Many readers – especially many American, Canadian and British friends – have expressed bewilderment at Germany’s party system. The eve of the German elections is as good a time as any to provide a basic primer on the different parties competing for votes within the Federal Republic, their rivalries and alliances, and their future prospects. This broad view will also clarify many present political tensions and explain why the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland has become such an important political principle, increasingly synonymous for our elites with “liberal democracy” itself.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll only describe the largest parties that are most likely to make it into the Bundestag, and I’ll neglect many historical matters and some crucial details, with a view towards clarifying present affairs.

The German party system is highly conservative, and it continues to be dominated by the traditional parties, which have been with us since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 or even before. There are three of these:

1) The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its smaller Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). The CDU and the CSU were originally conservative Christian democratic parties with some market liberal sympathies. Until the crucial chancellorship of Angela Merkel, they were also Volksparteien, or big-tent parties that represented basically all constituencies across the legally permissible right half of the political spectrum. Once upon a time, the CSU ruled Bavaria with an outright majority, and through the mid-1990s the CDU and CSU together generally commanded over 40% of the vote federally. Their decline began before Merkel’s chancellorship, but Merkel and her strategy of asymmetric demobilisation (more on that below) have cast them into a long crisis. If you had to sum up this crisis as briefly as possible, you’d say that it arises from the gradual transformation of the CDU/CSU from Volksparteien into the heavily triangulated centre-right parties of the present. The Union parties booked their worst result ever in 2021, with a mere 24% of the vote. They will be lucky if they get much more than 30% this time around. Americans looking for some orientation could do worse than equating the CDU and CSU with the pre-Trump Republican Party of the United States.