Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has suffered its worst state result in the party's 81-year history, falling below the five per cent threshold in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – just a fortnight after a drubbing in Saxony-Anhalt. In Berlin, Die Linke (the Left Party) surged to first place on a pledge to nationalise housing. Merz refuses to soften his welfare and labour reforms, even as rising unemployment pushes voters towards Germany's political fringes.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) topped the poll with 38.2 per cent, ahead of the SPD’s Manuela Schwesig on 35.5 per cent. The CDU took just 4.9 per cent, narrowly missing the seats threshold – a state it has never before failed to enter. Responding to the outcome, Merz said, “We cannot sugar-coat the result in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.”
“It is a disaster. The CDU fought hard, but in the end it was the CDU that got crushed in the polarisation between the SPD and the AfD,” he said. Nonetheless, he ruled out resigning, insisting reform “requires firmness, resolve, and patience.”
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel was jubilant. Her party has “overtaken the CDU,” she told CNN, declaring it “clearly the new people’s party in Germany” and branding Merz “strongly damaged.” Speaking separately to ZDF, she urged the chancellor to abandon the cross-party “firewall” that has kept the AfD from power, arguing the policy had instead handed victory to Die Linke in Berlin.
Die Linke won Berlin with 25.7 per cent in an emphatic victory, pushing the CDU into a distant second on 18.8 per cent and the AfD into third on 16.3, ahead of the Greens (14.3) and a badly weakened SPD (12.1). The result strips Berlin’s outgoing CDU-SPD coalition of its majority, opening the door to a Left-led administration under lead candidate Elif Eralp, a Kreuzberg lawyer running to become the city’s first Muslim mayor and Die Linke’s first since reunification. Her campaign, styled after Zohran Mamdani's in New York, has centred on rent caps and a levy on luxury property.
Why the flight from the centre? Merz took office promising short-term pain for long-term gain – tighter welfare rules, less red tape, more people into work. The turnaround hasn’t come. Unemployment kept climbing through the summer, and his government’s push to replace the basic “Bürgergeld” benefit with a stricter “Grundsicherung” regime – cutting payments and penalising missed job-centre appointments – has strained even his coalition with the SPD. His approval ratings have sunk to around 14 per cent after sixteen months in office.
The European dimension
The result came two weeks after the AfD’s even larger win in Saxony-Anhalt, where it took 43.8 per cent of the vote – prompting Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to warn that “only idiots or traitors” would celebrate it. Commentators are now viewing the two elections together as a stress test for the “grand coalition” model that has underpinned German – and, by extension, EU – politics since the war. Analysts described the Saxony-Anhalt result as a possible “first real crack” in the postwar consensus, with nationalist parties elsewhere in Europe already citing it as vindication ahead of several EU states’ elections next year.
A CDU that can no longer credibly hold the centre – squeezed simultaneously by a resurgent hard left and an AfD now polling above 30 per cent nationally – weakens Germany’s hand in Brussels at a moment when its economic and Ukraine policy leadership is already under strain, and hands both Moscow-sympathetic and Eurosceptic forces a louder voice across the continent.
Merz says he intends to stay and press on. Whether German voters give him the chance is now an open question – and one the rest of Europe is watching closely.
