Predicting Support for the Christian Democrats in the 2025 German Bundestag Election: A State-Level Approach

ABSTRACT In this article, we predict the result for the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) in the upcoming February 2025 German Bundestag election. We develop a parsimonious state-level forecasting model that relies on four variables measuring the state-level political, economic, and social contexts and the national popularity of the CDU/CSU chancellor candidate. Our model is based on Bundestag elections from 1972 to 2021, and we use the most recent values of our measures to generate the forecast. Our model predicts that the CDU/CSU will win between 31.5% and 34.6% of the vote share in the upcoming election.