German election reside updates: Voting begins after closing ballot predicts massive positive aspects for AfD

German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier has cast his vote at a polling station in Berlin.

Steinmeier called the elections after chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence in the German Bundestag on 15 January – after losing the support of his coalition when he fired finance minister Christian Lindner amid tensions over economic policy.

Exit polls will be announced and vote counting will begin as soon as soon as polls close at 6pm local time (5pm UK).

The general picture is expected to become clear fairly quickly, but the final official result is not expected until early on Monday.

Germany’s electoral system rarely gives any party an absolute majority and it is expected that two or more parties will most likely form a coalition.

There is no set time limit for this process, with parties likely to hold exploratory talks to determine who they have most common ground with before moving on to formal coalition talks.

Those negotiations typically produce a detailed coalition agreement setting out the new government’s plans. That will typically need approval at least from conventions of the parties involved and some parties may choose to put it to a ballot of their entire membership.

Once that process is complete, the Bundestag can elect the new chancellor.

German voters are heading to the polls to elect a new parliament which will determine how the country is run for the next four years.

Polls opened at 8am local time (7am UK), with exit polls released and counting set to begin as soon as voting closes at 6pm (5pm UK).

Germans can also vote by postal ballot, but their ballot must arrive by the time polling stations close on election day to be counted.

When a young German anti-climate activist nicknamed the “anti-Greta Thunberg” began flattering tech billionaire Elon Musk on X, few could have foreseen it leading to the tech billionaire wholeheartedly endorsing Germany’s far-right. It would take just ten months.

X owner turned Trump ally Musk has described the AfD as the only party that “can save Germany”, interviewed the party’s leader, Alice Wiedel, spoken at the AfD’s election rally and written an op-ed endorsing the party.

Musk has freely admitted that before his first interaction with the “anti-Greta Thunberg” Naomi Seibt on April 20 last year, he “didn’t know [the] AfD from a hole in the ground”.

Since she was 19, Seibt has spent five years becoming a right-wing firebrand, slowly building up an audience largely outside of Germany.

She began with opposition to climate activism, working with a pro-Trump, climate denial US think tank called Heartland Institute, but quickly turned to fighting against the “woke mind virus”. She is anti-feminist, anti-Islam, pro-Russian and dismissive of German guilt over its Nazi past.

Tom Watling and Alicja Hagopian report:

Our columnist Mary Dejevsky writes:

Europe thought it was better prepared for a Donald Trump presidency the second time around, but it clearly had little idea of the hurricane about to head east. The way Trump has exercised power since entering the White House has been dizzying. It has distressed much of the European and British establishment, while lending new dynamism to the political right – the actual right, that is, not its liberal European rendition.

You have only to consider the right-wing pow-wow that was the conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) in London this week. Meet the right as a rising political force, which may well be set to grow for as long as Trump is in power and as long as Trumpism endures.

But what of continental Europe? Could it be that Trump is changing the political dynamics here as well, to the point where the right could become dominant across the region? To an extent, the views brought together by the ARC are an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. But you could also argue that, in much of Europe, we are almost there.

The right was successfully creeping across Europe well before Trump 2.0 came along. Giorgia Meloni won power in Italy in 2022; there are what are widely regarded as populist governments of the right in Hungary, Slovakia and now Austria, and there would also be such a government in Romania had the election not been annulled. The far-right Freedom Party topped the polls in the Netherlands in 2023 and is part of a four-party coalition. The far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) is the main opposition in several regions in Germany, after heading last year’s polls, while Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is the main opposition in the French parliament, following Emmanuel Macron’s ill-judged summer election.

But there remains a big constraint on far-right parties being elected to government in France and Germany, which can be summed up as history. Voters in France have repeatedly shrunk from electing a far-right president or parliament, despite coming near, and those German regions where the AfD has topped the polls face the opprobrium of the wider electorate, with huge “Never Again!” protests every recent weekend. Could the Trump effect change this?

