Merz faces political crisis as AfD surges and CDU hits historic lows in German state elections

On Sunday, September 20, German voters delivered a verdict that shook the government. In two state elections—one in the northeastern coastal region of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the other in Berlin—the Christian Democrats under Chancellor Friedrich Merz collapsed. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the CDU failed to reach the 5 percent threshold required to enter the state parliament. It was the first time in the party's history that this had happened. In Berlin, where the CDU held power as the incumbent, the party suffered such severe losses that it is now expected to move to the opposition benches. The scale of the defeat was not lost on Merz himself. "This election is a profound turning point," he said. "It is a dramatic and unprecedented result for the CDU in Germany that we could not clear the 5% threshold."

But the real story was not simply about what the CDU lost—it was about who gained. The far-right Alternative for Germany, the AfD, more than doubled its support in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania to 38 percent. In Berlin, it nearly doubled from 9 percent to 16 percent. The socialist Left Party, meanwhile, surged to 26 percent in Berlin, doubling its previous result and winning a state election for the first time in its history. Together, these two parties—which Merz characterized as "destructive" forces offering "radical and simple solutions"—captured more than 40 percent of the vote across the two states. The AfD's co-leader Tino Chrupalla declared victory with a simple phrase: "The blue wave cannot be stopped." His party co-leader, Alice Weidel, went further, saying the CDU had been "pulverized" and that Merz's resignation was "overdue."

Merz acknowledged that federal policy had played a role in the defeats. Voters, he conceded, were not satisfied with the government's direction or with him personally. But he framed the losses as part of a broader realignment of German politics, one happening across Europe as well. The centrist parties were losing ground to forces at the political margins. What he did not fully address was the specific content of those federal policies—particularly the welfare reforms his government was pushing, which had become deeply unpopular.

The Left Party's surge in Berlin came despite a serious controversy. A campaign event had featured rapper Dahabflex, who performed a song wishing death upon Israeli soldiers. The party's district association in Neukölln, which had invited the performer, said it would clarify the matter. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, expressed skepticism that the party would take meaningful action. "So far there have been no personnel or political consequences," he said, and he appealed to other parties not to form a coalition with the Left. The party's federal co-leader, Ines Schwerdtner, insisted that antisemitism would not be tolerated. The Left's lead candidate in Berlin, Elif Eralp—whose parents had fled Turkey after a military coup—framed the party's success as a victory for "solidarity, for diversity, for democracy, against the shift to the right."

Political scientist Wolfgang Muno from the University of Rostock challenged some of the narratives emerging from the results. The AfD's claim to have replaced the CDU as a broad-based party was unfounded, he argued. The AfD was a right-wing extremist party that had managed to consolidate various disaffected groups. As for the Left, Muno's assessment differed sharply from Merz's. The party had moved toward being pragmatic and democratically oriented, he said, and there was no reason for the CDU to simply dismiss it as extremist. The CDU's refusal to work with the Left—its so-called firewall policy—was, in Muno's view, a mistake.

In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the Social Democrats' Manuela Schwesig, the state's premier since 2017, came in second with about 36 percent of the vote, just behind the AfD. She signaled she would seek talks with the Greens and the Left to form a governing coalition. But Schwesig was critical of Merz's plans to push ahead with deep cuts to the welfare system, particularly a controversial pension reform. "He is misjudging the situation of what the people on the ground think," she said. She reminded Merz of an agreement his party had made with the SPD at the federal level: that pensions without deductions would remain possible after 45 years of contributions. That agreement, she noted, was now hanging in the balance. Other eastern German CDU state premiers had also spoken out against the chancellor's plans.

The SPD found itself in a difficult position. At the federal level, it was part of the government with the CDU, yet the state election results showed voters were unhappy with the government's direction. The party's co-leader, Bärbel Bas, said the SPD wanted to draw the "correct conclusions" from the results. But she also emphasized that the party had taken responsibility by joining the government and wanted to maintain the coalition. "We must seek solutions" together with the CDU, she said, even as the campaign trail had made clear that people were not satisfied with the upcoming reforms. Merz, for his part, vowed to continue pushing his welfare agenda. The question now was whether his coalition partners would allow him to do so.