There are three main political parties in Germany: the Social Democratic Party of Germany or SPD; the Christian Democratic Union of Germany or CDU; and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria or CSU. CDU and CSU have to work together to achieve their goals because neither party operates in the whole country; SPD, on the other hand, is represented in all sixteen Länder.
Both of these parties are fairly centrist; SPD is center-left and CDU/CSU is center-right. If you had to equate the German main parties to American presidents, SPD is in the Clinton-Obama mold, and CDU/CSU would be Eisenhower.
You have four smaller parties in the Reichstag. Three of them are liberal.
The most liberal party in power is The Left. Seriously. That's what it's called: Die Linke. It was formed from two older parties: the Electoral Alternative for Labor and Social Justice, and the Party of Democratic Socialism. The PDS was formed from the ashes of the Socialist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic...yes, ladies and gentlemen, The Left used to be the East German Communist Party.
Next is Alliance 90/The Greens. Unlike in the US, where the Green Party seems to exist solely to put Republicans in office, the German Green Party does a lot of environmentalist work - and they've been somewhat successful. They've done wonders for renewable energy.
The Free Democratic Party is right in the middle politically. They're big on human rights and civil liberties, but also like free markets and privatization. If you were to make a Frankenstein's Monster that was half Reagan and half Kennedy, you'd have the FDP. They'll coalesce with either the SPD or the CDU/CSU depending on the thing they want to do.
At the farthest right of what Germans will stand is the Alternative for Germany. If Dick Cheney could speak German he'd fit right in.
And then comes who I think Trump wants to support, the Republicans. Their founders were two hard-right former members of the CSU and a disgraced talk radio host named Franz Schönhuber, who died in 2005 and was buried in secrecy. Normally, calling a German person a Nazi would be the gravest of insults...but in Schönhuber's case, it's completely accurate. He was a member of the National-Socialist German Worker's Party, the Hitler Youth and the Waffen SS. The Republicans' positions - they want to take back all the land in Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the Czech Republic that Hitler grabbed, end immigration and turn all of Europe into one nation under German control - are things Trump would like.
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