Germany
Every metric we have, chancellor by chancellor, since 1949.
In office
Friedrich Merz since 6 May 2025
Party positions
Across, the economy: left parties want the state to play an active role, right parties a smaller one. Up and down, social values: progressive parties favour more personal freedoms, conservative ones order, tradition and religion. Point at a logo for the party’s views and its numbers.
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How this survey placed the parties
Things to keep in mind
- These are estimates. Experts placed the parties: the parties did not place themselves, and no votes are counted.
- Each survey shows one moment. The Global Party Survey asked in 2019 and CHES at the end of 2024. Parties have changed since: BSW split from Die Linke in January 2024, so only CHES places it, and the FDP and BSW left the Bundestag at the February 2025 election.
- The surveys do not always agree. They asked different experts different questions, five years apart. Switch the survey to see how far a party moves: the AfD, for one, sits further right on the economy in CHES than in the Global Party Survey.
- Small parties are missing. The chart shows the parties in the Bundestag and those that won at least 3 percent of the vote in 2025. SSW, the party of the Danish and Frisian minorities, holds a seat but is in neither survey.
- Two axes leave a lot out. A party can be left on one issue and right on another, and parties can be divided inside or change course with their leaders.
- The views come from Wikipedia, not the surveys. In the tooltip, the position and ideologies are how Wikipedia describes the party today.
Positions: CHES Europe and the Global Party Survey, as each survey's notes describe. Views: Wikipedia, linked from each party. Logos: Wikimedia Commons.
Seats in Parliament
One dot is one seat. The parties sit from left to right by where 19 political scientists placed them on one left-right scale in 2024; parties without a place sit last.
Today's count is the house as it is: a member who changed party counts for the new one, and a substitute in office for the member they stand in for.
The blocs join the seven bands that Bolognesi, Ribeiro and Codato drew on a left-right scale from 0, the far left, to 10, the far right. Left: up to 3, the far left and the left. Centre: 3.01 to 7, from the centre-left to the centre-right. Right: above 7, the right and the far right. SSW is not in the survey, so its seat is not classified.
Seats: abgeordnetenwatch.de (CC0). Left and right: the 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES Europe), with the bands of Bolognesi, Ribeiro and Codato (Dados, 2023).
Productivity: output per hour worked · Output per hour worked
GDP per hour worked: what an hour of work produces, adjusted for prices.
Source: Feenstra et al. – Penn World Table (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2025-10-09) · fetched 26 Oct 2026
A year counts for whoever was in office on 1 July. A term's change runs from the year before it began to its last year with data. The years above, or a name in the timeline, set the years of the chart and of every list below. The dashed line and the small change under each term are the comparison group, over the same years. BRICS, the G7 and the G20 are the average of their member countries, and count only in years when every member has data.
Ranked by the average change per year: the best first, or the highest where neither direction is better. Only years with data count. For growth that multiplies, like GDP, the average compounds; other changes are divided by the years.
Show the numbers
Leaders, dates and parties: Wikipedia, compiled by Data Mechanics · loaded 26 Oct 2026. Party logos from Wikimedia Commons.
