By Manuel Müller

The election of the new German Bundestag is less than three weeks away – and, as always, it will also be a decision on the future of the European Union. The new German government that emerges from these elections will be involved in European legislation in the EU Council; it will have a veto in common foreign, defence, social, tax, and budgetary policy; it will play a leading role in matters of EU enlargement and institutional reform. And even parties in opposition in the Bundestag can be important for Europe, for example by cooperating with parties from other countries and setting the tone in public debate.
With their ballot papers, German voters will therefore have a major influence on the direction of the EU over the next four years. But what exactly do the parties in the Bundestag stand for when it comes to European policy? Almost all of them claim to be “pro-European” in some way, but if you want to find out more, you usually have to dig deep into the details of their election manifestos. Or you can use the EUROMAT.
The EUROMAT is an election tool that allows you to compare your views on 25 European policy statements with those of the parties in the German Bundestag – SPD (PES), CDU/CSU (EPP), Greens (EGP), FDP (ALDE), AfD (ESN), Left (EL) and BSW (–). It works similarly to the well-known Wahl-O-Mat or other voting advice apps, but focuses on questions of importance for EU policy.
25 statements, seven parties, one topic: EU policy
Der EUROMAT zur Bundestagswahl 2025 ist ein gemeinsames Informationsangebot der Bürgerbewegung Pulse of Europe, der Jungen Europäischen Föderalist:innen Deutschland, des Graswurzel-Thinktanks Polis 180 und des Blogs Der (europäische) Föderalist. It follows previous EUROMAT editions for the German Bundestag elections in 2017 and 2021 and for the 2024 European elections, and builds on their experience. There have been two major changes in two areas in particular:
- Firstly, we did not ask the parties themselves for their views on the EUROMAT statements, but inferred their positions from their manifestos and party programmes. This is partly for practical reasons, as in the past the parties have often not responded to our requests or have responded very late. At the same time, it has the advantage that the EUROMAT does not present tailor-made answers that the parties have written only for us, but rather the positions they take in the main programmatic texts that they also use as their policy guidelines themselves.
- Secondly, each statement in the EUROMAT is now accompanied by a short text summarising its context and the main arguments for and against it. This is based on feedback from users of previous EUROMAT editions, some of whom found it difficult to form their own opinions on the statements – partly because they had too little information about them due to the lack of a broad public debate on EU policy. The short explanatory texts aim to address this problem, while inviting users to further explore the background to the issues themselves.
Otherwise, the EUROMAT works in the same way as always: as a user, you rate 25 statements – covering a wide range of issues such as European foreign policy, the economy, migration, climate action, as well as fundamental institutional issues – with “agree”, “disagree” or “neutral”. You can skip individual statements or give double weighting to statements that are particularly important to you. The EUROMAT then calculates how closely your positions match those of each party. Finally, you can click on individual parties and read how they justify their positions in their manifesto or party programme.
You can read more about the background of the EUROMAT here. The EUROMAT is embedded into this blog via the euromat.info website. Hardly any personal data is collected during its use; in particular, the answers entered by users are not stored. The privacy policy of the EUROMAT can be found here.