The big day has arrived and the general election for the Bundestag is taking place today. Who will be the winners and who the losers? It looks as if there are some surprises among the many not-surprises.

Contrary to our usual practice, this time around we didn't vote by absentee ballot but actually went to the polling place, which is in a comprehensive school in the middle of Hechtsheim (not somewhere we have set foot before, why should we?). It looked reasonably busy but in fact after having located the room assigned to our voting precinct we didn't have to wait at all but were ushered into our election booths practically at once, which was a relief. The weather was really sunny and pleasant, too, so afterwards we had a nice walk, a tram ride to the bakery to pick up some treats for later, and another nice walk back home. I spent most of the afternoon finishing up the musical arrangements for the Frankfurt ball and working on the “annotated programme” for the same event – something new I'm trying this year in lieu of the “virtual class”, which was very poorly attended last year and does not seem to be worth the hassle of converting our upstairs living room to the “FSCDC e.V. broadcast studio” if only two people are listening.

So what about the election results? As I said, they seem to be a mixture of (small) surprises and (big) not-surprises:

• As was to be expected, the CDU/CSU won the election, although at a hair below 30% they don't seem to have as large a share of the vote as they may have expected. Still, Friedrich Merz seems to be well on his way to finally achieving his life goal of becoming federal chancellor, or, as the case may be, becoming Caliph instead of the Caliph.
• The SPD obtained the worst outcome in a federal selection for more than a century, at a projected 16-odd% of the vote. This epic loss means that they will probably be richly ärewarded with another stint in government because the CDU/CSU will need them to form a coalition (they're the only single party that together with the CDU/CSU will command a majority – at least as long as other complicated circumstances, of which more anon, won't come into play).
• The AfD is gloating because they seem to have managed to roughly double their share of the vote, to 20% or even a bit more. Of course this doesn't buy them anything because nobody else will touch them with a long pole when it comes to cooperation in parliament, let alone forming a government. Their outlook, according to their co-chairperson Alice Weidel, is to hang around until the CDU/CSU, having tried and failed to enact the policies they want with “the left” (meaning anyone except the CDU/CSU itself and the AfD), will be forced, for the sake of the country, to accept the AfD as the coalition partner they really wanted all along but weren't allowed to have. To which I say, “dream on”.
• The Greens have lost a little compared to the last general election to end up around 11%. Chances are they won't be needed for a government coalition but that depends on the outcome for the smaller parties (FDP and BSW). Bavarian first minister Markus Söder of the CSU must be thanking his lucky stars for apparently not having his promise of “no coalition with the Greens” catch up with him when that would be the only reasonable way to form a government.
• The FDP seems to be pretty definitely out for failing to clear the 5% cutoff. If that turns out to be the final result – and it looks likely – that would, according to himself, mean the end of its chairman Christian Lindner's political career. Looking at his bio he doesn't seem to have done much honest work in his life so far but since he spent most of the last two decades in various parliaments or as a government minister, he will probably have a nice pension to look forward to, so if he supplements that from the lecture circuit and a cushy book deal or two, he may not need to go back to his work as a (mediocre) entrepreneur. – The FDP's official narrative now seems to be that they took one for the team by being, at least in the public perception, the ones that caused the previous “traffic light” (SPD/Greens/FDP) government to fail, and that they're now being unjustly punished by the electorate.
• Whether the BSW, at a current projection of 4.95% of the vote, will be in our out is, as of now, anyone's guess. Apart from giving its namesake old battle-axe another chance at annoying everybody else by saying stupid things whenever she opens her mouth, that would make life in the Bundestag that much more complicated because having the BSW there means that the combined seats of the CDU/CSU and SPD won't command a majority, so Friedrich Merz would (to the chagrin of Mr Söder) have to arrange himself with the SPD and the Greens in what, based on the usual national-flag references, would be called a “Kenya coalition” (of black, red, and green). This is a situation which presumably everyone except the Greens themselves would prefer to avoid.
• The left-wing Linke party also managed to increase their share of the vote to almost 9%, apparently mostly from young voters – it seems that Merz's recent shenanigans in parliament have strengthend the Linke's claim of being the option that is least likely to lead to a CDU/CSU+AfD government, but again, fat chance. They're looking forward to being a thorn in the side of Merz's coalition, however that will look like in the end. (The Linke itself, like the AfD, is not a coalition partner that the CDU/CSU will consider, so they're not in any danger of becoming involved.)
• As usual, one seat in parliament goes to the SSW, or Südschleswigscher Wählerverband (South Schleswig Voters' Coalition), the representative of the Danish minority in the very north of Germany. As an ethnic group they are exempt from the 5% cutoff, but are otherwise quiet as mice (no pro-Danish separatism there).
• Everyone else is apparently out. This leaves us without representatives from the 39 other minor parties eligible to field candidates and which for the most part, except for their most direct adherents, few people will have heard about. That would include, e.g., the Piraten, the EU-friendly Volt, the Freie Wähler (Free Voters), the Tierschutzpartei (Animal Protection Party), the CSC (Cannabis Social Club), the V-Partei (which stands for Veränderung – change –, vegetarianism and veganism), the Partei für Verjüngungsforschung (Party for Rejuvenation Research) and various others.

We'll have to wait for tomorrow morning to be able to say whether the BSW will be joining the CDU/CSU, AfD, SPD, Greens, and Linke in the ranks of the Bundestag, and what that will mean for the impending coalition talks. There's noise about wanting to form a government “by Easter”, which seems like an awfully long time seen from mid-February, but if the SPD insists on having a members' referendum on the proposed coalition terms we can probably count ourselves lucky if they finish anywhere nearly as quickly. In the meantime Scholz will carry on as a lame-duck chancellor until Merz and whoever (not Scholz) will negotiate a coalition deal on the SPD's behalf get their act together. Scholz himself, of course, loudly lamented the SPD's loss without taking any sort of personal responsibility for it – but who would have thought that fielding the single most unpopular SPD politician in the country as the main candidate would lead to anything but a surprise landslide victory? After all, it worked in 2021 when Scholz's main asset was being “Merkel 2.0” and his CDU/CSU competitor Armin Laschet committed some very public gaffes, so this time around Scholz's hope must have been that Merz, too, would succumb to a serious attack of foot-in-mouth disease (something he is not unknown for) and let Scholz edge past him before the polls close. But that doesn't appear to have happened.

Update: (as of Monday morning) Provisional election results graph from the Federal Returning Officer. It looks as if the BSW is not in after all.