There may be a preliminary answer as early as this Sunday night.

In his final pitch to voters, frontrunner Friedrich Merz underscored his calls for a tougher stance on migration, but sought to insist that he would not repeat his move to break the so-called “firewall” against the far-right again.

Last month, he brought a nonbinding motion calling for many more migrants to be turned back at Germany’s borders to parliament. The motion was approved thanks to votes from AfD – marking a first in post-war Germany which prompted opponents to accuse Mr Merz of breaking a taboo. He rejects the criticism.

“We will under no circumstances discuss any talks, never mind negotiations or a participation in government, with AfD,” Mr Merz insisted on Saturday.

But some voters are finding it difficult to accept this pledge, including some in the LGBTQ+ community. As we reported earlier this week, many of AfD’s LGBTQ-related demands overlap with those of the conservatives, including reversing the trans self-determination law and restricting the use of inclusive language and gender-affirming care for minors.

“Whoever does it once, does it twice, and three times,” Andre Lehmann, board member at Germany’s LGBTQ+ umbrella group LSVD told The Independent. “It’s not only a threat for LGBTI people in Germany, but for many, many people in this country, and for democracy as a whole.”

Dirk Wiese, a politician in the centre-left SPD wing of the government, told The Independent that Elon Musk has “used his influence for deliberate provocations, misinformation, and the spread of populist narratives”.

For Wiese, Musk “crossed a red line” when he opened up his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, to unregulated, unverified content.

“His platform, X, has increasingly become a hub for right-wing conspiracy theories and anti-democratic actors,” he says.

“This has real-world consequences, in Germany, too. Disinformation undermines social cohesion and can influence elections. Musk crosses a red line when he deliberately interferes in democratic processes.

“Those who deliberately sow division, provoke, and disregard historical accountability must face consequences—whether in public perception or in business. Germany will stand firm against any form of foreign interference and disinformation.”

The 46-year-old is making the first bid of the far-right, Alternative for Germany (AfD) for the country’s top job.

An economist by training, Weidel joined the party shortly after it was founded in 2013.

She has been co-leader of her party’s parliamentary group since the party first won seats in the national legislature in 2017. She has been a co-leader of the party itself since 2022, along with Tino Chrupalla.

In December, she was nominated as the candidate for chancellor – though other parties say they won’t work with the AfD, so she has no realistic path to the top job at present.

Germany’s 69-year-old opposition leader has been the front-runner in the election campaign, with his center-right Union bloc leading polls.

He became the leader of his Christian Democratic Union party after longtime chancellor Angela Merkel – a former rival – stepped down in 2021. Merz has taken his party in a more conservative direction. In the election campaign, he has made curbing irregular migration a central issue.

Merz lacks experience in government. He joined the European Parliament in 1989 before becoming a lawmaker in Germany five years later. He took a break from active politics for several years after 2009, practicing as a lawyer and heading the supervisory board of investment manager BlackRock’s German branch.

Read more about his opponents here:

For many LGBTQ+ Germans, the upcoming elections are a source of anxiety, a fight to maintain existing rights rather than a push for new ones.

The focus has shifted from progress to preservation, with hard-won gains now under threat.

Despite the fact its candidate for chancellor is openly lesbian, the far-right AfD party has become the loudest voice against LGBTQ+ rights in parliament, and even filed a motion to repeal same-sex marriage and adoption in 2017.

While the far-right party alone will likely not have enough seats to push these demands forward, many fear that frontrunner Friedrich Merz’s recent collaboration with AfD on migration – which shattered a longstanding taboo against working with the far-right – could see his CDU/CSU party joining AfD to pass new LGBTQ+ rights restrictions nationally – just as they have already done at the state level.

Many of AfD’s LGBTQ-related demands overlap with those of the conservatives, be it reversing the trans self-determination law or restricting the use of inclusive language and gender-affirming care for minors.

Enrique Anarte has more in this report: