Germany After the Election: Rightward Shift, Left-Wing Surge, and the Battle Over the ICC

As Germany's new chancellor Merz backs Netanyahu against the ICC and the far-right AfD hits historic highs, a left-wing resurgence mounts its strongest challenge to Germany’s establishment in years.

Germany’s election results signal a breaking point. The far-right AfD made chilling gains, surpassing 20%, while Die Linke – alone in refusing to throw minorities under the bus – scored a historic win, emerging as the strongest political force in Berlin.

The conservative CDU/CSU surged to nearly 29%, while the Social Democrats (SPD) collapsed to their worst result since the 19th century. The Greens, too, took a hit. The pattern is as familiar as it is damning: Germany’s center-left parties abandoned economic justice and tried to repackage far-right scapegoating with a humanitarian gloss – blaming migrants instead of confronting the policies fueling insecurity.

Meanwhile, Germany’s new chancellor, CDU leader Friedrich Merz, wasted no time signaling his allegiance to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Less than 24 hours after securing the largest share of the vote, Merz invited Netanyahu to Germany, framing it as an explicit rebuke of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for the Israeli leader on charges or war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“I think it is a completely absurd idea that an Israeli prime minister cannot visit the Federal Republic of Germany,” Merz declared, leaving no doubt about where his next government stands. The move puts Germany at the center of an escalating showdown over the ICC – one that predates this election but could have profound consequences for the EU’s stance on the court’s authority. The ICC’s charges against Netanyahu came as the court already faced mounting attacks from Western governments. The Biden administration made clear it will resist efforts to hold Israeli leaders accountable. Trump went even further, slapping sanctions on the ICC.

When the ICC requested arrest warrants last year, Germany didn’t just refuse to back the move – it intervened. Berlin’s amicus curiae submission, a complex legal maneuver, effectively stalled the process and gave Israel diplomatic cover. The justification? The “principle of complementarity,” which prioritizes national investigations over international prosecution. Never mind that Israeli human rights group Yesh Din warned Israel has no record of seriously investigating its own war crimes. Its review of the past decade of Israeli assaults on Gaza and the courts’ responses makes chrystal-clear: Israel has no intention of properly punishing or preventing war crimes.

Independent experts like former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth pointed to a broader pattern: Germany prioritizing Staatsräson – its policy of safeguarding Israel’s security as historical atonement – over international law. With Merz in power, many fear this imbalance will escalate to new extremes.

Germany’s role is pivotal. For years, Berlin positioned itself as both a staunch defender of Israel and a champion of the rules-based order. Ever since Israel’s assault on Gaza after Hamas’s attack on October 7 2023, that contradiction has become increasingly impossible to ignore. Asked about Merz’s stance on the ICC, Die Linke frontrunner Jan van Aken didn’t mince words: “Of course, Netanyahu must be arrested if he comes to Germany,” van Aken said. “This is international law.” He slammed Merz’s “double standards” and called ignoring the ICC’s warrant “a catastrophe.”

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) frontrunner Alice Weidel hasn’t weighed in on the issue, but her recent meeting with U.S. Vice President JD Vance signals deeper alignment with the American nationalist right. She is expected to fall in line with the Trump administration on foreign policy.

The question isn’t whether Merz’s government will shield Israeli leaders – it’s how far it’ll go. Merkel-era policies enshrined Staatsräson but still kept a fragile balance: backing Israel while paying lipservice to international law. That balance is now unraveling. An outright rejection of the ICC’s authority is on the table. If Germany and its European allies follow the U.S.’s lead in undermining the court, what stops other states from doing the same? By siding with Netanyahu, Merz is helping to dismantle the very system of accountability Germany claims to uphold.

But the real shock of this election was the far-right’s dramatic surge. The AfD didn’t just gain ground – it doubled its vote share, cementing itself as a major force in German politics. Its platform? Mass deportations, open racism, and a full-scale assault on multiculturalism and memory culture. The AfD’s rise is part of a broader unraveling across the West, where economic hardship and austerity fuel reactionary politics. Germany’s establishment thought co-opting far-right rhetoric would contain the threat. Instead – predictably – it legitimized the AfD and helped push it further into the mainstream.

In eastern Germany, the AfD’s surge was most striking, laying bare unhealed wounds from reunification. The party exploited deep resentment over the collapse of socialist-era industries and a neoliberal political class that never deliverd on its promises. Thirty-eight percent of working-class voters backed the AfD – nearly three times the support for the SPD.

As centrists clung to austerity, the far right filled the void with easy scapegoats: migrants, elites, the left. One in five German voters bought into this narrative. The question now is how much the AfD’s extremism will shape the new government. As normalization accelerates, many believe Germany’s so-called firewall – its refusal to govern with the far right – could easily crumble by 2029.

Meanwhile, the Die Linke’s surge – becoming Berlin’s strongest force for the first time with nearly 20% and winning multiple districts – exposed a generational divide. Older voters largely stuck with establishment parties or the AfD, while younger ones moved left. This wasn’t just about economic justice or frustration with the status quo; it was a backlash against centrist parties embracing xenophobic rhetoric and Merz’s last-minute push to break thefirewall, forcing through a controversial – and arguably unconstitutional – anti-migrant law just weeks before the election.

Foreign policy played a role as well. Die Linke was one of the few parties to mildly challenge Germany’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, while the mainstream – including the Greens, once a progressive force – appeased to the CDU-CSU and failed to channel the outrage of a generation shaped by rising inequality and the real-time genocidal horrors in Gaza, carried out in part with German-made weapons. Die Linke mobilized largely through grassroots activism and social media.

Over the past year, Germany ramped up arms exports to Netanyahu’s government under the banner of Staatsräson – and in doing so, handed the AfD a new weapon. The far right co-opted Staatsräson as a shield, using support for Israel to deflect from its own antisemitism. A stark example came in a recent X exchange between Elon Musk and AfD frontrunner Alice Weidel. In a blatant rewrite of history, Weidel absurdly claimed Hitler was “a communist,” then insisted modern antisemitism stems primarily from “leftish Palestinians” critical of Israel. The remarks fused the AfD’s historical revisionism with a pro-Israel stance increasingly indistinguishable from the mainstream.

Germany’s pilitical shift raises urgend questions. Will the EU resist U.S. interference in the ICC, or will Germany’s new government help Washington dismantle one of the last mechanisms of global accountability – on both Israel-Palestine and Russia? And as Germany tilts to the right under Merz, is Die Linke’s surge the start of a broader left-wing counterforce? The stakes extend far beyond Germany. The future of international law, Europe’s political realignment, and the next phase of the global far right’s ascent are all on the line.