A Political History Forecast of Bloc Support in the 2025 German Federal Election

ABSTRACT “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” said humorist and social critic Mark Twain. Simply put, history often follows recurring cycles, enabling us to identify patterns that will likely repeat. Such supposed steadiness should bode well for prediction. Nevertheless, regarding structural election forecasts, most projections rely on short-term political fundamentals measuring macroeconomic performance or government or leader popularity. In this contribution, we take a structural approach but eschew any macroeconomic or popularity measure and instead rely on historical and structural patterns to predict the 2025 German Federal Election. Using seemingly unrelated regression, our model predicts the vote share of Germany’s two largest blocs—the Union and the SPD—and All Others combined across 19 elections between 1953 and 2021 with solid accuracy (correctly predicting the winning bloc three out of four times), creating circumstances to assume that political history may be a helpful guide as to how the 2025 contest may pan out. Our ex ante central projection for the 2025 German federal election foresees a cliffhanger race, with point estimates suggesting that the Union and the SPD will win 26% of the vote each and All Others 48%, departing from the dominant narrative of the opinion polls of a clear CDU/CSU plurality vote victory and substantial losses for the SPD. The political history model suggests that the formation of another grand coalition is possible.