Since 1949, Germany’s political system has been all but dominated by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), with fringe parties only ever claiming only tiny morsels of the electorate. In 2013, 67% of the country’s voters backed one of these two traditional governing parties. This number dropped to 53% in 2017 and to 50% in last month’s federal race that saw the SPD’s Olaf Scholz emerge as the likeliest next chancellor. This trend echoes similar developments across Europe, where traditional centre-right and centre-left forces have either imploded or lost considerable ground to insurgent rivals.  And yet unlike its European neighbors, Germany’s fragmentation has largely benefitted centrist alternatives rather than radical upstarts (so argued Tom Nuttall of The Economist and Jana Puglierin of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in the latest episode of Uncommon Decency). The far-left Die Linke and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) claimed only a combined 15% of the overall vote, with the former only barely making it past the threshold for entering the Bundestag. The rise of the alternative centrists Instead, two centrist parties, the Greens and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), have emerged as the main beneficiaries of this fragmentation. They are thus the potential kingmakers determining any government coalition that the victor-party the SPD will lead.  Germany’s Grüne (the Greens), unlike many of their European analogs, have shed their early radical tinge in favour of a more establishment line, as evidenced in their presence in the ruling coalitions in 11 of Germany’s 16 states. The party can even boast of having a Green  minister-president in charge of the traditionally conservative state of Baden-Wurtemberg. Staunchly pro-EU and fiscally moderate, the Greens advocate a boost to Germany’s ambitions without the kind of radical central planning that would compromise the country’s economic fundamentals.  The FDP, for its part, is not new to the role of kingmaker. Despite its fiscally hawkish approach to Germany’s EU membership and its penchant for austerity at home, the FDP remains a solidly centrist party, the likes of which dot the partisan spectrum of many a Northern European country.  Split by age With the SPD and the CDU having been locked in a “grand coalition” (the “große Koalition”) for 12 of the past 16 years, their relative underperformance in last month’s race is of course partly a symptom of incumbent attrition. Yet a look at the election results by age suggests that Germany’s centre-skewed fragmentation is a nascent trend: a staggering 73% of the electorate aged 70 or over backed either the CDU/CSU or the SPD, with only 25% of the under-25s voting the same, and 44% of the latter backing instead the FDP or the Greens. Given Germany’s ageing population, the dominance of older voters isn’t likely to go away soon, but such an age fracture should be a cause of concern for the traditional governing parties.  All of this points to a Bundestag that will undergo rising fragmentation into various centrist parties, with no huge ideological chasms between them. Such a fragmented yet congruous parliament, however, will increasingly struggle to form strong, durable governments, with three-party coalitions likely becoming the new normal (as is already the case in many German states). Fragmentation will likely lengthen coalition negotiations while hampering the government’s capacity to react to unexpected crises that were not anticipated in the coalition agreements.  A difficult post-mortem for the CDU In each of the last two CDU primaries, centrist figures triumphed over Friedrich Merz, a former CDU grandee sidelined by Merkel. Merz campaigned on steering the CDU to the right after 16 years of prudent, centrist governance. He was defeated both times by Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, now defence minister, and Armin Laschet, the party’s candidate this time around, respectively, with the narrow margins raising the spectre of a right-wing takeover should the party fail to deliver.  And yet, despite Laschet’s centrist leanings, the CDU has bled electors to all the main centrist parties while making inroads with the AfD’s electorate, denting the case for a sharp steer to the right being the CDU’s miracle solution. While Merz and others might want to seize the opportunity of being in opposition to re-energize the party with more radical positions and come back to office with a stronger mandate, such a pivot seems unlikely at the national level. The Germans tend to be more cautious of radical solutions coming from the opposition than their European neighbours. As the ex-SPD leader Frans Müntefering once put it: “opposition ist mist” (“opposition is shit!”).  Geographic fragmentation Underneath this centrist dynamism lies a growing geographic polarisation. Benefitting from the collapse of the CDU, the AfD captured as many as 16 constituencies in east Ger...