German states possess considerable powers under the constitution, so elections to state parliaments always matter. But state elections taking place in 2026 have far wider implications. At stake is Germany’s nearly 80-year old tradition of centrist coalition government, in which a parliamentary majority is fashioned through negotiation and compromise among parties with only minority support themselves.
Each of Germany 16 states has its own parliament (Landtag) and government. The politics and procedures surrounding the election of the state parliament and the subsequent latter formation of a state government closely resemble those around the election of the Bundestag and the formation of a federal government.
With the normal term of a Landtag being five years (for the Bundestag it’s four), an average year would see three such elections. But 2026 sees five, two, in March, in the south-west of the country and three, in September, in the east. All five of them will have an impact on national politics, but the impact of two of them – in Baden-Württemberg in the south-west and Sachsen-Anhalt in the east – will be of an altogether different magnitude.
Although the political situation in the two states could not be more different, each represents a profound challenge to the centrist parties in general and to the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) in particular. Meeting either challenge alone will be hard enough for Germany’s dominant party; meeting them both might be impossible for it.
This series of posts, over the remainder of the year, will record what happens, first in the elections (in March and September) and second, in the subsequent negotiations aimed at forming a government in each state that commands majority support in the state parliament.
I: Elections in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz (March 2026)
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 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 post goes on to conclude that it shows 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.