high unemployment, thus leading to all kind of fun things, like widespread drug abuse, which then leads to domestic abuse and poorer education, digging the hole even deeper.
This is a problem 75 years in the making and there is no help in sight.
Maybe voting should be by policy. Each party lists, say, their top 8 policy points as a simple summary sentence each (has to be more concrete than just an aspiration like "protect our economy"). The combined points are randomised and printed on the voting paper. Voter marks all the policies they agree with. Each policy agreed with counts as a vote for that party (so each party can get more than one vote per person). The party with most points agreed with by the voters wins. If the winning party goes back on or does anything in contradiction to any of the policies they listed, the media has something solid to grill them on, and maybe could be some sort of trigger for a new election.
Young people between the ages of 18 and 24 leaned to the extremes, casting their ballot more often for the far-right AfD and the Left Party.
Kind of misleading. Their AfD vote was roughly the same as other age groups, but they had the most support for the Left Party.
Millennials having the highest vote for the AfD is embarrassing, however.
"German Election Results Explained in Graphics"
Full text article with no graphics
Not sure why the graphics aren't showing up for you. It's rendering fine in Firefox for me. I've added some graphics to the summary just in case you can't see them on the website.
Maybe it got updated, but I see plenty of charts and interactive graphics.
Note for the Charts: The parties ordered politically left to right in the seat distribution, using grey instead of black for the CDU/CSU.
For the further graphics they are mixed together in a poor way. The Parties from "most left to most right" are in the following order:
Left Party -> The Greens -> SPD -> CDU/CSU -> FDP -> AfD
The FDP can be debated, as they are a bit more socially liberal but also strongly against human rights for refugees, hard neoliberal destruction of the public sector, anti renewable energies... They have been sucking Musk and Milei on Twitter and other media platforms these past months. The CDU/CSU are also mentioned together because the CSU only exists in Bavaria and in exchange the CDU stays out of Bavaria. There are two distinct parties though, with the CSU being even more far right populist than the CDU currently. They are also staunchly against refugees, against renewable energies and more outspoken against womens rights and LGBT rights than the CDU. BSW is a bit of a wild card, because they are for proper social systems and taxation of the rich, but against refugees and pro Putin.
Elections results by age supports what I've been feeling for a while now - capitalism reduces our capacity to dream of a better world, to believe we all deserve a better life, takes away hope.
Once in the job market, people become competitive and enter the debt cycle, slowly losing capacity for empathy.
Since you need at least 316 out of 630 seats to have a majority we get only a few viable combinations.
Another interesting figure is, how voters have transferred to AFD:
My 2-cents analysis about this, the right parties have decided to fight on AFD's turf, focus their campaign on immigration, insecurity, reduce welfare, shifting the whole debate to the extreme right, in an attempt to steal the voters from AFD. But very predictively, this only help to legitimize the extreme right rhetoric et topics and unsurprisingly traditionally right voters ended up voting for extreme right this time.