CHANCELLOR Olaf Scholz’s three-party class cuddle coalition has collapsed. The unholy assembly of Scholz’s Social Democrat Party (SPD), the petit bourgeois Greens and the neoliberal Free Democrats has disintegrated under the burden of Germany’s growing economic crisis and the problems facing the German model of managed capitalism.

One expression of the break with the recent past is the rise, within the opposition Christian Democrat Party (CDU), of its latest leader Friedrich Merz, whose long contest with former party leader and chancellor Angela Merkel ended with her retirement. Since then the political landscape in Germany has changed and while the full disposition of political forces will not be visible until the election is over, the outline is taking shape.

The latest opinion polls have the SPD on 16.5 per cent, the conservative CDU/CSU alliance on 24.2 per cent, the Greens on 12 per cent, the neoliberal FDP on 3.5 per cent ,the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) on 20.5 per cent, Die Linke on 4 per cent and Bundnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) on 7 per cent. 

Entry to the Bundestag requires a 5 per cent national vote or, failing that, majority mandates from at least two constituencies. Thus it is possible, even probable, that both the FDP and Die Linke will leave the parliament.

In the case of the FDP the cause is the lack of traction for its particular brand of unconstrained capitalist economics, hostility to social spending and the whiff of bourgeois entitlement its leading personnel habitually display.

For Die Linke a lacklustre leadership and the growing contradiction between its working-class and substantially East German electoral base and the particular brand of identity politics which has displaced much of its earlier style has led to an inner-party crisis. 

In particular, the sharp hostility its leadership displayed towards the growing anti-war movement lay behind the formation, by the party’s most charismatic leader, Sahra Wagenkecht, of the eponymous BSW. The last time a survey examined how Die Linke would fare if it was led by Sahra Wagenknecht it polled 12 per cent — one in eight voters.

The CDU is in pole position to form a Bundestag majority but the abrasive Merz needs parliamentary allies. Traditionally the firm alliance between the CDU and its not-quite-soulmates in the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) is usually supplemented by the FDP’s support. But if it falls below the 5 per cent threshold and disappears from the Bundestag he has to opt for a “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats and face the uncomfortable fact that the CSU sister party cannot tolerate the Greens and will not govern with them.

The far-right populist AfD lies in second place and the recent Magdeburg Christmas market attack has given its anti-Islam rhetoric a new audience.

This is despite the fact that the alleged perpetrator of the murderous attack is an Israel-supporting, anti-Islamic eccentric whose early development was shaped in the poisonous domestic political environment of the Saudi dictatorship.

The first response to the outage from the coalition government came from the SPD Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who called upon the coalition partners to back more powers for the police and intelligence organisations.

Under a new Federal Police Act the cops will get new powers for electronic surveillance, storage of DNA data, the use of drones and new powers to reintroduce the infamous berufsverbot “employment bans” and bans on residence.

It would take a lot to admit the AfD into a right-wing coalition even if, on the AfD’s preferred territory of racism and Islamophobia, there is much they share.

The stumbling block is the longstanding verbot on co-operation with the fascist-influenced right plus the AfD’s idiosyncratic stance on Germany’s participation in Nato’s confrontation with Russia. The AfD is highly sensitive to the mood among its core supporters who oppose the Bundestag consensus for confronting Russia.

Patrik Kobele, the leader of Germany’s communist party, the DKP, makes the compelling point that the main expression of present-day anti-imperialism in Germany is the movement for peace. Sentiment against Germany’s participation in the Ukraine conflict is widespread, affects the electoral base of every political formation, especially that of the SPD, and is fused with anger at the effects of the economic crisis that is hitting home.

Germany’s manufacturing economy has been hit hard by the country’s participation in the Nato/EU sanctions regime which denied access to the cheap Russian energy supplies which had underpinned industrial productivity.

One consequence of the manufacturing crisis is that Volkswagen’s owners want to shut at least three German plants, slash tens of thousands of jobs, and also cut pay by 10 per cent for surviving workers.

