Here is the best article I could find on this.
The Greens' surge in popularity comes after the party on Monday named co-chair Annalena Baerbock, 40, as its first candidate for chancellor. The nomination of Ms Baerbock, a centrist who advocates a greener economy and a tougher foreign policy stance on Russia and China, has been widely praised.
Hopefully the Christian Democrat Union won't be on top any more.
Bismarck would never have done this if he wouldn't have been scared shitless of the worker's movement Germany had at that time. The SPD in the Wilhelminian era already included collaborationist libs, but they also had a revolutionary wing before WW1, they represented the biggest worker's movement on the continent, and the capitalists had seen the uprisings of British workers over the last decades, so it's kinda obvious Bismarck had no choice but to appease the workers to some degree. He literally did that to save capitalism.
Yes, but it is a big mistake to mistake the SPD as the only party and the only relevant actor of the workers movement. It also marginalizes the conflict within the party and cloaks the factual reach of it.
It is also wrong to act as if it was the SPD that created the welfare state when the factual powerful and acting bodies were the old and through and through feudalist-capitalist establishment. Surely without organized workers and material conditions heightening the contradictions it wouldn't have happened (and naturally the first laws that the German states created weren't really a welfare state - e.g you couldn't stay alive on rents alone mostly), but that doesn't mean that the SPD was creating it.
There is also a fun element in the history of the German welfare states and that predates any Bismarkian influence. I talk about insurances and rents. For example the mine worker had solidarity funds and such for centuries, those were incorporated into the state for some reasons, but the worker solidarity predates capitalist cooptation of worker's solidarity movements.