Skateboards, Climate Change And Freedom... A new generation is going to enter Germany's parliament

Emilia Fester is 23 and has yet to finish college. Max Lucks is 24 and calls himself a militant cyclist.

- Katrin Bennhold & Melissa Eddy

Berlin: Ria Schroder is 29 and has the rainbow flag on her Twitter profile. Muhanad Al-Halak is 31 and came to Germany from Iraq when he was 11. And all of them are now in the German parliament. The German election result was in many ways a muddle. The winners, the Social Democrats led by Olaf Scholz, barely won. No party got more than 25.7%. Voters spread their ballots evenly across candidates associated with the left and right.

But one thing is clear: Germans elected their youngest ever parliament, and the two parties at the center of this generational shift, the Greens and the Free Democrats, will not just shape the next government but are also poised to help shape the future of the country. For now, the Greens, focused on climate change and social justice, and the Free Democrats, who campaigned on civil liberties and digital modernization, are kingmakers: Whoever becomes the next chancellor almost certainly needs both parties to form a government. “We will no longer leave politics to the older generation,” said Schröder, a newly minted lawmaker for the Free Democrats from Hamburg. “The world has changed around us. We want to take our country into the future — because it’s our future.”