BERLIN – At the Alternative for Germany party’s federal congress in Erfurt on Saturday, co-chair Alice Weidel said something German coalition managers do not want printed: she expects the next Bundestag election in 2027, two years before the scheduled 2029 vote.
“I think that the Bundestag elections will not take place in 2029, but significantly earlier. I expect early elections already next year,” Weidel told the Phoenix channel from the congress floor in Erfurt.
The polling data behind that prediction is not easy to dismiss. A YouGov flash survey published on June 16 placed support for the CDU/CSU conservative bloc at 20 percent, close to a five-year low. Separately, an INSA study commissioned by Bild in early May found that only 24 percent of Germans believe the CDU/CSU-SPD coalition will last until 2029. Fifty-eight percent expect it to collapse beforehand.
Those numbers do not translate automatically into the scenario Weidel described. A snap election requires either a failed confidence vote or an agreed dissolution, neither of which is currently on the coalition’s stated agenda. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has not indicated any intention to seek early elections. But the arithmetic of 20 percent CDU/CSU support, combined with the INSA finding about public expectations of coalition durability, gives Weidel concrete numbers to point to rather than a rhetorical position alone.
The AfD currently leads most national polling, a position that has held broadly stable through months of governing turbulence. Thousands of protesters filled the streets of Erfurt to oppose the congress, blocking roads and clashing with police, as TRT World reported from the scene. Early elections would give the party its best opportunity to convert that polling lead into actual power, since coalition arithmetic after a snap vote would almost certainly require any government-formation process to navigate around AfD numbers that no other major party is currently willing to include.
Whether the coalition endures long enough to avoid a confidence crisis before 2029 is a question the summer political calendar will not resolve. What the Erfurt congress confirmed is that the AfD is not building its strategy around waiting to find out.
