On 23 February, Germany voted for members of the new Bundestag, the German parliament, with the Christian Democratic Union and its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), winning the election.
The conservatives obtained 28.6% of the vote and will most likely recover the chancellorship they lost to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) when Olaf Scholz became chancellor in 2021.
Before replacing Scholz, the CDU leader and chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz will have to reach a coalition agreement with the Social Democrats, who finished third with 16.4% of the ballot (nine points below the 2021 elections).
A coalition between the main poles of the centre-right and centre-left appears to be the only realistic option. The Greens also lost votes compared to their result from 2021 and would not have a parliamentary majority with the CDU/CSU.
In contrast, the CDU/CSU and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have more than half of the seats in the Bundestag after the AfD doubled its 2021 results and received 20.8% of support. Still, everything seems to indicate that the conservatives will continue to politically isolate the AfD – at least at the national level and when it comes to forming coalitions.
With all signs pointing towards a coalition between the CDU/CSU and the SPD, what kinds of policies towards the Middle East should we expect from the new government?
Open doors to Netanyahu
Under the Scholz-led government, comprised of his SPD, the Greens, and the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), Germany was already one of the closest EU countries to Israel. In 2024, the German government approved arms exports to Israel valued at €160 million ($166 million).
Although the weapons export data is far from transparent, it shows that the German government continued to authorise weapons sales to Israel after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in May 2024 that Israel must halt any military offensive in Rafah that could harm civilians. Among the products approved for export after the ICJ ruling were, for instance, engines for Israel’s Merkava tanks.
Germany’s stance on Gaza has complicated the relationship between German cultural, political, and development organisations and local partners in the Middle East. It has also led to a major reputational loss for Germany in Arab countries. A survey of Arab public opinion in January 2024 showed that only 9% of respondents supported Germany’s position, while 75% disapproved and the rest did not know or did not answer.
Berlin was one of the European capitals that blocked a review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement petitioned by Spain and Ireland. The association agreement, which includes a human rights clause, facilitates trade between Israel and the EU. This bilateral framework could potentially have offered the most direct avenue for the EU to exert pressure on Israel for its war conduct in Gaza after 7 October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, killed 1,139 people, and took around 250 hostages.
Since then, 46,006 people (most of them civilians) have been killed in Gaza, in what is probably a significant undercount. The fragile ceasefire currently in place led to an increase in the quantity of humanitarian aid entering Gaza before Israel announced on 2 March that it was re-introducing a blockade. Even before this recent decision, the situation remained abysmal, with families struggling to find shelter from the cold amid destroyed houses.
The political and humanitarian situation in Gaza did not play a major role at the Munich Security Conference held one week before the German elections, nor in the election campaign. Among the parties that will be represented in the next Bundestag, only Die Linke (The Left) demands an end to Germany’s weapons exports to Israel. Likely future chancellor Friedrich Merz has a clear image of the kind of relations between Germany and Israel he wants in the future.
As opposition chief, Merz criticised the ruling coalition for a brief reduction in the approval of licenses for weapons exports to Israel in early 2024. To this, Scholz replied: “We have supplied weapons and we will supply weapons [to Israel].” After his election win, Merz announced he had talked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In their call, Merz promised Netanyahu that, despite the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant against him, he would “find a way” for Netanyahu to visit Germany if he wished so without being arrested.
In a speech to the Knesset in 2008, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, also from the CDU, spoke about Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust before defining Israel’s security as Germany’s “Staatsräson” (reason of state). Daniel Marwecki, who has written extensively about German-Israeli relations, argues that the “Staatsräson” concept has never been properly defined.
And yet, he notes, the question of whether to arrest Netanyahu if he sets foot in Germany presents itself as a decision between this ill-defined “Staatsräson” and the respect for a rules-based world order, which requires Netanyahu’s arrest.
The SPD has criticised Merz’s welcoming of Netanyahu to Germany but so far, the discussion remains theoretical. The foreign ministry will likely be occupied by a Social Democrat in the next government, as it traditionally goes to the smaller coalition partner. The current Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, and the SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil, are some of the names under discussion.
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Tougher on Iran, cuts in humanitarian aid
The next German government will likely adopt a tougher approach towards Iran. Whereas the SPD election program in 2021 discussed a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s nuclear program, there is no mention of a possible nuclear agreement this time.
Instead, there is a call for the EU to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation. On this topic, the SPD would be pushing at an open door with the CDU/CSU, as the conservatives’ own program promises “more realism and toughness” in Germany’s policy towards Iran. Critics of an IRGC terrorist designation have argued that it would damage diplomatic contacts with Tehran and would also affect junior members who joined the IRGC as conscripts.
The core topic in the current coalition negotiations between the CDU/CSU and the SPD is the same one that brought about the collapse of the previous coalition, namely, how to square the national budget for 2025. When it comes to this, the funds for development cooperation and humanitarian aid (which already suffered a reduction in 2024) offer a propitious target for budget cuts. Merz recently stated that countries that do not collaborate with the repatriation of their citizens after they have had their asylum claims denied in Germany should not be entitled to German development aid.
Although drastic measures such as those recently taken in the United Kingdom, or even more extreme, in the United States, are not to be expected, the cuts would still have significant consequences. In 2022, Germany was the second largest economic contributor to the UN system with almost $8 billion, more than doubling Japan, the third-largest contributor, and only behind the US.
The future of Germany’s contributions to UNRWA is also uncertain. Berlin halted its payments to the UN agency dedicated to Palestinian refugees for three months in early 2024 after UNRWA was accused of complicity with Hamas. Long after these claims had been debunked, the CDU/CSU kept referring to them to put pressure on the German government’s resumed funding of UNRWA.
Immigration and asylum: Front and centre in the election
The main topic in Germany’s election campaign was not foreign policy or the economy, which has experienced a moderate recession for two consecutive years. Instead, the most discussed issues were immigration, asylum, and domestic security. The three of them were too often discussed indistinctively, nurturing a faulty conflation of immigration and criminality.
The election campaign came at the end of a year during which the governing coalition had imposed controls at all German borders, increased the number of deportations by 20% (including the resumption of deportation flights to Afghanistan), and reduced the provisions for asylum seekers in the country.
After the collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, the German government joined other European countries in pausing the asylum applications of Syrians in Germany. Due to an unclear legal framework, uncertainty prevails among Syrians who have long been in Germany about whether a short return to their homeland could imply the loss of refugee status. Meanwhile, the CDU/CSU and the AfD called for an immediate plan to organise the return of Syrian refugees to their country, a move that generated further unease.
A car-ramming attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg that killed six people on 20 December 2024 added a new harshness to the immigration debate. The main suspect is a Saudi-born doctor who had expressed Islamophobic views as well as support for the AfD. This did not prevent the far-right party from instrumentalising the attack. They did so by focusing on the suspect’s origins and not on his political statements.
In the following weeks, Magdeburg registered a major increase in racist attacks, as 2024 concluded with an increase in assaults against asylum-seeker centres and right-wing extremist crimes.
Soon after the attack in Magdeburg, Merz proposed stripping dual citizens of their German citizenship if they committed criminal offences. The high bar in the German constitution for someone to lose citizenship is a result of lessons learned from the politically and racially motivated denationalisation during Nazism.
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At the end of January, the CDU/CSU presented a non-binding resolution in the Bundestag that demanded turning back anyone seeking to enter the country without the appropriate documents at Germany’s borders, including asylum-seekers. The resolution was approved thanks to the votes of the AfD, the first time the far-right played a decisive role in reaching a parliamentary majority.
Merz justified his new stance on accepting votes from the AfD by referring to the attacks in Magdeburg and Aschaffenburg, where on 22 January a rejected asylum-seeker from Afghanistan with psychological problems killed two children.
Merz engaged in further rhetorical escalation, talking about asylum applicants as “ticking timebombs” and falsely claiming that there are daily incidents of gang rape by asylum seekers in Germany. If the CDU/CSU had thought that putting immigration and asylum front and centre in the election campaign would help them, this was not the case.
Whereas the AfD won around three points in the polls since the collapse of the German government last November, the conservatives moved from an initial 33% in the polls to 28.5% on election day.
The far-right waits in the wings
Chancellor Scholz boasted during the election campaign about the increase in deportations and announced plans to deport criminal offenders. In the ongoing coalition negotiations, the SPD is willing to make major concessions on immigration and asylum to the CDU/CSU. There is speculation that the Social Democrats would approve even more controls at the borders as well moving towards the CDU/CSU’s calls to have asylum processes take place outside the EU.
Even so, Merz’s initial calls for all asylum-seekers to be pushed back at the borders will not materialise. They are not only incompatible with the German constitution or the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights but also impossible to implement on a 3,767-kilometre land border. The CDU/CSU’s maximalist demands while on the campaign trail risk providing ammunition for the AfD’s opposition strategy in the coming years.
The far-right is already portraying Merz as having broken his promises on immigration in the ongoing coalition talks and has its eyes set on the regional elections in Saxony-Anhalt in 2026, a federal state where the AfD obtained 37% of the votes in the recent elections.
Although the coalition negotiations between the CDU/CDU and SPD have just begun, some things are for certain: the next German government will be even closer to Israel, tougher towards Iran, and implement harsher immigration and asylum policies.
Marc Martorell Junyent is a graduate of International Relations and holds an MA in Comparative and Middle East Politics and Society from the University of Tübingen (Germany). He has been published in the LSE Middle East Blog, Responsible Statecraft, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), Jacobin, and Inkstick
Follow him on Twitter: @MarcMartorell3
