On the road to a new German government, the election itself is only halfway.
The new governing coalitions that could normally be expected to emerge a couple or so months after the elections for each state’s parliament in March 2026 are nothing if not familiar: in Baden-Württemberg, the continuation of the two-party coalition between the Greens and the CDU that has governed there since 2016; in Rheinland-Pfalz, a carbon copy of the two-party coalition between the CDU and the Social Democrats (SPD) which took power at national level after the Bundestag election in February 2025.
What does the familiarity of these outcomes say about German democracy? Does it reflect a reassuring stability at a politically difficult time – or an inability to create anything new?
Starting with a detailed analysis of the 2026 election results compared with 2025 (for the Bundestag) and 2021 (for the outgoing Landtags), this first post goes on to show how bunged-up German democracy has become. This conclusion is based on both the near-inevitability of these outcomes and the political fragility that rules other outcomes out.
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