After Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won a plurality of seats in federal elections Sunday, party leader Friedrich Merz said he will pursue a governing coalition with the country’s socialist party rather than its right-wing populist party.
CDU achieved a comfortable 208 plurality in the Bundestag elections, short of the 316-seat absolute majority necessary to secure Merz’s chancellorship — meaning the party must form a coalition with another party before Merz can govern. At a celebration at the party’s headquarters Monday, the CDU leader confirmed he will pursue that coalition with the leftist Social Democratic Party (SPD), which came in third place at 120 seats — and not with the AfD, which came in second at an unprecedented 152 seats, more than doubling its presence since Germany’s 2021 election. (RELATED: EU Regulators Attacking X Because Of…
