(24 Feb 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Berlin – 24 February 2025
1. Wide of parliament
2. Mid of glass dome and statue
3. Wide of train station
4. Mid of newspapers
5. Close of newspaper headline reading (German) “Merz does it!”
6. Close of headline reading (German) “Election winner Merz faces difficult coalition talks”
7. Close of headline reading (German) "Today is 1st of Merz"
8. Wide of train station
9. SOUNDBITE (German) Wilma Schütze, historian:
“No, I’m not content at all. It’s very difficult to handle that 20% of Germans voted for the AfD. I find this to be a very difficult result. I live in Leipzig and at home in Saxony it’s a catastrophe. The AfD won almost all direct mandates.”
10. Mid of people in front of train station
11. SOUNDBITE (German) Jörg Rudnicki, laboratory assistant:
“I think the problem happened already 7, 8, 9 years ago. The centrist parties didn’t really deal with the problems and then the populists had an easy time getting a lot of votes without solutions.”
12. Wide of train station
13. SOUNDBITE (German) Anne Müller, Berlin resident:
“Well, quickly forming a coalition would be good, stable conditions and then act quickly. And then hang on for 4 years!”
14. Woman taking picture while standing on bridge
15. Wide of cyclist riding across bridge
STORYLINE:
Germany faces its second change of government in less than four years after conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz won Sunday’s election, which saw a surge for a far-right party and a stinging defeat for outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Berlin residents said they hoped a coalition could be found soon, expressing apprehension at the rise of the far-right.
After the collapse of Scholz’s three-party government in November, it’s now up to Merz to restore stability to the European Union’s most populous country and traditional political heavyweight, which has the continent’s biggest economy.
Merz has one realistic option to form a government: a coalition with Scholz’s Social Democrats.
His Union bloc and its center-left rival have a combined 328 seats in the 630-seat parliament.
He says he hopes to do the deal by Easter.
That’s a challenging timeframe: the possible partners will have to reconcile contrasting proposals for revitalising the economy, which has shrunk for the past two years, and for curbing irregular migration — an issue that Merz pushed hard on during the campaign.
That will likely require diplomacy and a readiness to compromise that often weren’t evident in recent weeks.
It’s still a much easier task than it might have been. For hours on Sunday night, it looked likely that Merz would need to add a second center-left partner, the environmentalist Greens, to put together a parliamentary majority.
The Union and Social Democrats were post-World War II Germany’s heavyweights.
But their support has been eroding for at least two decades as the political landscape has become more fragmented.
Their combined showing Sunday was their weakest since the postwar federal republic was founded in 1949.
AP Video shot by Stanislav Hodina
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