In the negotiations the union IG Metall entered the negotiations with a wage demand for 7 per cent, barely enough to compensate for three years’ inflation wage loss and the first indications are that it is the the union that is making concessions.

The sabotage of the undersea pipeline which delivered much of Russia’s energy supplies to Germany is variously attributed to British, Ukrainian and US malefactors. While the political purpose of the sabotage was transparent and the objectives of whoever carried out the sabotage equally so, the immediate economic effect was to force Germany to import highly expensive fracked gas from the US.

Whether Scholz survives — not an impossibility since last time he pioneered Keir Starmer’s tactic of promising little, while his main opponent, the then CDU leader Armin Laschet, disgraced himself with uncalled-for levity at a solemn event to honour flood victims — he faces serious problems.

Last time his negotiating position in coalition formation also gave him an edge over the bellicose Green Annalena Baerbock who followed the German politicians’ tradition in sexing up her CV. (Former German defence minister and current EU president Ursula von der Leyen was also accused of copying several passages in her graduate dissertation without attribution and earlier two other German politicians were found to have faked qualifications).

Nevertheless Baerbock, as foreign minister in the coalition, has proved to be as effective an obstacle to peace as any conventional bourgeois politician and a no less effective and longer lasting warmonger than Boris Johnson, who two years ago was the Nato enthusiast delegated to blow up the last peace initiative.

The electoral consequence of Baerbock’s bellicosity is a narrowing of the Greens’ base and a deepening of the hostility with which workers already regard the Greens.

A new factor in the election is the intervention of Elon Musk. In an article in Die Welt, owned by the right-wing Springer media monopoly, Musk anticipated the “economic and cultural collapse of Germany” and backed the AfD.

Revealingly his admiration for the AfD arises not from its opposition to a war in the east but because its programme offers “to remove state over-regulation, to reduce taxes and to deregulate the market.”

And therein lies something of a problem for the AfD, which cannot easily reconcile the contradictory interests of its bourgeois backers and its largely plebeian followers. Of course, its rampant racism does much of the ideological work in masking the basic class orientation of its policies but the deepening of Germany’s economic crisis is bringing forth precisely the social forces which will level any forthcoming coalition as surely as it has dispatched the existing alliance.

What of the left in this election? The DKP is barred by a contested electoral ruling and argues that it can intervene in the election with the campaign for the Berlin Appeal which places the deployment of new US missiles in 2026 at the core of its fight against war.

Die Linke has elected a new leadership but even though some of its more right-wing, pro-Israel elements have left, it has still failed to resolve the policy questions — especially its hostility to the peace movement — which express the party’s ideological confusion. One tendency still backs arming Israel as the state mission of Federal Germany.

The big-city style of the leadership tends to underplay the basic economic questions which drive working-class attitudes while the socially liberal orientation of its rhetoric has limited reach beyond certain urban and well-educated strata. 

In the Angela Merkel era, when state policy encouraged the entry of large numbers of skilled and well-educated migrants/refugees from the Middle East, Die Linke contained conflicted views on such migration. With the rise of the AfD this issue became more central to national politics and Die Linke’s divisions more visible.

Die Linke lost touch with much of its West German working-class base and even more of its East German electorate, most especially in Thuringia, where it formed the state government and where, in recent state elections, it is was outvoted both by the AfD and the new BSW.

Die Linke’s electoral strategy recognises that it has lost its chance of reaching the 5 per cent threshold and hopes to retain parliamentary representation by winning several key constituencies directly, perhaps in Berlin and in Leipzig. 

Nothing is guaranteed in German elections and BSW thinks its more substantial national polling figure and its stronger local base in some areas will give its a solid representation in the Bundestag and a more decisive role at state and local level. Its oppositional view of free markets and unrestricted immigration — although couched in terms highly critical of the explicit and implicit racism of the AfD and the government parties — is fused with opposition to imperialist war and solidarity with the global South.

This election is unlikely to resolve very much and even less likely to see much in the way of a left-wing challenge even though Germany’s capitalist crisis is manifest in almost every area of social life and work.