Hotly-anticipated German election results offered few surprises if the ballot offered any at all.

As expected, the CDU/CSU “won” with around 30% of the vote, putting conservatives back in power following what, with apologies, was a woefully insipid several years for the country and particularly for the German economy under SPD and Olaf Scholz.

To briefly recap the backstory, Sunday’s vote was the culmination of a drama that began three months ago, when former finance chief Christian Lindner effectively fired himself. During contentious budget negotiations, Lindner assailed Scholz for being every bit the prosaic, stale character that he is, leaving the chancellor no choice but to dismiss him, a move which collapsed Scholz’s shaky coalition.

For Lindner, the move looked like a desperate bid at martyrdom — an attempt to shed the baggage of Scholz’s government through political suicide. Implicit was a belief in resurrection, and as of this writing, it wasn’t clear if the gambit paid off. Lindner’s Free Democrats were struggling to stay above the 5% threshold to be included in parliament.

For Scholz, ditching Lindner and collapsing the three-party governing coalition was a kind of self-inflicted coup de grâce. The tie-up — between SPD, the Free Democrats and the Greens — never had much hope of working, particularly not in a quasi-recession scenario like that which gripped Europe’s largest economy for the better part of two years.

Lindner’s a hawk who insists on the notion that to violate Germany’s infamous debt brake isn’t just an affront to principle, but in fact a kind of treason. In November, he claimed that to run afoul of the nation’s self-administered fiscal straitjacket is to violate the oath of office. Needless to say, that’s a not a position everyone shares, even in pathologically debt-averse Germany.

And so, here we are, three months later, with CDU/CSU back in pole position, the Free Democrats no better off for Lindner’s gamble, SPD nursing its worst showing since World War II and, speaking of World War II, Alice Weidel’s AfD ascendant with a 20% share of the vote, more than SPD, and almost double the far-right’s share from 2021.

Nobody’s going to partner with AfD, or at least that’s everyone’s promise, including likely chancellor Friedrich Merz. The boycott rationale’s pretty simple: Germany’s last experience with far-right government didn’t go especially well, where that means a failed artist with a stimulant problem tried to take over the world and murdered six million people in the process.

To me, that’s a pretty solid argument for a lifetime political ban, but some don’t like it. JD Vance, for example, thinks maybe Weidel deserves the benefit of the doubt, and so does Elon Musk. After all, 20% of the electorate can’t be wrong. “Vox populi, vox Führer.” And come on, Alice isn’t Adolph. She doesn’t even have a mustache!

Musk interviewed Weidel in January in a rather transparent bid to amplify AfD’s global reach and standing. Asked about Hitler by Musk, Weidel described The Führer as “this communist,” a description I’ll generously call misleading. (Hitler consolidated power by falsely accusing Germany’s communists of a conspiracy, paving the way for a brutal crackdown. Communists were among the first people the Nazis put in concentration camps. And then there’s Operation Barbarossa.)

Weidel’s a proponent of the view that Germans wittingly persist in a “guilt cult” vis-à-vis the Third Reich and that it’s high time to move on. Musk has explicitly endorsed that notion, including at an AfD rally late last month. “Children shouldn’t be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said, appearing virtually at the event. (“What’s the matter, little Wolfgang?” “Gwam — sniff, sniff — gwampa waz a, a, a Naughtzeeeeee!!” “Honey, we’ve been over this. It’s true that grandpa probably gassed a few thousand Jews, but he was a good man, and besides, we can’t let that ruin our weekend, ok?”)

For his part, Vance met with Weidel in person last week while in Munich, where Donald Trump’s deputy implicitly chided the Germans for denying AfD a chance to govern. Scholz, who Vance snubbed while in town, excoriated America’s No. 2. “From the experience of National Socialism, the democratic parties in Germany have a common consensus: This is the firewall against extreme right-wing parties,” he said, addressing Vance directly.

Anyway, Merz will try to form a coalition posthaste, and maybe even restore the “grand coalition,” although given SPD’s lackluster showing, they may need to come up with a new name for it. I don’t think “grand” fits anymore.

The last thing Merz wants is to be forced into the kind of awkward, star-crossed three-party tie-up that doomed Scholz’s government. The process could take weeks, may take months and will anyway make for a very tedious cover if you’re unlucky enough to have that beat as a foreign journalist.

Naturally, Trump said the vote was all about him. “This is a great day for Germany, and for the United States of America under the leadership of a gentleman named Donald J. Trump,” he declared.

Weidel offered an ominous assessment. “The next election will come and we will overtake the CDU as the strongest party,” she said. Turnout on Sunday in Germany was 84%.