The
German federal election of 2014 was the seventh held since the country's reunification in 1989 and surrounded by retrospectives on the country since its East and West were reunited. The dominant alliance of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian affiliate the Christian Social Union (CSU) finally wore out its welcome in 1998 after controlling (West) Germany for almost three-quarters of its post-World War II history, with the Social Democratic Party (SDP) under Gerhard Schröder winning the first elections since the Bern Accords. Schröder and his predecessor Helmut Kohl had begun the task of bringing the poorer and less-developed former German Democratic Republic up to par with the part of the country that had never been under communist rule, as well as finding themselves perhaps the largest economic beneficiary of the end of the Cold War in Europe.
Schröder had annoyed Washington by refusing to include German combat troops in the Congo Stabilization Force, instead only promising supply and logistical support, although the move played well domestically and in Europe. Nonetheless, Schröder's "social liberal" government between the SDP and Free Democratic Party (FDP) begun peeling back the German welfare state in the economic boom times, infuriating SDP voters and resulted in a staggering loss to the CDU/CSU under Friedrich Merz in the 2002 elections. Merz, in contrast to his immediate predecessors, was largely content to allow French President Alain Juppé to be the public face of continental Europe (the USSR notwithstanding) while his government quietly consolidated the reduced welfare state he had inherited and chafing against the European Union's immigration laws. Merz's fiscal prudence, ironically, ended up costing him a third term: his government reopened several dormant nuclear power stations that had been shuttered following the Kahuta Explosion two decades prior after cost-benefit analysis concluded nuclear power to be cheaper than the marked-up fuel the Germans had since been importing from the Soviet Union. Memories of Kahuta and the proximity of many immigrant neighborhoods to several urban plants (a result of lower housing prices) quickly saw the government's support collapse as a SDP-Green Alliance minority government under Frank-Walter Steinmeier took over in 2010.
Steinmeier's government was beset by its minority status as well as the SDP's worry about the Green Alliance's growing support that caused the coalition to be remarkably unstable and unsure of itself. Domestically, Steinmeier's chancellorship was a disappointment to SDP voters who had hoped for a reversal of Schröder and Merz's changes to the welfare state as the chancellor's time was spent reasserting Germany's role on continental Europe that his predecessor had allowed to fade. He also began overhauling Germany's system of integrating refugees that Merz had pared back to the barest acceptable under EU law. Steinmeier was also the last German chancellor to have his government issue marks, as he oversaw Germany's transition to the ecu alongside most other European Union members throughout 2013.
The CDU-CSU coalition had a large lead heading into the 2014 election, but public spats between CDU and CSU politicians and concerns over the coalition's proposal to combat projected higher retirement costs led to the evaporation of the lead as the SDP promised a large investment in its aging transportation infrastructure in a second Steinmeier term. CDU leader and chancellor-candidate Hermann Gröhe, however, incorporated that into the coalition's manifesto and managed, for the most part, to avoid controversy for aping the government's plan.
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The CDU-CSU won a convincing plurality of seats, but could not get a majority even with FDP support. Similarly, the SDP-Green Alliance could not get a majority without including either the FDP (which firmly rejected a "traffic light coalition") or the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the reinvented ex-ruling party of Eastern Germany, the latter of whom all other four parties had enacted a
cordon sanitaire around, owing to concerns about its extremist tendencies and surviving links to the Soviet Union. As such, a grand coalition was formed between the CDU/CSU and SDP, with Gröhe becoming chancellor. The chancellor has so far proved able, but has come under fire for being more socially conservative than many in his party would like and increasing disenchantment with the SDP makes it seem likely that an early election will take place before the Bundestag would normally dissolve in 2018.