AfD's Saxony-Anhalt victory pressures Merz as CDU support collapses

On Sunday, September 6, roughly 1.6 million voters in Saxony-Anhalt cast ballots for a new state parliament—a modest electorate by German standards, representing a fraction of the country's population. Yet the results that emerged from this eastern state, nestled between the Elbe River and the Harz Mountains, sent tremors through Berlin's corridors of power.

The Alternative for Germany, the AfD, won decisively. The party doubled its vote share compared to the previous election five years earlier, while the ruling Christian Democrats—Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU—saw their support collapse by half. For months, political observers in the capital had whispered about the possibility that Merz might be forced to resign in the wake of such a defeat. The stakes felt that high. If the AfD managed to form a government in Saxony-Anhalt, the consequences for the federal coalition in Berlin would be severe.

Merz had staked his chancellorship on a specific promise. Before his election in May 2025, he had declared his intention to halve the AfD's support through aggressive migration policies. The strategy had failed spectacularly. Instead of shrinking the far-right party, the CDU itself had hemorrhaged voters. Within his own party, the criticism was sharp and unforgiving. Political scientist Carsten Koschmieder from Berlin's Free University suggested that Merz would not step aside—the chancellor, he noted, had worked too long for the office and showed no signs of being the type to surrender it. But there was another problem: no obvious successor waited in the wings. The CDU and CSU had no ready replacement.

The real pressure, Koschmieder explained, would come from the question of how to handle the AfD itself. All established German parties had ruled out cooperation with the far-right movement, which they viewed as a threat to democracy. Many CDU members held this line firmly. "They want to abolish our democracy; they support Russia's President Putin and oppose Western integration and European unity," Koschmieder said, articulating the view of conservative democrats within the party. Yet in eastern Germany especially, some local CDU politicians had begun to see things differently, viewing cooperation with the AfD as possible and rejecting any work with the Left Party instead.

This created a bind for Merz. In Saxony-Anhalt, the most likely outcome was a minority government formed by the CDU, SPD, and Greens—but such a coalition would lack a parliamentary majority. It would need toleration from the Left Party to survive, a prospect that contradicted everything Merz had said. In an interview with the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, he had been explicit: "Both the AfD and Left Party have such fundamental differences with the Union that cooperation is out of the question." Yet the math of the election suggested that cooperation, or at least tolerance, might become unavoidable. Koschmieder identified the trap: many local CDU figures in the east rejected the Left Party entirely, making the chancellor's position untenable.

Merz appeared determined to press forward regardless. Despite the electoral setback and mounting dissatisfaction within his party, he intended to push through controversial pension reforms this year. The changes had drawn heavy criticism during the Saxony-Anhalt campaign, even from CDU members. But Merz saw the issue as settled by demographics. "The pension system is no longer sustainable because of demographics, and we have known this for years," he said, signaling that he would not be deterred by political headwinds.

The Social Democrats, meanwhile, had salvaged something from the Saxony-Anhalt vote. They held steady at around 8 percent—a marked improvement from predictions made six months earlier. More promising for the SPD was the outlook in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where state elections were scheduled for September 20. The party's premier there, Manuela Schwesig, appeared well-positioned for reelection. Polls showed the SPD at roughly 30 percent in the coastal state, suggesting they could form a government with the Left Party, the CDU, or potentially both. For a federal coalition partner that had been written off by many observers, the possibility of a state-level victory offered a glimmer of recovery.