Germany General Election 2025

On 23 January 2025 Germans went to the polls to elect a new parliament. The collapse of the coalition between SPD, Die Grünen, and FDP in November 2024 led to a snap election just over half a year ahead of the scheduled general election in the autumn. The final result saw the Christian Democrats come first with 22.6 per cent of the votes, an increase of 3.6 per cent. Combined with their the Bavarian sister-party CSU’s 6.0 per cent (up 0.8 per cent) they are the strongest force in the new Bundestag, together holding 208 of the 630 seats. The extreme right ‘Alternative for Germany‘ (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) gained most new votes with a vote share of 28.8 per cent (up 10.4 per cent, 152 seats). The party of (outgoing) chancellor Olaf Scholz came third with 16.4 percent (down 9.3 percent, 120 seats).
The Green party (Grüne) came fourth, securing 11.6 percent of the list vote (down 3.1%, 85 seats). Die Linke won 8.8 per cent (up 3.9 per cent, 39 seats). Former co-governing FDP did not enter parliament due to their vote share of 4.3 per cent which is below the 5 per cent threshold to enter parliament (down 7.1 per cent). Danish minority party SSW reached 0.2 percent in the list vote but gained one seat through special rules for parties representing minorities. Other parties not represented in parliament accounted for 9.4 percent of the valid votes.
This pair of maps shows on the left the winning parties of the constituency vote (Erststimme) which directly elects a constituency representative into parliament and on the right the strongest party in the list vote (Zweitstimme) which determines the proportional representation for each party in the new parliament. These results are shown as gridded population cartograms which are proportional to the respective population there, accompanied by a small ‘conventional’ land area map.